Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  Also by Gary Myers

  The Catch: One Play, Two Dynasties, and the Game

  That Changed the NFL

  Copyright © 2012 by Gary Myers

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownarchetype.com

  CROWN Archetype and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71968-3

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Jacket photography © Getty Images

  v3.1

  To Allison, Michelle, Emily, and Andrew

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  FROM THE SUPER BOWL TO SUSPENDED

  THE PHONE CALL

  TUNA SUBS

  MIND GAMES

  SECOND CHANCES

  THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY

  Photo Insert

  TRICK OR TREAT

  THE KING OF BURNOUT

  THANKS FOR EVERYTHING. YOU’RE FIRED.

  THE JOY OF REX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  As soon as Tom Brady’s Hail Mary pass hit the ground in the end zone on the final play of Super Bowl XLVI, it was madness in Indianapolis for Tom Coughlin.

  The New York Giants’ coach had just defeated Bill Belichick and the Patriots in the Super Bowl for the second time in five seasons. Now it was total chaos as confetti came flying down from the rafters and the field was flooded by media, television cameras, and whoever else managed to get onto the floor of Lucas Oil Stadium. Coughlin came off the sidelines to seek out Belichick.

  He found him, and they shared a long embrace. Years earlier, under Bill Parcells with the Giants, Coughlin was the receivers coach and Belichick was the defensive coordinator and secondary coach, and they would script practices with their units going against each other, which helped them prepare for the upcoming opponent. They won the Super Bowl together in 1990.

  The postgame celebration is what all coaches dream about as they are dragging their families from city to city as they go from job to job in their quest to become an NFL head coach and one day ascend to the podium at midfield after a Super Bowl and accept the Vince Lombardi Trophy. They work ridiculously long hours in a business with a high rate of divorce. Parcells, Belichick, Jimmy Johnson, Jim Fassel, Sean Payton, and Jeff Fisher are among those who had their marriages end while they were coaching. Not only has Coughlin’s marriage endured, but football has brought his family closer together. His daughter became pregnant at Boston College, and the father was Chris Snee, an outstanding guard on the BC football team. The Giants drafted Snee in the second round of the 2004 draft, but it was not done as a favor to Coughlin. Giants management gave him veto power over the pick if he felt having Snee on the team would make things too uncomfortable. Coughlin gave his approval, and Snee married Coughlin’s daughter before training camp his rookie year and went on to become an All Pro player and a starter on two Super Bowl teams.

  Coughlin’s first Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, who were less than a minute away from completing their undefeated 2007 season, was one of the greatest upsets in pro football history. Winning another after the 2011 season elevated Coughlin into the elite status of coaches who have won multiple Super Bowls and put him in position to be considered for the Pro Football Hall of Fame after his coaching career was over.

  After the trophy ceremony, Coughlin was led to the NFL Network set near one of the end zones. As he finished the interview with Marshall Faulk and Deion Sanders, he saw a man waiting for him. It looked like he wanted to give him a hug. Coughlin was in a huggable mood.

  “I’m hugging signposts at that time,” he said, laughing.

  He was caught up in the moment, and it was hard to blame him. He nearly had been fired after the 2006 season. He had one year left on his contract, and the Giants, who either extend their coaches or fire them with one season remaining, basically made him re-interview for his job and then tacked on just one year to his deal. That was a vote of little confidence. He responded by winning the Super Bowl. The Giants, however, were a big disappointment in 2008 and lost their only playoff game. They didn’t make the playoffs in either 2009 or 2010 and then, after a 6–2 start in 2011, lost four games in a row. Once again, Coughlin’s job was in jeopardy. The players knew it, too. They had Coughlin’s back and won three of their last four games to win the NFC East, then beat the Falcons, Packers, and 49ers in the playoffs and the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

  Coughlin came off the NFL Network set and was able to get a closer look at the man who wanted to hug him. “This guy is waiting for me with these big glasses and a clock on his chest,” he said.

