PALM HARBOR, Fla. — John Rauch died in his sleep quietly and peacefully, just as he had lived.

His service last week at the United Methodist Church in Palm Harbor, a middle-class community between Tampa and St. Petersburg, befitted the modesty that characterized Rauch’s life.

A modest crowd showed up for his service, nothing like the thousands who were in attendance in Miami in 1968 when Rauch took the Oakland Raiders to Super Bowl II. However, the sports world, coast to coast, mourned the loss of the creative and innovative football coach.

Rauch’s obituary occupied liberal space in the New York Times, evidence that this was no ordinary person being eulogized. Though he never cashed in on football’s riches, he was an accomplished contributor to the game. I can testify to the endorsement of two National Football League icons that speaks to Rauch’s remarkable influence on today’s game.

Let’s take a step back to set the scene. Rauch had been nominated for the College Football Hall of Fame, but had been passed over often, much to the chagrin of his supporters. How could a man start every game of his career, including four bowl games, earn All-America honors, and lead his team to a national championship and not engender enough votes for election?

The Hall has a rule requiring that a nominee’s name comes off the list when his class has been graduated for fifty years. For Rauch, that was 1998. This meant that the only hope was for him to be elected by an old-timers’ committee.

When I mentioned to him that the University of Georgia would promote his candidacy to that committee, the great Bulldog quarterback from the 1940s stopped the conversation.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, typically humble. “Let’s get Coach (Wallace) Butts elected.” At the time, his old coach had not been elected to the Hall. In Rauch’s opinion, the omission of his former coach was more glaring than his own.

Butts did get elected in 1997, and Georgia officials redoubled their efforts to see that Rauch was honored.

When Rauch took the Raiders to Super Bowl II, he only had two assistant coaches. Bill Walsh, who would later win three Super Bowl rings with the 49ers, was his backfield coach, and John Madden, the flamboyant television analyst who coached the Raiders to a Super Bowl victory in 1976, was his line coach.

What would those guys say about Rauch? I decided to find out. A meeting with Walsh in San Francisco before the Rauch campaign got underway made it easy to request help from the 49ers’ icon.

Later on, at lunch when we were attending a coaching convention in New Orleans, Walsh began paying tribute to Rauch’s coaching knowledge. “The genesis of the West Coast offense,” Walsh said, “began with John Rauch at Oakland.”

I almost fell out of my chair. To me, that meant that the highly-regarded and emulated West Coast offense had its origins on the practice field at Georgia, when Rauch first learned the Bulldogs’ offense under Butts.

Later, in a phone conversation with Madden, he said that Rauch was so versatile that he could coach every position on the team, and that he had never met another coach in his entire career who could do that.

With those two endorsements, Rauch’s Hall of Fame candidacy gained an enlarged boost, which helped close the deal.