Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  Belichick was Mangini’s role model and mentor. They had gone to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, a generation apart. After the Patriots’ loss to the Broncos in the 2005 playoffs, the Jets hired Mangini as their head coach. He was just thirty-five years old. Belichick was furious. He hated the Jets and felt that taking the job was not the proper way for Mangini to show his gratitude. They stopped talking, and their postgame handshakes—Belichick had perfected the no-look dead fish—were more anticipated than the Jets-Patriots games.

  Belichick had developed the rules-breaking program of having one of his video guys tape the opponent’s defensive coaches hand signals sending in the alignment. It was for future reference when the teams would meet again. Belichick would decode the signals and use the tape to his advantage, for whatever it was worth. Two problems: it was against NFL rules, and Mangini knew about it. He knew where all the camcorders and tapes were stored. Now that he was with the Jets, it didn’t work to his advantage to allow Belichick to tape his defensive signals. The Jets blew the whistle on Belichick during the first game of the 2007 season. NFL security confiscated the video camera of New England video assistant Matt Estrella while the game was going on.

  It was dubbed Spygate, and the scandal had such a long shelf life that you can’t tell the story of Belichick’s career without bringing it up. Commissioner Roger Goodell fined Belichick the maximum $500,000, the most a coach had ever been fined. He fined the Patriots $250,000 and took away a first-round pick from New England in 2008. Belichick was fortunate Goodell did not suspend him.

  “Everybody has their idiosyncrasies, but if there is trust, that’s the key in business, in marriages,” Kraft said. “You build a sense of trust so you go through rough times. Look what happened with this bogus thing with the Jets. I stood by him pretty darn good. That was rough.”

  Why was it bogus? Kraft hesitates.

  The restaurant is buzzing with activity. It is noisy. It was the most humiliating time in his Patriots ownership. He pauses before answering.

  “How much do you think that helped us?” he said. “How much of a surprise was it to Mangini and [Jets GM Mike] Tannenbaum?”

  It was against the rules. “You know how many teams steal signals? That’s bupkis,” Kraft said. The Patriots claim they caught the Jets illegally videotaping them in 2006 at Gillette Stadium. “We kicked them off our roof,” Kraft said. The Jets insist the Patriots had given them permission to tape from that location.

  The Jets had been on to Belichick’s taping years earlier. Head coach Herm Edwards saw the Patriots’ camera fixed on him and defensive coordinator Donnie Henderson during a game in 2004 at Giants Stadium, and they started waving to it. Clearly, Edwards wasn’t concerned about any information Belichick might be pilfering. Edwards and Belichick were friends. He never talked to him about it. He laughed it off.

  Kraft questioned Belichick about his use of the videotape.

  “How much did this help us on a scale of 1 to 100?” Kraft said.

  “One,” Belichick replied.

  “Then you’re a real schmuck,” Kraft said.

  Mangini was fired by the Jets after the 2008 season and immediately was hired by the Browns to be their head coach. After two seasons he was fired by Cleveland and went to work for ESPN. Nearly five years after turning in his former boss, Mangini had deep regrets. Belichick had given him his break in coaching, he won three Super Bowl rings as an assistant in New England, and Spygate not only destroyed his relationship with Belichick but created discussion whether the championships were tainted.

  “If there is a decision I could take back, it’s easily that decision,” Mangini said on ESPN. He knew too much and didn’t want Belichick cheating against him. That’s as far as he wanted it to go. It went much further. “Never in a million years did I expect it to play out like this,” Mangini said. “This is one of those situations where I didn’t want them to do the things they were doing. I didn’t think it was any kind of significant advantage, but I wasn’t going to give them the convenience of doing it in our stadium, and I wanted to shut it down. But there was no intent to get the league involved. There was no intent to create the landslide that it has become.” It also put any coach who might consider hiring Mangini on his staff in a difficult position. Could he trust Mangini not to turn on him the way he turned on Belichick? Mangini did the right thing shutting down Belichick’s taping operation, but as coaches like to say, the execution was poor. Coaches are a tight-knit fraternity and Mangini turned in one of his brothers.

