4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  Alternative leagues—and again NFL Europe in particular—have also served another crucial function: they act as training grounds for coaches and referees, and laboratories in which the NFL can test potential new rules. In 2011 the NFL had three head coaches who had been in NFL Europe: Chan Gailey, Steve Spagnuolo, and Hue Jackson (though the latter two were fired after the 2011 season). Scott Green and Alberto Riveron, NFL refs, started in Europe. The two-point conversion, the current playoff overtime rules, and one-way radio communication between players and coaches were all first tried in Europe (so was awarding four points for a field goal of fifty yards or longer, but that one didn’t make the jump across the pond, much to Sebastian Janikowski’s chagrin).

  Without a league like NFL Europe, the NFL relies on the college game—which, to be sure, is one of the greatest and cheapest (read: free) farm systems in the pro sports world—for the vast majority of its players, coaches, and innovations.

  Hambrecht and his friends were betting that the UFL could help fill a real void.

  In 2007 the owners of the UFL hired Michael Huyghue to be the commissioner of the new league. Huyghue is a 1983 graduate of Cornell, where he was a wide receiver on the football team. (While there, he ran routes against Joe’s Dartmouth defense three times. Cornell lost each game.) At age twenty-eight, he became the first black general manager in pro football history when he was hired by the WLAF’s Birmingham Fire. He later moved into vice-president roles at the NFL’s Detroit Lions and Jacksonville Jaguars, handling the team’s salary caps. With the Jaguars in “near financial ruin” at $23 million over the salary cap, according to NFL reporter Adam Schefter, Huyghue left the team to start a sports agency. He represented, among others, Adam “Pacman” Jones, Vince Wilfork, and Eric Crouch.

  Huyghue is a charismatic man, warm, thoughtful, and always impeccably dressed. To his detractors, his charms merely serve to mask his flaws, the main one being the sin of financial mismanagement.

  Huyghue and the UFL owners had grand visions for the league. They started with a plan for eight initial teams and player salaries that ranged from $100,000 to $1 million. It wasn’t NFL money, but it wasn’t the chump change that the Arena League paid its players ($400 per game). There was even talk about quickly expanding into Canada and Mexico.

  But the financial crisis of 2008 put an end to most of those dreams. The league postponed its launch to 2009, and scaled back to four teams—in Orlando, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and New York. By having teams in the latter two cities, which between them host a total of three NFL teams, it went against its own mandate to put teams only in cities that didn’t have an NFL team. Those franchises were moved after the first season.

  The product on the field was of some quality. It helped that the league was viewed as a last-chance ticket back to the NFL by some of the NFL’s former stars. Simeon Rice, Daunte Culpepper, and Dominic Rhodes all found homes there, playing alongside a slew of hungry rookies, many of whom were last cuts in NFL camps. When asked if his team could compete with an NFL team, Jim Fassel, who has coached the Las Vegas Locomotives since the league’s inception, claims that on his team’s better days, they could indeed beat a lower-tier NFL team. “We’ll never be better,” says Fassel. “The NFL has the money and the picks of the litter. But we could compete. We’re closer to the NFL than Triple-A baseball is to the major leagues.”

  The high quality of play has a lot to do with the coaching as well. And, as with the players, the quality of that coaching has a lot to do with the NFL. Going into the 2011 season, the league had a stellar lineup of former NFL coaches (plus one former CEO of course) for its five teams—Schottenheimer, Green, Fassel, and Glanville—who for one reason or another, sometimes not very good reasons at all, had been deemed no longer fit for the NFL.

  Like Virginia’s Schottenheimer, Dennis Green, the Sacramento Mountain Lions head coach, posted some superb regular-season records in the NFL, at least during his tenure in Minnesota. He led the Vikings to a 15-1 record one year and made the NFC Championship game twice, losing both times. His stint with his second NFL team, the Arizona Cardinals, is, for better or worse, remembered mostly for the nonsensical rant he delivered to the media after his team lost to the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football. (“The Bears are what we thought they were…now if you want to crown them, then crown their ass! But they are who we thought they were!”) The outburst probably sealed his fate as an NFL coach for good, but it did provide him with a presumably lucrative career as a pitchman for a beer company.