  It wasn’t a piece of jewelry. It was a clock. What the hell: Coughlin gives him a hug after the man grabs him and wraps his arms around him. “As I walk away, one of my kids says to me, ‘Dad, do you know who that was?’ ” Coughlin said. “ ‘No, I don’t.’ ”

  He was told it was Flava Flav, the hip-hop star. He didn’t think much about it, but it was out of character for this father and grandfather who rarely ventures out of his comfort zone to be standing on the field embracing a man with a big clock around his neck. “It’s pretty funny to think of Coach Coughlin and Flava Flav hugging it out,” Eli Manning said later.

  As Manning was getting ready to leave the stadium, he realized he had not seen Coughlin since the game was over. He walked into the coaches’ dressing room and sat with the only head coach he’s had in the NFL. “I talked to him for a long time,” Manning said. “He definitely was very excited. He had a big old smile painted on his face.”

  Coughlin arrived back at the Giants’ hotel at 12:30 a.m. and skipped the team party. His wife, Judy, had arranged for a private party for family and friends. By midday Monday, the Giants were on their team charter for the two-hour flight back to New Jersey.

  “The next day we’re on the parade, and Brandon Jacobs reaches down and grabs a man by the hand and pulls him up,” Coughlin said. “He’s on the float.”

  He was laughing hard as he finished the story. “It was Flava Flav,” Coughlin said.

  He had given his team a history lesson before they boarded the buses to take them to downtown Manhattan for the ticker tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes. He told them about Dwight Eisenhower and Neil Armstrong taking the same route. He could have told them about the Giants and Yankees, too. “It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” he said.

  Winning the Super Bowl, being the best in the business, makes all the work it takes to get there worthwhile. If the job was just Sunday afternoons, it wouldn’t be so demanding. But it involves so much more. Coaching Confidential takes a behind-the-scenes look at the compelling and frantic world of NFL head coaches. I interviewed some of the biggest names in football in a three-year journey to find out what their lives are all about. The list starts with Tom Coughlin, Sean Payton, Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Holmgren, Rex Ryan, Tony Dungy, Joe Gibbs, Mike Shanahan, and Andy Reid but certainly does not end there.

  I provide details about Payton’s meetings with the NFL that preceded his being suspended for the 2012 season. But just as important is a long sit-down I had with Payton two months before he won the Super Bowl as he was on the verge of becoming one of the stars of the coaching p
rofession as an engaging, likable, and brilliant offensive strategist and risk taker. After he won it all, he got carried away with his self-importance, and his sense of entitlement and his arrogance went off the charts.

  Gibbs was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame after he first retired from the Redskins after winning three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks. But his best coaching job might have been in the fourth year of Gibbs 2.0 in the last month of the 2007 season, when the Redskins played with a broken heart and went on a surprising playoff run after their teammate Sean Taylor was murdered during a home invasion late in the season. Gibbs’s compassion and personal frailties showed his strength as a leader.

  Dungy and Reid unfortunately had one thing in common: heartache brought about by their children. Dungy’s son James committed suicide. Reid’s sons were jailed for incidents that involved drugs. Dungy’s decision to counsel Michael Vick after he was released from prison and Reid’s understanding of how inmates transitioning back into society need a helping hand were the driving forces that brought them together. I spent a lot of time with Dungy and Reid peeling back the layers of the way their experiences with their own children helped lead Vick to Philadelphia.

  Tragically, Reid’s oldest son, Garrett, twenty-nine, was found dead on the morning of August 5, 2012, in his dorm room at Eagles training camp at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He had been assisting the team’s strength and conditioning staff. Reid did not mention drugs three days after his son died, but he said, “It’s a sad situation, and one my son has been battling for a number of years. Our family has been battling. It doesn’t mean you stop loving your son, because that’s not what you do. You love him and a lot of families deal with this type of thing. It’s a sad situation.”

