Dennis Green

Two different totals for Green circulate, and both are correct. The Vikings publish 101-70-0 (.591) across 171 games, which is regular season and playoffs combined. The 97-62 figure used above is regular season only, over 159 games; add the 4-8 postseason mark and the two reconcile exactly. Green's 97 regular-season wins are the second most in franchise history behind Bud Grant.

The 2001 line is a 15-game record, not 16. The Vikings finished with a losing record for the first time in Green's decade, and he and the club parted before the final game; assistant Mike Tice took the team for the season finale against Baltimore and was later hired as head coach. The Vikings bought out Green's contract on January 4, 2002.

When the Vikings hired Green on January 10, 1992, he became one of a very small number of Black head coaches in the National Football League. Almost every account adds a qualifier, and the qualifiers matter.

NFL.com wrote that Green "became the NFL's second black head coach when he was hired by the Vikings in 1992." ESPN described him as "the second black head coach in the NFL's modern era," hired three years after Art Shell took over the Raiders. Both of those are counts of the modern era. Counting the whole history of the league, Green was the third: Fritz Pollard was a head coach in the 1920s, decades before Shell. Green was also the first of that group to become an NFL head coach without ever having played in the NFL.

The Vikings themselves, in the statement they released after his death, put it without a number at all: his tenure "as one of the first African American head coaches in both college and the NFL was also transformative." He had already been one of the first in college football too — when Northwestern hired him in 1981 he was among the first Black head coaches in Division I-A.

This page deliberately does not state a flat "first" or "second" without the qualifier attached. The count changes depending on whether the 1920s are included, and reporting it without that context would be inaccurate in either direction.

1. 1981–1985

   Northwestern, head coach

   Green took over a Northwestern programme that had gone 1-31-1 over its previous 33 games. He was named Big Ten Coach of the Year by writers and broadcasters in 1982. He left after the 1985 season.

2. 1986–1988

   San Francisco 49ers, assistant

   Green returned to the NFL as wide receivers coach under Bill Walsh, his former boss at Stanford. His last season on that staff ended with the 49ers winning Super Bowl XXIII. He was a disciple of Walsh's West Coast offence, and it is the system he brought to Minnesota.

3. 1989–1991

   Stanford, head coach

   Three seasons at Stanford for an overall record of 16-18. His 1990 team beat top-ranked Notre Dame at South Bend; his 1991 team went 8-3 and reached the Aloha Bowl, losing to Georgia Tech. The Vikings hired him out of Stanford that winter.

4. 1992–2001

   Minnesota Vikings, head coach

   Ten seasons, 97-62, four division titles, eight playoff appearances and two NFC Championship Games. The full ledger is above.

Green spent two seasons as an analyst for ESPN and was hired as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals on January 7, 2004. He held the job for three seasons and went 16-32: 6-10 in 2004, 5-11 in 2005 and 5-11 in 2006. The Cardinals did not reach the playoffs in any of them, and Arizona dismissed him on January 1, 2007 with a year left on his contract.

The reading of that stint has softened over time. Green inherited a franchise with one winning season in twenty-five years, and a good deal of the core that took Arizona to the Super Bowl after the 2008 season — including quarterback Matt Leinart and running back Edgerrin James, both added in 2006 — arrived under him.

The press conference

On Monday, October 16, 2006, Arizona led the Chicago Bears 23-3 late in the third quarter of a nationally televised game and lost 24-23, with Chicago scoring no offensive touchdowns. Green's post-game press conference — a short, furious outburst from the lectern about how the Cardinals had scouted the Bears and then let the game go — became one of the most replayed moments in NFL media, quoted constantly and used in a beer advertisement. One sentence from it survives as the whole thing:

“They are who we thought they were!”

The rest of the remarks are not quoted here. Published transcriptions of the full outburst differ from one another word for word — the clauses around the famous line are rendered differently by different outlets — so only the sentence that every source renders identically appears above. The remainder is described rather than quoted. Green later apologised for the outburst.

Two years later, in 2018, Minnesota inducted Green into the Vikings Ring of Honor posthumously. He was the only inductee that year, the 24th member overall, and the third former head coach to be honoured, alongside Bud Grant and Jerry Burns. The ceremony was held at halftime of the Vikings' home game against Buffalo on September 23, 2018 at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The case for him is not complicated. He inherited a functional franchise and made it a consistently dangerous one for a decade, in a division that contained a Green Bay team at the height of the Brett Favre era. He won 97 regular-season games, more than anyone in the club's history except Grant. He put three future Hall of Famers on the field at once and built the highest-scoring offence the league had ever seen around them.

The case against him is the January record: 4-8, two conference championship games, no Super Bowl. Both halves belong in the same paragraph, which is roughly where the Vikings themselves left it when they put his name on the wall.