Analysis: Is '07 Dungy's final year?
John Czarnecki
FOXSports.com,
Colts head coach Tony Dungy will turn 52 in October and there is a slight chance this could be his final NFL season.
"There are so many other things I want to do with life, but I wouldn't be coaching right now if I still didn't enjoy it," Dungy told me on Monday.
"When I started (he was the league's youngest assistant at age 25), I told myself I would coach 25 years, thinking that would be long enough," Dungy said. "Well, I'm over that number now. There are so many speaking engagements that I have to turn down because of coaching. I want to be able to visit prisons and spend a lot more time working with kids. I want to do these things when I'm still relatively young."
Dungy, a devout Christian, wants to help others. At the behest of his wife, his family has three adopted children.
"When our kids went off to school, she said the house was too quiet," Dungy said, smiling.
Despite the tragedy of losing his oldest son, James, Dungy seems almost whole once again.
And now that he has finally won a Super Bowl as a coach, his football career is complete. He earned a ring as a defensive back with the Steelers in 1978, and despite this not being his best Colts' team, he and Peyton Manning finally won a title, beating the Bears in Miami last February.
Not that Bucs owner Malcolm Glazer and his sons care right now (they fired him and ran him out of Tampa), but Dungy is the winningest head coach (90-38 record) in the league since 1999 and the first coach to beat all 32 teams.
To improve ticket sales and boost the stadium bottom line, the Glazers spent four draft picks and $8 million to acquire then-Oakland coach Jon Gruden. But Gruden's team really won a championship with Dungy's defense and now there's talk that the Glazers, if the Bucs don't win this season, could make another dramatic coaching hire to make some money.
"I've thought about it," Dungy said. "I guess I would be appealing to them now, now that I've won and still have a home there. But we both know that isn't going to happen."
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