Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  Stepping in and replacing a legendary coach can be a nightmare. Before the Parcells dispute with the Jets was resolved by Tagliabue, Kraft hired Pete Carroll as his new coach. Carroll had limited head coaching experience. He joined the Jets’ staff as defensive coordinator when Bruce Coslet was hired in 1990. Coslet was fired after four seasons, and Carroll was promoted by Hess and general manager Dick Steinberg to replace him. Carroll was a fun guy. He had a basketball court constructed in the parking lot of the team’s facility and created a diversion during training camp with bowling night, but these were still the Jets, a team with only Super Bowl III on its résumé.

  The results on the field for Carroll weren’t so good. The Jets were 6–5 when they played the Miami Dolphins in a crucial game late in the 1994 season. They held a 24–6 lead deep in the third quarter but lost on Dan Marino’s famous fake spike play, in which he motioned as if he was about to stop the clock by slamming the ball into the ground but instead fired a touchdown pass to Mark Ingram. The Jets didn’t win another game the rest of the season, finishing with a five-game losing streak, and ended 6–10. Carroll, who had three years remaining on his contract, was shocked when Hess fired him after just one season.

  “I really feel no bitterness,” Carroll said a few days after he was let go. “I hate talking about this. It’s not worth it.”

  Carroll went to San Francisco to resurrect his career. The 49ers were coming off their fifth Super Bowl championship and were the model franchise in the NFL. He was hired by George Seifert as the defensive coordinator to replace Ray Rhodes, who had been hired by the Eagles to replace Rich Kotite, who had been hired by the Jets to replace Carroll. Kraft admired the 49ers, and Carroll was the anti-Parcells. He would not make the owner feel like an outsider.

  But Carroll was not Kraft’s first choice. He had grown close to Belichick in his year with the Patriots after Art Modell fired him as the Browns were moving from Cleveland to Baltimore. Belichick had alienated Browns fans with his secretive ways, lack of personality, painful-to-watch news conferences, and his controversial decision to cut popular quarterback Bernie Kosar, who grew up in nearby Boardman, Ohio. Modell knew that to get started on an upbeat note in Baltimore he could not take the morose Belichick with him. Parcells threw Belichick a career-saving lifeline and brought him to New England to help with the defense for what turned out to be a Super Bowl year. Kraft and Belichick became buddies.

  “We had our budget full when Belichick got fired,” Kraft said. “Parcells said, ‘Look, this is a guy I think we should have in the system. You talk to him and you see if you agree.’ I liked him from the minute I met him. That’s when I realized I would eventually hire him as a coach.”

  Kraft and Myra and Belichick and his wife, Debby, went to dinner after Parcells left, and Kraft explained why he had to make a clean break from the Parcells era. “I probably should have hired him,” Kraft said. “But in the important decisions in life, I go with my instinct. I don’t think Belichick would have been right in ’96. I told him when I didn’t hire him that I thought he had to work on how he handled the media, how he handled things. But the real problem I had with him was he was so tight with Parcells. I thought Parcells had stuck it to us. Belichick wanted to stay with us. He didn’t want to go.”

  It shows the depth of Kraft’s enmity for Parcells at that point that he dismissed Belichick, whom he considered a friend, “because I didn’t want anything to do with Parcells,” he said. “Anyone who could live with Parcells for so many years and be under his thumb, I needed someone as a head coach I could trust, and I hired a guy who is the antithesis. As soon as I met Pete, I knew I wanted to hire him.”

  Kraft needed to heal, and Carroll was exactly the right medicine to help Kraft get over Parcells. Carroll has an infectious personality, and players liked playing for him.

  Parcells was the tough Jersey guy. He had friends in the Boston media. Carroll was California cool, and that didn’t play well in one of the toughest sports towns in America. He used to wear sandals to work, not that there is anything wrong with that; it just didn’t play well in Beantown. “Can you see Bill Parcells coming to a meeting in sandals?” Kraft said. “Pete is one of the truly great guys in the coaching fraternity, and I didn’t give him all the support he needed. Pete was inclusive. Look, in the end, I needed someone to make me feel good. It was good for me to have a guy like Pete Carroll because he’s my kind of guy. I mean, we loved Pete. You want Pete to marry into your family. I love the guy to this day. He’s an awesome guy.”

