Steelers safety Polamalu considered LeBeau more deserving than Lombardi

The Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu considered the team’s defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau deserving to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame even more than Vince Lombardi.


“As a football player, a special teams coach, a position coach, a coordinator, a head coach, nobody has done it all like he has,” Polamalu said of LeBeau, who has spent most of his coaching career as an assistant. “He’s done everything but own a team. He’s more deserving than Vince Lombardi, if you’re talking to me.”

LeBeau and former Broncos star running back Floyd Little are the two senior finalists for the Hall of Fame. The former has been an NFL player and coach for 51 years, and Little finished his career with 6,323 yards of rushing, 43 touchdowns, 215 receptions for 2,418 yards, nine TDs, and ranking seventh in career rushing when he retired in 1975. LeBeau had 62 interceptions and started 171 games while he was a player playing for the Detroit Lions.

Lombardi was a legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967. He won five league championships during his nine years of career and the NFL championship trophy is named for him.

Steelers defensive coordinator LeBeau got hohors from Friends and former teammates

Steelers' defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau returned home in Ohio, and attended the activity of "A Night with the Coach" at London High School last Saturday night.


More than 400 people, including a handful of his former college and NFL teammates, packed into the gym at the school. Both the pary and the attendees were parts of a fundraising effort that is expected to produce a new building that has already been christened the LeBeau Field House. They also attended the evening to celebrate LeBeau is going into his 51st season in the NFL.

"When you're growing up, you don't expect to have your name laying around anything on your high school," LeBeau said. "That's really a sincere honor that I don't take lightly."

"He's the best," said Jauron, who played for LeBeau in Cincinnati from 1978-80. "Anything anybody told you about him, if it was good, it was true. I'm just really thankful I know him."

"Dick on the football field was a different man," said former Pitt star and NFL player Bill Priatko, who roomed with LeBeau at Browns training camp in 1959 before LeBeau got cut, and is still close friends with him. "Off the field, he's a gentleman. On the football field he would hit you. He was tough, he was aggressive, he was smart as a bugger."

LeBeau had a great playing career. He is also widely and highly praised as an innovator of the zone blitz that has made the Steelers' defense one of the most feared units in the NFL during his two coaching stints in Pittsburgh.