Dave Shula
American football player and coach
David Donald Shula (born May 28, 1959) is an American former football coach and player. Shula served as the head coach for the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League (NFL) from 1992 to 1996, compiling a record of 19–52. He is the son of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Don Shula, brother of fellow football coach Mike Shula, and father of football coach Chris Shula.
Biography
The Shula family moved to Detroit in 1960 and Baltimore in 1963, following Don Shula's career in the NFL. The family settled in Miami Lakes, Florida in 1970, where Dave Shula was a high school football and baseball player at Hollywood Chaminade High School. Shula was a star wide receiver at Dartmouth College, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1981.
NFL career
Shula's career as an NFL player was a brief one-season appearance as a wide receiver and punt returner with the Baltimore Colts in 1981. He began his coaching career with the Miami Dolphins in 1982, under his father as head coach. In 1989, Shula was hired by Jimmy Johnson to be his offensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys, a position he held for two seasons. Shula clashed with players due to trust differences and was demoted from that position after the 1990 season, and soon thereafter left the Cowboys to take an assistant coaching position with the Cincinnati Bengals in 1991.
In 1992, Shula was named head coach of the Bengals.
“Dave Shula” enters the record as american football player and coach. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dave, Shula and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Dave Shula” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dave, Shula and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5229830. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1992, 1996 and 1960.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dave Shula” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.