  Kraft just didn’t want him as his head coach anymore. Three years was enough. The team was going backward. Carroll won the AFC East with a 10–6 record in his first year in New England and lost 7–6 to the Steelers in Pittsburgh in the second round of the playoffs after beating Miami in the wild-card game. He made the playoffs his second year but lost in the wild-card game to the Jaguars. The Patriots won just nine games that year, and making things worse, Parcells and the Jets finished 12–4 and won the AFC East for the first time since the division was formed in 1970. New England avoided further embarrassment when the Jets blew a 10–0 second half lead in Denver in the AFC championship game and failed to make the Super Bowl. In 1999, the Patriots started 6–2 and looked like one of the better teams in the NFL, but they went just 2–6 in the second half of the season and missed the playoffs at 8–8. They had gone from eleven victories in Parcells’s final season down to ten, then nine, then eight with Carroll. Kraft fired him.

  “Pete was very good, but I probably went overboard in cutting down his influence over personnel to the point where I didn’t give him a fair chance,” Kraft said.

  The scars had healed from Parcells, and Kraft felt the time was right to bring Belichick back to New England. Even though Belichick came off looking like a stooge when he ran interference for Parcells in the 1997 scam by taking the head coaching job as a way to get Parcells to New York, it wasn’t something Kraft held against him. He remembered how as Belichick was leaving the Patriots, he not only spoke to him about the personnel on the team but how thorough he was in his presentation. That was his guy, and it was the right time.

  It was also the start of another chapter in what had become known in the New York tabloids as the Border War between the Patriots and Jets. Parcells’s move to the Jets got it started. Then in 1998, Parcells had his salary cap specialist Mike Tannenbaum construct a six-year $36 million offer sheet filled with poison pills to Patriots restricted free agent running back Curtis Martin, who Parcells drafted in the third round in 1995. Kraft didn’t match the offer and received first- and third-round draft picks as compensation. Advantage: Parcells. Martin played eight years for the Jets and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2012.

  The Jets went to the AFC championship game in 1998, and Parcells was loading up for a Super Bowl run in 1999 amid speculation that his third year back in New York would be his final year coaching the Jets. In the second quarter of the season opener against the Patriots, the Jets’ season ended when quarterback Vinny Testaverde tore his Achilles chasing after a fumble by Martin and was lost for the year. Parcells lost interest for weeks, and the Jets stumbled. Not until he switched at quarterback from Rick Mirer, the player he passed over in 1993 to select Bledsoe, to Ray Lucas halfway through the season, did Parcells seem to have the old fire. Lucas went 6–3 and helped the Jets rally to finish 8–8. But it didn’t prevent Parcells from quitting as the Jets coach within minutes of their season-ending victory over Seattle.

  There was a reason he acted so quickly: there was a clause in Belichick’s contract that automatically elevated him to Jets head coach the moment Parcells stepped down. Hess had even given him a $1 million bonus the previous year to entice him to remain and turn down opportunities to interview for head coaching jobs. Belichick had met with Al Davis for the Raiders job that went to Jon Gruden in 1998. The bonus was intended to make it attractive for him to wait out Parcells.

  The Jets knew Kraft wanted Belichick, and as so
on as the season was over, Kraft faxed in the request to interview him. By that time, the Jets had activated the clause in Belichick’s contract, and he was their head coach with three years remaining on his contract. The Jets denied Kraft permission. “We put in a request to talk to him, and I think as soon as we put in the request, Parcells resigned,” Kraft said. “He didn’t preempt me. We had it in. Parcells didn’t want to coach without Belichick. I’m not looking to beat up Bill, but he didn’t want to lose him.”

  What the Jets didn’t know right away was that Belichick desperately wanted the Patriots job. On the day after the season ended, Belichick, now the Jets head coach, turned down media requests after Parcells’s official announcement. The Jets said it was because Belichick wanted it to be Parcells’s day. Parcells promised he would never coach again and encouraged reporters to write it on their chalkboard. Of course, with Parcells, it was always wise to keep an eraser handy. The next day, the Jets called a press conference to introduce Belichick as their new head coach.

