Dick Vermeil: ‘There will be tears’

Eight minutes. That’s the time limit for Dick Vermeil’s acceptance speech on Saturday when he will be the final inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Eight minutes. How do you encapsulate an entire lifetime of coaching and broadcasting and serving as an ambassador for the game and for the NFL in 480 seconds?

“I’ve given enough thought to speak for five hours,” Vermeil is saying to me as we walk along the front porch of his spacious, entirely comfortable, and welcoming estate in Coatesville, Pa. “It’s a little nerve-wracking.”

Vermeil does have a game plan because, well, he’s a coach. The coach who rescued the Eagles from obscurity in the 1970s after then-Owner Leonard Tose hired Vermeil fresh off a Rose Bowl win as UCLA’s head coach. Vermeil’s job was to instill some dignity in a franchise that hadn’t made the playoffs since, gulp, winning the NFL Championship in 1960, to bring dignity to a program that had fallen to the depths of the NFL. Vermeil’s time with the Eagles began in 1976 and, the truth is, there wasn’t a better match made anywhere.

All of these years later – long beyond Vermeil’s seven seasons as the head coach here that featured four straight playoff seasons and one trip to Super Bowl XV, and then his 15 years of retirement to become a force in the broadcast booth and then three seasons and a Super Bowl Championship with St. Louis before a second retirement and then another return to the NFL as a head coach, this time with Kansas City for five seasons before calling it quits, for good this time, following the 2005 campaign – he has been ours to have and to hold. Vermeil lived in Bryn Mawr, Pa. when he coached the Eagles and then bought up more than 114 acres in the countryside to live with his wife, Carol, and enjoy every day to the fullest.

“My message is ‘Thank you.’ I’m very grateful to all the people that made it happen,” Vermeil said. “They’re going to put my bust on a standard (in the Pro Football Hall of Fame) and…