SAN DIEGO — The late Don Coryell finally got his full due last summer with his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Waiting for him among the bronzed football greats was Sid Gillman, fellow San Diegan.

We must not forget about Gillman, who died in 2003 at age 91, two decades after his enshrinement in Canton.

Like Coryell, “Sir Sidney” made football more fun to watch as a Chargers head coach. Like Coryell, he inspired greatness among his assistant coaches and players and generations of football personnel to come.

“Sid Gillman is considered the father of the modern-day passing game,” NFL Films’ Greg Cosell, who has studied NFL chess for several decades, was saying by phone recently.

Artistic passing games have buttered the NFL’s bread for decades and will do so again beginning Sept. 5, when Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson take aim in Arrowhead Stadium to kick off the 2024 season.

Why does the NFL stand as the country’s most powerful cultural magnet — one whose championship game five months ago pulled 123 million viewers and whose broadcasts accounted for 93 of the country’s 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023?

The modern passing game Gillman helped to evolve stands as a big part of it.

Customers enjoy the precise and flowing choreography of a well-designed passing game. Touchdowns drive TV ratings and spur fantasy league participation. Capable offenses stimulate the gambling instinct in a country where more than one of every four adults bet on an NFL game last year, per the American Gaming Association.

San Diego, far away from football’s power centers in the 1960s, fostered enormous gains in the forward pass soon after a pair of brilliant coaches moved south from Los Angeles in 1961.

Gillman and Coryell had left behind the Los Angeles Rams and USC to take over the relocated San Diego Chargers and the Aztecs of San Diego State, respectively.

The coaching’ chalk and spirals began to fly.

Gillman, having joined the fledgling American Football League, had an open canvas on which to shape a franchise.

Coryell and his assistants, no longer privileged by USC’s recruiting power, would have to find alternative ways to move the football beyond “three yards and a cloud of dust” sweeps and plunges.

The San Diego decade sparked the NFL’s passing-game growth that continues today.

“You could almost argue it was the coolest football laboratory,” Cosell said of Sixties San Diego.

Of the two, Coryell’s legacy for innovation sits fresher in the public mind. Coryell, who died in 2010 at 85, still draws mention during NFL game broadcasts. Current NFL clubs, it is often noted, employ the numerical play-calling system Coryell taught at San Diego State and with the entertaining Cardinals and Chargers.

Gillman was a muse to Coryell who’d been watching football film for more than a decade. He was interested in film because his father had owned movie theaters in Minnesota, reported Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman. In the late 1950s, when he was head coach of the Rams, Gillman started the first film exchange program in the NFL.

Gillman showed a rare grasp for football geometry. “He understood that the passing game is based on spacing and route concepts and combinations,” Cosell said.

The poetry came from designs that produced anticipation throws, the quarterback aiming for a spot in zone defenses (and some man coverages) where a pass-catcher would materialize.

Gillman and his aggressive coaches signed several players who became stars. Among those who wore the lightning bolt helmet were receiver Lance Alworth, who had been a wingback at Arkansas but had not caught a lot of passes; Keith Lincoln, a versatile, slashing runner from Washington State; Paul Lowe, a former Oregon State halfback who was working in the mailroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton when he begged Chargers owner Barron Hilton for a football job; and Canton-bound tackle Ron Mix, whose positional coaches at USC included Davis.

Gillman had no postseason victories in his five years directing the Rams, but those passing attacks commanded attention. Led by Hall of Fame quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and pass-catching end Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, his 1957 team led the NFL in points scored.

In San Diego, Gillman built and oversaw teams that football experts said could’ve rivaled the top NFL teams of the era. Five of his first six AFL clubs won division titles. All told, his 11 squads combined for a .619 win rate.

His signature victory came in January 1964 when the Chargers rolled up 610 yards and defeated the Boston Patriots, 51-10, for the AFL title.

That day, Gillman’s three-receiver formations foreshadowed passing designs to come, said Cosell.

“Sid had two backs, Paul Lowe and Keith Lincoln, and Lincoln was a really good receiver,” Cosell said. “So what he decided to do was to take Lincoln out of the backfield and line him up as a split receiver. No one was doing that. That was truly unique. So, in some ways, that was the true beginning of the three-wide receiver look, even though it was the fullback in Lincoln. But Lincoln was a really good receiver.”

Gillman’s eye for defensive talent would also seed the aerial evolution.

His first draft with San Diego brought in a pair of linemen who would frighten many QBs — pass-rushing end Earl Faison and Ernie Ladd, an athletic, 6-foot-9, 317-pound from Grambling, who, along with Faison, would form the cornerstones of the “Fearsome Foursome.”

The Chargers’ quartet averaged 6-foot-6 and 274 pounds per man, reported Zimmerman, and applied so much pressure that the 1961 team picked off 49 passes.

For opponents, the grim message was this: adapt or perish.

“I invented the moving pocket because of those four guys,” former Dallas Texans and Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram told author Bob McGinn. “They’d knock down five or six passes a game, so I rolled the pocket and had our linemen block down on them or cut them.”

With Kansas City’s victory in Super Bowl IV as a 13-point underdog against the Vikings, the AFL finished 2-2 against the NFL.

The Chiefs said their freewheeling AFL competition contributed to their upset of the Vikings and the Jets’ stunner against the Colts in Super Bowl III.

Defending a Vikings offense that showed no pre-snap movement in Super Bowl IV, the Chiefs implied, wasn’t as hard as countering Gillman’s tactics with Alworth and others.

“Our whole influence was ‘Bambi’ and the things Sid Gillman was doing; the Raiders and the Jets, when you got an arm like (Joe) Namath. That was our (AFL) culture,” Chiefs linebacker Jim Lynch said, per McGinn.

Stram cast the NFL as stagnant intellectually, saying it “resisted new approaches and new ideas” compared to their more exciting AFL counterparts.

Today’s passing games ooze sophistication.

Stationing four pass-catchers to one side of the formation, for example, has become a popular tactic.

Watch the Detroit Lions attack coordinated by young assistant Ben Johnson, and witness the spacing.

Gillman would enjoy the show.

“Amusingly enough,” said Cosell, “a lot of people aren’t aware that the whole concept of expansive passing games really started on the West Coast.”

May the reminders never cease.

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