Kentuckians Bill Arnsparger and Romeo Crennel win NFL lifetime achievement award
A pair of Kentuckians who achieved great success as NFL assistant coaches have been honored by the Professional Football Writers Association.
Bill Arnsparger of Paris and Romeo Crennel of Fort Knox have been selected as the 2020 Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman Award winners for lifetime achievement as an assistant coach in the NFL.
Arnsparger, who passed away in 2015, was the architect of the Miami Dolphins’ “No-Name Defense” and “Killer Bs” defense of the 1970s and 1980s. A native of Paris who played his college football at Miami of Ohio under Woody Hayes, Arnsparger was an assistant at UK under Blanton Collier before moving on to the NFL with Don Shula. He coached in six Super Bowls, one with the Baltimore Colts, four with Miami and one with the San Diego Chargers. Arnsparger was also head coach of the New York Giants and collegiately of the LSU Tigers. He also served as athletics director at Florida.
“Coach Arnsparger had all 11 guys on the field figured out. It was like having the eye in the sky on ground level,” said A.J. Duhe, who was the PFWA’s 1977 Defensive Rookie of the Year with Miami. “I was always impressed how he could diagnose what we were doing right and wrong in our defensive schemes. He was not an instructional coach. He’d draw everything up on the chalkboard, he’d show us film, that’s why [we called him] ‘One More Reel’. He could teach better with the reels than by lining up and showing how he wants it done. It was a unique coaching style and system that he had. He’d watch the film 24 hours a day if he could.”
Crennel played his college football at Western Kentucky under Jimmy Feix. He was a college assistant coach at WKU, Texas Tech, Ole Miss and Georgia Tech before joining Ray Perkins with the NFL’s New York Giants in 1981, coaching alongside Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. He coached in three Super Bowls under Parcells (two with the Giants; one with the New England Patriots) and three Super Bowls under Belichick (all with the Patriots.) Crennel has also been an assistant with the New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans. He was head coach of the Browns from 2005 through 2008 and the Chiefs from the end of the 2011 season through 2012. After serving as defensive coordinator, Crennel is currently associate head coach with the Texans under Bill O’Brien.
“It’s great to have RAC (Crennel) around still,” said J.J. Watt, Texans defensive end who is a three-time (2012, 2014-15) PFWA Defensive Player of the Year. “I love RAC. I’ve always said it, I’ve been very fortunate to have a guy like (2016 PFWA Dr. Z Award winner) Wade Phillips early in my career and a guy like Romeo Crennel here these last few years. Those two guys are just incredible people, incredible minds, incredible experiences, and I’ve been very fortunate to be around them, to learn from them and to grow with them. We finished up a Zoom meeting recently, and at the end of it, he (Crennel) gave us his little words of advice and wisdom, and we were having some fun. He’s just such a great guy.”
The Dr. Z Award is honor of the late Paul Zimmerman, who covered the NFL for nearly three decades for Sports Illustrated. Zimmerman wrote “A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football” in 1970 and the revised “The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football.” Dr. Z continued to write on the NFL up until suffering series of strokes in 2008. He passed away in 2018.
Arnsparger and Crennel are both members of the Kentucky Pro Football Hall of Fame.
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 2:38 PM.