  Jim Fassel, the Las Vegas coach, was with the New York Giants from 1997 to 2003. The former NFL coach of the year (1997) made the playoffs three times and went to the Super Bowl in the 2000 season, where his Giants were manhandled by the Baltimore Ravens. After a bizarre loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the 2002 playoffs (the Giants blew a 38–14 third-quarter lead) and a 4-12 season in 2003, Fassel resigned and has never gotten another chance to be a head coach in the NFL.

  The Hartford Colonials’ Jerry Glanville was the least accomplished of the quartet of former NFL coaches. During his nine-year NFL career with the Houston Oilers and the Atlanta Falcons, he was best known for his sidelines antics, all-black outfits, and for the fact that he frequently left game tickets at the will-call window for Elvis Presley. But even he made the playoffs four times.

  Combined, these four men boasted fifty-four years of coaching experience and 431 wins in the NFL. That win total was greater than any single division of coaches in the NFL could claim at the start of the 2011 season. (Only the NFC East’s four coaches—which included veterans Mike Shanahan, Andy Reid, and Tom Coughlin—came close, with a combined 408.)

  The UFL has given these men the chance to continue to do what they love. Possibly, it even gives them a chance to burnish their reputations enough to get back into the NFL.

  Joe, of course, is the outlier, the business guy with exactly zero wins as a head coach at the professional or even collegiate level. His last win as a head coach came back in 1977—as the head coach of a high school team.

  Not surprisingly, his hiring raised a few eyebrows among the league’s coaches. Fassel says his first thought upon hearing of Joe’s appointment was: What are we doing? If this guy is just doing this as a hobby, then I’m going to be offended. This is my profession. But Fassel says he talked to Joe and learned about his background and came away impressed. “I loved his passion,” he says. And he wasn’t worried about Joe’s coaching chops. “He’s a proven leader.” Fassel’s assessment, even down to some of the words he uses, is similar to what Tom Osborne had said when trying to talk Joe up to college athletic directors. “Coaching isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to be a great tactician, you just have to hire the right people, give them the tools, and motivate them and push them to greatness.”

  Besides, there was some sound tactical logic behind hiring Joe. The league was a mess financially. With Joe, the UFL was getting a two-for-one deal. They got a coach. But they also got someone who could help them figure out how to clean up the finances of the Nighthawks (the team had lost $11 million in 2010)—and the league. “To me, that was the attraction of Joe, the financial stuff,” says Hambrecht. He certainly needed the help.

  To be sure, any start-up venture—and especially one that is going up against an entity as powerful as the NFL—will incur losses, at least in the beginning. But the UFL’s first two years seemed even rockier than might have been expected. The league overestimated revenues and underestimated expenses. They were late in payments across the board, from concessionaires to its players (a few companies claim that they’ve still never been paid for the work they did for the league). The UFL failed to secure national media rights for its games—the lifeblood for any professional sports league—instead opting to pay HDNet and Versus for airtime. And given that the league was essentially acting as a farm system for the NFL, having already supplied their teams with more than a hundred players by the end of 2010, getting some kind of support from the NFL, financ
ial or otherwise, seemed like a natural step. But the UFL never succeeded at establishing a working relationship with the NFL. There also seemed to be a serious imbalance in the league’s pay structure: the high-profile coaches made around $1 million for the season (Joe, not so high-profile, was being paid $400,000); player salaries, which started in the tens of thousands, had dropped to $5,000 per game (quarterbacks made slightly more).