  Maybe Kraft had blind loyalty to Belichick because he delivered three Super Bowl rings, but he never thought about firing him after Spygate. He believes Belichick wouldn’t do anything “deliberately” wrong. “He would take every edge he could get, but he would never knowingly break the rules or cross the line,” he said. “I know him. I’m not saying he was a choirboy.”

  There was never a doubt in Kraft’s mind that he would support Belichick. He didn’t condone what he did, but he wasn’t going to end their relationship because he made a mistake. “Your wife gets very sick. You dump her? Or your kid makes a bad mistake. It’s your kid,” he said. “It’s your family. How can you get people to dig deep and go through the wall for you if they know you’re not going to be there for them when they need you? You make your decisions, you think it out, you get good people, and then you stay the course. And then the wind comes and the lightning comes and you stay the course.”

  Kraft one day should be in the Hall of Fame as an owner. Belichick’s three Super Bowl championships as a head coach and two as an assistant will get him to Canton, too. That won’t stop critics from saying that what the Patriots accomplished before the videotaping was stopped is tainted.

  But as Kraft says: “That’s their problem.”

  MIND GAMES

  Lawrence Taylor, the greatest defensive player in NFL history, walked into the locker room a few days before the Giants were going to play the Los Angeles Rams in the 1989 playoffs. His locker was just a few feet from the entrance, so it was just a matter of seconds before he was able to see something he didn’t recognize sitting on his stool. He picked it up. It was an airline ticket to New Orleans.

  LT usually didn’t need much motivation to play in a game, especially a playoff game, but Bill Parcells knew that all he had to do “was show him where the competition was” and he would respond to it. Parcells’s greatest gift in his nineteen years as an NFL head coach was being able to push the right buttons with his players. Every player had a different button. He knew Taylor and Phil Simms responded to tough love mixed in with a lot of cursing, and he didn’t mind when they gave it right back to him.

  Parcells figured the best way to create a path to the quarterback for Taylor was to appeal to his enormous pride. LT had an overdose of athletic arrogance, and Parcells always picked the right time to tap in to it. Taylor had put Parcells through a lot with his drug problems—he was suspended the first four games of the 1988 season—but they were as close as a coach and a player could be. “I think about it all the time: if I had gone to another team, if I had gone with another coach, what type of player would I have been?” Taylor said. “I was very fortunate to have Parcells. He allowed me to do my thing. I’ve never been a guy who works well in structure.”

  When Taylor came into the league in 1981, he was immediately unblockable. He was 240 pounds of lightning-fast fury rushing the passer from his right outside linebacker spot in the Giants 3–4 defense. It took about two snaps in training camp before the Giants ended the charade that there was a competition with the veteran John Skorupan. Taylor was put right into the starting lineup. Teams tried to block him with running backs, which was a terrible mismatch. Finally, in a playoff game against the 49ers his rookie year, San Francisco’s innovative coach Bill Walsh came up with an alternative plan. He would swing 258-pound left guard John Ayers into the backfield to meet Taylor head on. Soon teams would use their left tackle, always the best pass protector, as the
first line of defense in trying to neutralize him. They might get backup help from a tight end or running back, but at least Taylor wasn’t allowed to run over 185-pound running backs. One left tackle who had his way with LT was his nemesis, Irv Pankey of the Los Angeles Rams. Earlier in the 1989 season, Pankey had held Taylor without a sack when LT was playing with a sprained ankle. Pankey had shut out Taylor when they met in 1985. Meanwhile, Parcells was well aware of the success that New Orleans linebacker Pat Swilling, a third-round pick in 1986, had when he faced Pankey in the two Saints-Rams games in 1989. Swilling had three sacks in the first game and one sack in the other playing the same position as Taylor in New Orleans’s defense. Swilling was a fierce pass rusher but was not in Taylor’s league.

  Pankey was an excellent player, but Taylor was having a Hall of Fame career. He just had trouble with Pankey, who at six-four and 277 pounds had one inch and nearly 40 pounds on him. Pankey was as much of a barrier as those blocking sleds they use in practice. Before Taylor arrived in the locker room the week of the playoff showdown with Pankey, Parcells put the airline ticket on the stool in front of his locker. Once he knew that Taylor had seen it, Parcells walked over to needle him.