  Dick Vermeil doesn’t run away from the label. He is the poster child for coaching burnout. But in Coaching Confidential, you’ll find out how his inner turmoil led to his being unable to get out of his car one day when he pulled up in the parking lot at Veterans Stadium and face the pressures of his job. You’ll also find out why, after fifteen years away from the NFL, he finally came back, leading to his greatest triumph and the biggest regret of his career.

  Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame one day, has managed three of the biggest names in the coaching business: Parcells, Pete Carroll, and Belichick. At dinner one night, Kraft told me one of the first things Parcells wanted him to do when he bought the team in 1994 was sell 1 percent to his good friend and confidante Tim Mara, the former co-owner of the Giants.

  Three of Parcells’s guys—Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, and Curtis Martin—tell what it was really like playing for the Tuna. Jimmy Johnson takes you deep into his thought process in deciding to deal Herschel Walker in what turned out to be the greatest trade in NFL history. Shanahan reveals that he feared that a practical joke he pulled on Al Davis would result in Davis’s death. What’s it like to be fired? Brian Billick received his pink slip and an $18 million golden parachute. The NFL is all about coaches and quarterbacks, and no relationship was more volatile than that of John Elway and Dan Reeves, but no quarterback made his coach laugh the way Brett Favre did to Mike Holmgren.

  In my more than thirty-five years covering the NFL, the most poignant moment was sitting with Tom Landry in his office the morning after he was fired by the Cowboys as he stuffed twenty-nine years of memories into boxes. “Amazing how much you accumulate for that many years,” Landry said. “You wonder why you never cleaned out your files before.”

  When I called Pete Rozelle at home the night Landry was fired, he said, “This is like Lombardi’s death.” It was a shocking reminder to every man who has ever stood on the sideline: if it can happen to Landry, it can happen to me. There are retired coaches and fired coaches and enduring coaches and aspiring coaches. There are control freaks and delegators. There are winners and there are losers. A who’s who in the coaching fraternity is opened up in Coaching Confidential.

  The completed and often circuitous journey to the podium right after the clock at the Super Bowl says zero is a road traveled by the chosen few. Coughlin and Belichick have won five between them, but each was fired from his first NFL head coaching job. The survival rate is low, but the payoff is high.

  “It’s well worth it,” Coughlin said. “I’ll take the lumps to get what’s at the end of the rainbow anytime.”

  FROM THE SUPER BOWL TO SUSPENDED

  In mid-March 2012, Sean Payton was walking briskly through the hallway on the sixth floor of the NFL’s midtown Manhattan headquarters at 345 Park Avenue. He was taking a quick break from a meeting with Commissioner Roger Goodell that was the equivalent to a student being called into the principal’s office.

  Payton had a card key in his left hand as he passed through a reception area on his way to a bathroom just beyond locked glass double doors. He stopped for a moment to chat with a familiar face and kept on going. The league had moved a few blocks uptown nine months earlier from its offices at 280 Park Avenue, where it did business during most of Paul Tagliabue’s time as commissioner and Goodell’s first five years.

  The look on Payton’s face didn’t lie. He was worried.

  “Has Roger informed you of the discipline?” he was asked.

  “No,” he said.

  He swiped the key, went through the glass doors, and two minutes later was passing back through the reception area on his return to Goodell’s office. He was meeting with his professional executioner. It was barely two years since Goodell had handed him the Vince Lombardi Trophy after the New Orleans Saints’ feel-good Super Bowl victory over the favored Indianapolis Colts. Now Goodell was giving Payton one last chance to plead his case for leniency before he would hand out the first suspension of a head coach in the NFL’s ninety-two-year history.