  The auditorium where the Jets held their team meetings on the second floor of Weeb Ewbank Hall was filled. This was to be Belichick’s coronation. Despite his failures in Cleveland, in New York he was known for constructing the defenses that helped the Giants win two Super Bowls and for helping Parcells clean up the mess Kotite had left behind. Nobody in New York cared what happened with the Browns.

  Belichick walked to the podium and began to read from a handwritten note. He was resigning as the “HC of the NYJ.” He had held the job for twenty-four hours.

  Belichick stunned Gutman with his decision shortly before addressing the media in a rambling twenty-five–minute address on January 4, 2000. Hess had passed away on May 7, 1999, and the sale of the team to Woody Johnson for $635 million would be official one week after Parcells and Belichick quit. Belichick was concerned about working for a new owner. He was concerned about Parcells remaining as the general manager and being in his shadow. Parcells in essence had quit because of the uncertain ownership situation. Now Belichick was doing the same thing with a couple of other issues: He wanted to work for Kraft. He was tired of Parcells having a career crisis after every season.

  “We all know how Bill is,” Belichick said. “Sometimes he reacts emotionally to a loss or a bad season or a series of bad performances. Every time Bill says that, I take it with a grain of salt. It’s been like that for the last twelve, thirteen years.”

  After Belichick made his decision public, he exited the auditorium at the Jets facility. Gutman then took the stage and unloaded on Belichick. “We should have some feelings of sorrow and regret for him and his family,” Gutman said. “He obviously has some inner turmoil.”

  Two hundred miles away in Boston, Kraft was keeping a close eye on this latest Jets drama. “Steve Gutman thought Belichick was having a mental breakdown,” he said.

  He was not. He just wanted out. He made an unsuccessful bid to get the final three years of his contract with the Jets overturned by the NFL—Parcells was called as a hostile witness—after Commissioner Paul Tagliabue ruled that he could not coach another team without the Jets’ consent.

  Kraft was in his office in downtown Boston. It was January 25, and the season had been over for nearly a month. Former Jaguars coach Dom Capers was the fallback candidate for the Patriots. Kraft didn’t think he was going to get Belichick. In addition to Tagliabue ruling against Belichick, a judge had refused to issue a temporary restraining order that would have allowed Belichick to take another job after Belichick’s attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Jets and the NFL. Kessler was well known as an attorney for the NFL Players Association who was adept at giving the league a hard time. After losing his bid for the restraining order, Belichick dropped the lawsuit. His immediate coaching future was now in Parcells’s hands. Could Parcells strike a deal with Kraft to set Belichick free? If not, he could make him sit. It was ironic that Parcells still controlled Belichick’s fate because that was one of the reasons Belichick left the Jets.

  “I’m in my office, and they said someone is calling, and they say it’s Darth Vader,” Kraft said. “So I knew exactly who it was.”

  It was Parcells, of course, and it was the first time he and Kraft had spoken in three years. The Jets had named long-time Parcells assistant Al Groh as their new head coach one day earlier after Johnson was unable to talk Parcells into rescinding his retirement to return to the sidelines. Now with all the leverage after the ruling by Tagliabue and the courts, Parcells was ready to deal. He and Kraft negotiated Belichick’s release. The Jets received the Patriots’ first-round draft pick, and the teams exchanged lower-round picks. “The Border War is over between the Jets and Patriots,” Parcells declared.

  Belichick got into his car and drove to Foxborough to close the deal. Kraft was already being second-guessed. “When I was waiting to hire Belichick, I was getting calls from the league office and my own internal organization saying you are seeing things here that no one else sees,” Kraft said. “But it was my instinct.”

  There is little debate that “Little Bill” is an acquired taste. He is not for everybody, just as Kraft painfully found out that “Big Bill” is not for everybody, either. One of Belichick’s first hires was Scott Pioli to run the Patriots’ personnel department. Pioli worked for Belichick in Cleveland, and accompanied the team to Baltimore in 1996. Belichick brought him to the Jets during that interim period in 1997 when he was the head coach and Parcells was the supposed consultant. One day at the Jets complex, Pioli started chatting up a woman named Dallas, who said she was there on business for an electronics company.

