By Anthony Holden
CBS SportsLine Historian
It was once said about Hank Stram that he was every bit as tough as Vince Lombardi, but you just couldn't tell because of his happy-go-lucky nature. "If Lombardi did it with a hammer, Hank did it with a velvet hammer," said a Chiefs employee during the 1960s.

"He was a player's coach," said longtime Kansas City wide receiver Otis Taylor.

Stram (right), and QB Len Dawson won three AFL titles and one Super Bowl together. (AP)

It was once said about Hank Stram that he was every bit as tough as Vince Lombardi, but you just couldn't tell because of his happy-go-lucky nature. "If Lombardi did it with a hammer, Hank did it with a velvet hammer," said a Chiefs employee during the 1960s.

"He was a player's coach," said longtime Kansas City wide receiver Otis Taylor.

He was also the winningest coach in the history of the AFL, and because San Diego's Sid Gillman retired briefly in 1969 Stram is the only man to have served as a head coach through all of the AFL's 10 seasons.

Stram was a superb technician, and an innovator who studied miles of film always looking for a new way to do something.

When he saw rookie Abner Haynes during his first year as head coach of the Texans in 1960, Stram installed the I-formation -- an alignment that was not very popular in pro football at the time -- to take advantage of Haynes' skill as a cutback runner. Lining up deep in the "I" allowed Haynes to be creative if a hole wasn't there. "Haynes was a very skillful runner and he had a great capacity to find seams, running room, daylight," said Stram.

Stram used the moving pocket in the early 60s specifically to counter San Diego's fearsome front line led by Ernie Ladd and Earl Faison. "Ladd and Faison would invariably knock down six or seven balls every game if you tried to throw from the normal pocket," Stram reasoned.

On defense, Stram devised the stack defense where he would put a man nose-up on the center and stack his linebackers right behind the linemen, basically the modern version of the 3-4.

In his 1970 book "The Illustrated History of Pro Football" author Ron Smith compared Stram to legendary Paul Brown, a man renowned for his visionary thinking. "Stram seemed to be doing to professional football what Paul Brown had done a quarter century before," Smith wrote. "Shifting it to a higher intellectual plane, or at least developing it in the direction of an academic discipline. There was far more to learn, to practice and to remember in Hank Stram's football than there ever had been in Curly Lambeau's or in Jim Thorpe's."

Stram played college football at Purdue and he began his coaching career when he joined Purdue's staff after graduation in 1948, serving eight years as backfield coach under coach Stu Holcomb. During that time a quarterback named Len Dawson was firing footballs all over the Big Ten, and the connection Stram forged with Dawson would pay huge dividends years later.

In 1956 Stram left Purdue and bounced from SMU to Notre Dame to Miami (Fla.) before finally -- after 12 years as a college assistant -- landing the head coaching job of the Dallas Texans in the new AFL. Within three years the Texans were league champions.

Dawson, who spent five years on the bench in the NFL, was given new life by Stram. He came to Dallas and immediately proved that he was a top-level quarterback in 1962, leading the Texans to a 20-17 double-overtime championship victory over two-time defending AFL champ Houston.

Through superb drafting and coaching, Stram built a powerhouse team, but he often came under criticism because the team - which moved to Kansas City and was called the Chiefs starting in 1963 - didn't always seem to respond to Stram's coaching. From 1963-65, the multi-talented Chiefs had a record of 19-19-4 with no playoff appearances.

"One day," said a former AFL coach, "I saw those Chiefs run onto the field against us and I buried my head in my hands. I thought they would beat us 40-0. Instead, we beat them."

In 1966 Stram's Chiefs went into Buffalo and crushed the Bills in the AFL title game, advancing them to Super Bowl I opposite the Green Bay Packers, and this is when people began to respect his ability. The Chiefs lost that game, but they made amends in 1969. They beat a superb Raiders team in Oakland for the AFL championship game and then beat Minnesota in Super Bowl IV, earning Stram his rightful place among the upper echelon of coaches.

Stram stayed with the Chiefs through 1974, then spent a year in the CBS television broadcast booth before returning to coach the woeful New Orleans Saints in 1976 and '77. That stint failed miserably, and Stram returned to television in 1978. He also hooked up with CBS radio joining play-by-play man Jack Buck on the weekly Monday night game, a position he held for nearly two decades.

"I was grateful to have had an opportunity to play for a coach of his caliber," Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell said. "But it was more than coach and player with us. We don't have so much a coach and player relationship as we do friend and friend."