  At the beginning of its third season in 2011, the league’s financial situation seemed to be getting even worse. Mark Cuban, who had loaned the league $5 million in seed money (roughly the price of a solid backup quarterback in the NFL), was now suing to get that money back. (Cuban and Hambrecht would eventually work out a settlement, and Cuban says he still has a “debt and not an equity interest in the league.”)

  The league still had no national media rights deal and looked like it would forgo it completely. Six million dollars left over in bills from 2010—most notably, for worker’s compensation—had not yet been paid. The Virginia Destroyers’ players had no pads or helmets. (One media pundit in Virginia took to calling the UFL the “Unreliable Football League.”) Most troubling, the league had built its season schedule with the expectation that the NFL would have some sort of work stoppage because of the lockout, either for part or all of its season. The UFL had bet it all on black.

  All of these issues would come to a head in July, just when camps were scheduled to begin. That was when Huyghue and the UFL owners would decide to delay the start of the season by thirty days, giving themselves some time to plan and to try to come up with the funding they needed to save the season. And that was when they turned to Joe for help. He was in on nearly every important conference call. In August he flew to Martha’s Vineyard to meet Hambrecht and Huyghue and brainstorm. Joe never offered his own money. The league was the sort of unstable investment that he generally shied away from. But he did work hard on trying to solve the league’s problems throughout the season. “I always wanted him on the calls, though I don’t think he always wanted to do them,” says Huyghue. “I think he thought, Hey, Fassel is spending all day coaching his team, not on the phone. But Joe’s insight was invaluable. His take was fresh. He had no sacred cows.”

  But Joe actually volunteered to be on the calls because while he had no financial stake in the league, he did have another stake, one that meant much more to him than money: He desperately wanted the season to be played as much as or more than anyone else. He needed the experience for his résumé. If giving them his financial advice would help make sure the season happened, then he was eager to do so. But money wasn’t the only problem the UFL had.

  In the middle of August the league came up against another kind of trouble. Nevin Shapiro, a University of Miami booster who was in jail for coordinating a $930 million Ponzi scheme, told an interviewer that he had provided illegal benefits to seventy-two Miami athletes from 2002 to 2010. Shapiro had been a part owner of Huyghue’s sports agency. And in the interview, he claimed that Huyghue had helped him provide these “benefits” to the college athletes. Huyghue denied the allegations, and Hambrecht stood behind him. “There’s never been an ounce of evidence or proof that I did anything wrong,” says Huyghue. Still, the UFL’s image took yet another hit.

  Huyghue says that during the thirty-day delay he actually suggested to the owners that they cancel the season and start fresh in 2012. But Hambrecht believed that losing the 2011 season would sound the death knell for the league. In the end, the owners found just enough money to start the 2011 season. They cut costs by killing the Hartford franchise (Jerry Glanville’s team) and by shortening both training camp (to two weeks) and the season (now six games instead of eight) for the four remaining teams. Somehow, the UFL’s 2011 season was on.

  Hambrecht believed that playing the league’s third season would help him secure future investors, a media deal, or maybe even a partnership with the NFL. It was a Hail Mary pass, except that instead of throwing the ball from the 50-yard line, Hambrecht and the other owners were backed up to their own 1.

  Chapter Six

  Training Camp, Take Two

  In late August the Nighthawks report to camp again. Energy crackles through the Kroc. The kids enrolled at the center’s day camps stare, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the giant men lumbering around in their midst. The players and coaches are ecstatic—​if still in something of a state of disbelief—to be here, to have this season brought back to life after it had seemingly flatlined. None of them know the significant role their coach played in saving it.

  Some big challenges await the team. The Nighthawks have what amounts to only two weeks of training camp. There’s been some serious roster turnover since last they were together—twenty-one of Omaha’s players were signed to NFL training camps, the most of any team in the UFL. This is a testament to Mueller’s skills as a talent evaluator, but it will make camp more complicated, especially on the offensive side, with new players having to learn the playbook. The team’s final roster won’t be settled until September 5, the day after the NFL’s final cuts, when the Nighthawks may get back some of the players they’d wanted, or add some others.