  The reception area in the league’s new office was state of the art. Payton glanced at the immense high-definition flat screen television with square panels. The picture covered almost an entire wall. Naturally, it was tuned to the NFL Network. If Payton had taken a seat on one of the leather couches and kept Goodell waiting just a few minutes, he could have seen himself as the lead story on the network’s news updates. It was the second meeting between Payton and Goodell after an NFL investigation had uncovered one of the biggest scandals in league history. The Saints had been accused of setting bounties on opposing players in a pay-for-injury performance scheme for the previous three seasons, including their dramatic Super Bowl season of 2009. Payton hadn’t been part of the bounty meetings, which the league said was run by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams and funded by Williams and the players, but he had gotten himself into deep trouble by not putting an end to it when he was told the league was investigating in 2010 and then not being forthcoming about what he knew in his initial meeting with the league investigators in New York in 2012. Goodell demands honest answers to questions, and the NFL believed Payton was not telling all that he knew to the commissioner.

  Payton must have felt that the Lombardi Trophy, which he said he slept with and joked that he slobbered on the night the Saints won the championship, made him bulletproof. The Saints were aware the league was investigating them shortly after the Super Bowl, but Payton was intoxicated with success and the league felt he ignored its warnings. If Payton could not control Williams, he could have fired him. His self-importance came through in the first meeting in New York, when he spoke with league security. He was spitting smokeless tobacco into a Styrofoam cup. It’s a good thing Goodell was not present for that portion of the meeting or he would have tossed him out of the office and personally escorted him onto Park Avenue.

  No one person is bigger than the league. It doesn’t matter if you are at the head of the class in the next generation of great coaches, already have won a Super Bowl ring, make $5 million a year, and helped in the healing process of one of the great natural disasters in the country’s history. The NFL will not let its $9 billion a year business be brought down by a g
roup of renegade coaches and players.

  Payton had become one of the faces of the league after the Saints did their part in helping the city of New Orleans get over the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that ravaged the Big Easy in 2005 one year before he arrived. Until then, Payton was known for being a scab quarterback for the Chicago Bears during the twenty-four-day players strike in 1987, being close friends with Jon Gruden, and doing good work as the Giants’ offensive coordinator when they went to the Super Bowl in 2000 but then being run out of New York by Jim Fassel two years later when he was demoted from his play-calling duties. If it’s true that things eventually work out for the best if you keep working hard, leaving New York and going to work for Bill Parcells when he was hired as the Dallas head coach in 2003 was the best thing that ever happened to Payton. They had no connection other than that they had worked for the Giants at different times. They hit it off right away.

  Having Parcells on his résumé was a good thing for Payton. Just one season with the Cowboys had put him in position to be offered the Raiders’ head coaching job by Al Davis. But the Raiders had become a burial ground for coaches, and Payton turned down Davis and kept building his portfolio working for Parcells. He had been instrumental in recruiting Tony Romo to sign with the Cowboys as a free agent after he went undrafted in 2003 and then played a big role in his development that led to Parcells benching Drew Bledsoe early in the 2006 season and elevating Romo to the starting quarterback job. By then, Payton was in New Orleans and had tried and failed to acquire Romo in a trade shortly after he took the Saints job and before signing Drew Brees as a free agent.

  Payton had an edge to him that Parcells loved, and they did have some things in common. Parcells lost both his parents during the 1983 season with the Giants. Payton lost his mother during the 2002 season with the Giants. Fassel had given him the play-calling duties after his own mother died in 1999. He took the play-calling responsibilities back just eleven days after Payton’s mother died. Payton, who previously had lost his dad, considered Parcells a father figure. Parcells has three daughters and treated Payton like the son he never had. It was Payton’s confidence that allowed him to turn down the Raiders job; he knew that if he stuck with Parcells, a better opportunity would come his way. Two years later, after the 2005 season, he interviewed in Green Bay and New Orleans. He was crushed when the Packers hired Mike McCarthy, the 49ers’ offensive coordinator. That was the job Payton wanted, and he got the news from Packers general manager Ted Thompson while he was in New Orleans interviewing with the Saints. But he could have the Saints job if he wanted it. At the time, it was far from the most attractive spot in the league. The city was still trying to rebuild after Katrina, and the Saints were coming off a 3–13 season in which they spent the year based in San Antonio and played all their games on the road.