What if Miami Dolphins general manager Chris Grier acquired five Hall of Fame players over his first five years in charge?
What if he found 10 Pro Bowl players during that time?
What if he did this by being a one-man front office — scouting, drafting, trading, planning, building?
Do you think he’d be celebrated in a way that carried through time?
Here, in this pause without games, we have time to dust off some archives, call up some memories and right some wrongs. Let’s remember the forgotten Dolphin enough to ask: Why isn’t Joe Thomas in the stadium’s Honor Roll?
There’s an easy answer. Thomas isn’t up there because so few remember him. Even fewer remember how he traded a top draft pick in 1970 for Paul Warfield or sold the Boston Patriots on a couple of honest-to-history, no-name players to get the heart of the No-Name Defense, Nick Buoniconti.
Maybe only Steve Spurrier remembers how Thomas went to the Gainesville office of the Florida quarterback’s lawyer for a talk before the 1967 draft and was put off as Spurrier played solitaire during the conversation. Thomas decided on Bob Griese. To be sure, he posed as a reporter after the Rose Bowl to study Griese’s post-game demeanor.
The most lopsided move by Thomas, the most one-sided deal in Dolphins history, was trading a little-used cornerback for little-known San Diego guard Larry Little. San Diego’s Sid Gillman, a Hall of Fame coach, labeled at the time a, “nothing-for-nothing trade.”
News moved slower in those days, and Little was in an Overtown bar after the trade when he saw the Dolphins’ Mack Lamb, a former high-school teammate.
“Mack, I just got traded to the Dolphins,” he said.
“Great, we’ll be teammates again,” Lamb said.
“Mack, I got traded for you,” Little said.
Lamb didn’t make San Diego’s team that year. Little played 14 NFL seasons and made the Hall of Fame. Gillman, at Little’s induction, told the Dolphins great that trade was the biggest mistake of his career.
Throw in fullback Larry Csonka in the 1968 draft and there are the five Hall of Famers that Thomas acquired. Add Bill Stanfill, Jake Scott, Dick Anderson, Jim Kiick, Manny Fernandez and the other multi-Pro Bowl players and you have the foundation of the Dolphins’ Super Bowl runs in the early 1970s.
“The greatest evaluator of talent I ever saw,” Buoniconti once said of Thomas.
Thomas would agree. That’s how he rolled. “It’s embarrassing,” he once said, “but I guess I’ve never made a bad trade.”
So what happened to Thomas? Why isn’t he even an afterthought of those championship years?
Part of it was the arrival of Don Shula. Those players were off a 3-10 season when Shula arrived. He molded them into champions. He deservedly gets credit for that.
In hiring Shula, Dolphins owner Joe Robbie effectively diminished Thomas, too. Shula always credited Thomas. But each wanted full control. They were, in short, two bulls in one pasture.
Thomas, unlike a coach, never was part of the daily regimen, either. He hovered over the scene in the manner front-office people do by definition. He did so eerily at times, evidently.
“Ominous Presence,” players called him.
Before the 1972 season, with Shula in full charge, Thomas left to run the Baltimore Colts. Then the San Francisco 49ers. He didn’t come close to matching his success with the Dolphins or the Minnesota Vikings before that. The great Vikings teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s had his fingerprint on them, too.
Robbie hired Thomas back to the Dolphins front office in 1981 in a move to help some wayward drafts and, probably, prod Shula, too. Robbie and Shula were feuding loudly those days. But Thomas died of a heart attack early in 1983, his wife calling the Shulas in the immediate aftermath. Don and Dorothy rushed to the hospital, but it was too late.
All these years later, maybe it’s too late for Thomas to have his name excavated. Or maybe a franchise with so much institutional knowledge can sift through the sedimentary layers of time and do him right.
Cameron Wake seems the next obvious Honor Roll entrant, whenever that comes. Maybe, just maybe in the echo of the applause for Wake, there’s room for Thomas to be remembered, too.
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