  As they were talking, Parcells came out of the head coach’s office.

  “Oh, I see you met my daughter,” Parcells said.

  Pioli was floored. Dallas’s last name was Parcells.

  They started dating during the 1997 season, but Parcells didn’t find out until after the season. Friends in the Jets’ front office warned him about dating the boss’s daughter, but Pioli was smitten. Scott and Dallas were married on June 11, 1999. Kraft naturally was not initially thrilled when Belichick told him he wanted to bring along the man who married the enemy’s daughter.

  “It shows you how I trusted Belichick when he wanted to bring in Parcells’s son-in-law,” Kraft said. “I trusted him to do it, although at the time, it was not something I was in support of.”

  Pioli was the most important part of Belichick’s infrastructure. Belichick had the final say, but Pioli was not afraid to present the counterargument. The Kraft-Belichick marriage turned out to be one of the best owner-coach relationships in football history. Belichick turned out to be a combination of Parcells and Carroll. He’s tough like Parcells and a control freak like Parcells. Publicly, he’s cranky, but with Kraft, he’s open and honest. He doesn’t have Carroll’s outgoing personality, but he respects his boss the way Carroll did.

  “Whatever I want to know, I know,” Kraft said. “Is he forthcoming? He knows what I want to know, and he tells me. He’s smart because he knows it’s in his interests, especially if something doesn’t go right. Bill will leave me voice mails at eleven, eleven thirty at night, on his way home. Then I’m speaking to him at six in the morning. That’s six days a week. That’s just what it is.”

  Belichick had Kraft’s complete backing, and Kraft gave him the power he had taken away from Parcells and never gave to Carroll. But Patriots fans felt they had the wrong Bill when Belichick went 5–11 in his first season in 2000. He had drafted Michigan quarterback Tom Brady that year in the sixth round, the 199th player taken overall. Kraft had signed Drew Bledsoe to a ten-year $103 million contract in March 2001. Brady was an afterthought. Why not take a chance on a kid who had started some games at Michigan and showed at times he might have the “it” factor? The investment was minuscule. The first time he met Kraft, the rookie told him, “I’m the best decision this organization has ever made.”

  Brady had a terrific training camp in his second year in 200
1. There was speculation that Belichick wanted to start him over Bledsoe in the season opener against the Bengals but backed off. The Patriots lost in Cincinnati. The second week of the season was postponed because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Patriots’ next game was against the Jets. Late in the fourth quarter, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis crushed Bledsoe near the sidelines. Bledsoe was sent to the hospital with severe internal bleeding in his chest. Brady was impressive in taking over for Bledsoe on the Patriots’ final possession in that game, but New England still lost. At 0–2 following his 5–11 first season, there were rumors that Kraft was going to fire Belichick.

  But Brady saved Belichick and turned Bledsoe into the NFL’s Wally Pipp. Brady got red hot and had the Patriots rolling by the time Bledsoe was ready to return. Belichick stuck with Brady, the Patriots won the Super Bowl over the heavily favored Rams, and Bledsoe was traded to Buffalo the next spring for a number one draft pick.

  Those were great times for the Patriots. Kraft had set the standard for how to run a franchise. He opened a new $325 million privately financed state-of-the-art stadium on the land he owned next to Foxboro Stadium after nearly moving the team to Hartford when he had been unable to get a deal done in the Boston area. There were even backs on the seats at the new place. The Patriots won the Super Bowl again after the 2003 and 2004 seasons, giving them three in a four-year period. Belichick was a genius. Brady was the new Joe Montana. Belichick might be uncomfortable socially, but his relationship with Kraft worked.

  “Basically, similar philosophy relative to team building, organizational structure, things like that,” Belichick said.

  The Patriots lost in the divisional round in Denver and in the AFC championship game in Indianapolis the next two years. Disappointing? For sure. Embarrassing? Not really. The embarrassment would come during the season-opening loss to the Jets in 2007. Eric Mangini was a coach Belichick handpicked in Cleveland when he was working in the public relations department and then hired with the Jets. When Belichick returned to New England in 2000, he brought Mangini along with him from New York, and Mangini worked his way up from secondary coach to defensive coordinator.