  The night before their first practice, when they will finally take the field for the first time, Joe addresses the full team. They have no idea what they are in for.

  Joe stands in the Kroc’s dining area. He’s dressed in a black Nighthawks T-shirt and shorts, and has a whistle hanging from his neck. He starts out speaking in a low murmur, as if he wants to force the players and coaches to focus intently in order to hear him. He lays out what he calls his fundamental philosophies. Only a few of them have anything directly to do with the game of football itself.

  The first philosophy, and the one he will mention at every game and nearly every practice and meeting, is the one that Joe believes to be the fundamental guiding principle of life itself: be a man.

  “A man is someone who stands on his own two feet and accepts responsibility for his actions,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of rules here with the Nighthawks, but the foundation of our program is built on this concept. It carries over into everything you do in your life. It carries over to your families, to how you treat your parents, your wife, your girlfriend, your kids. It carries over into your careers. It carries over into how you handle yourself every day. There is nothing in life that this doesn’t touch.”

  A couple of the players nod. But most sit in silence, perhaps waiting to see where this is going.

  “Respect is a by-product of being a man,” Joe continues. “You guys have been stars all your life. You’ve been treated differently than nearly everyone else because you have a gift: you are great football players. This treatment has given you—all of us—a feeling of entitlement that sometimes diverts our focus. We feel this sense of entitlement, but we shouldn’t. We need to take responsibility for our own lives. We need to treat everyone with respect, to treat everyone like you would treat your own family. Treat the women you see here at the Kroc, in Omaha, just as you would your own mother.”

  As Joe says this, a woman who is hidden behind a curtain somewhere in the dining area suddenly calls out, in a world-weary voice: “Amen, brother!”

  Then comes Joe’s selling point. “We—the staff here on the Nighthawks—will do everything in our power to get you into the NFL,” he says. But he tells them making it there will ultimately come down to their actions: their play on the field, their consistency on tape, their ability to rebound from a bad play and not make the same mistake twice. “The NFL will be halfway through its season by the time we’re done. You will have played six games. You will be ready.”

  Then, the business pitch, words perhaps never uttered before to these football players. “I’ve found throughout my career in business and football that if you are really going to be successful, you have to figure out how to differentiate yourself from others. This means leveraging your core competencies. Discover your strengths and talents and use them to get your competitive advantage.”

>   Suddenly, the players are students in an MBA class.

  “Again, this extends to more things than just football. This will help you in your life, as a husband, a boyfriend, a son, a father.”

  Then, unexpectedly, comes talk about the end of their careers. “The reality is that you absolutely know that your football career has a limit. Whether you end up playing another five days or another five years, it’s time to start thinking about what you will do with the rest of your life.” Every week during camp and the season, Joe tells them, he will be hosting something he calls “Life after Football,” where he will talk about things like how to find a job and how to establish a personal budget. These sessions will be voluntary, he tells them, “but I would suggest you take advantage of them.”

  Joe stops for a moment, the dramatic pause of a seasoned speaker. He looks down and brings his fingers to his lips. “At the end of the day, this is what I see,” he says, with just the slightest passing note of an Inwood accent. The players sit up straight in their chairs, wondering where this could possibly go next. “‘Football is life,’ goes the old mantra. It is the greatest game on earth. And yes, it does teach you about life. But it is not life. The bottom line is that it is a game. But it is a game we have all chosen to be part of. Enjoy it. Treasure it. And most of all, have some fun.”

  The last line seems to resonate with the players. These are guys who were once the best players on their teams, in their states, maybe even in the entire country, as Joe has reminded them. They were once highly recruited high schoolers, courted by the world’s greatest football factory colleges. Then they were college players—great ones—with their own ESPN.com player pages and NFL draft rankings. They seemed to overflow, once, with potential greatness.