  “You get the ticket?” Parcells said.

  “Yeah, what’s up with that?” LT said.

  As much as Taylor loved to party, he knew Parcells was not sending him to the French Quarter to get ready for the game by staying up all night on Bourbon Street.

  “I want you to go down to New Orleans. Now you don’t have to change jerseys, because he also wears number 56. Just give Swilling your helmet and send him up here. And you go ahead and stay down there and play for the Saints this week because I need somebody that could whip Pankey,” Parcells said.

  “If you wanted Pat Swilling, why didn’t you draft the son of a bitch?” Taylor fired back.

  Taylor was incensed. He was also fired up to face Pankey. Mission accomplished. Parcells had hit LT’s sweet spot. Of course, the Saints didn’t make the playoffs, so they were not even playing that week. Taylor had two sacks against Pankey even though the Giants lost the game on Flipper Anderson’s touchdown in overtime.

  “He was always playing head games,” Taylor said. “There’s a lot of guys who didn’t care for Bill. I really find that amazing. Are you kidding me? For me, I couldn’t imagine having any other coach. He let his players play. What else do you want?”

  Parcells was not for everyone. He alienated players with his mind games. As decisive as he was managing games on Sunday, he was just as indecisive when it came to managing his career. He had four head coaching jobs and quit all four. He ruled by intimidation and had a sarcastic sense of humor that could humble his players. He had no patience for celebrity quarterbacks. He’s one of the great motivators in NFL coaching history. As Parcells likes to say about players who have accomplished a lot in their careers, he has the pelts on the wall to prove it.

  Taylor was part of an exclusive club. He was a Parcells guy. It’s not a club to which you apply for membership, and it’s harder to get into than Augusta National. The coach decides you are in, and once you are accepted, it’s a lifetime membership. Taylor, Simms, Harry Carson, and George Martin were executive directors with the Giants. Curtis Martin became a charter member in New England when Parcells drafted him in the third round in 1995. Sam Gash and Troy Brown were part of the club with the Patriots. Curtis Martin later followed Parcells to the Jets, where the group expanded to include Vinny Testaverde and Keyshawn Johnson. Then it was on to Dallas for Parcells’s final four years as an NFL head coach, and he initiated Demarcus Ware, Jason Witten, and Tony Romo. If there was a problem in the locker room, if a player needed peer pressure instead of Parcells pressure to get with the program, he went to the Parcells guys and said, “Fix it.”

  Parcells had won two Super Bowls with the Giants, got to another with the Patriots in his fourth season after inheriting a 1–15 team, and in his second season after taking over a 1–15 team with the Jets had them in the AFC championship game. Dallas was his only stop where he failed to win a playoff game, although he would have if Romo had held on to the snap for a chip shot field goal in a wild-card playoff loss to the Seahawks in what turned out to be the final game of Parcells’s career in 2006. Parcells always felt that if the Cowboys had won that game, they could have made it to the Super Bowl.

  What is a Parcells guy?

  “Just likes football and wants to win,” he said. “You got to like it. I like it.”

  Curtis Martin scored the winning touchdown in the first game of his rookie year. He was surrounded by reporters at his locker after the game. He had lasted until the third round because of injury concerns, but Patriots running back coach Maurice Carthon, another Parcells guy from their time together with the Giants, gave Martin high grades. He told Parcells he was going to be suspicious of Martin because “he’s too good to be true.” Now with Martin’s locker surrounded by reporters after his impressive debut, Parcells walked by, barking as usual.

  “Get away from him,” Parcells declared. “He’s a one-game wonder.”

  Martin had run for 30 yards on his first carry and 102 yards for the game. Nice way to break into the NFL, but as Parcells was fond of saying of young players who did well, “Let’s not put him in Canton just yet, fellas.” Martin was much more than a one-game wonder. He rushed for 1,487 yards and won the rookie of the year award. “One-Game Wonder morphed into Boy Wonder,” Martin said. “He still calls me that.”

  Martin finished his career as the NFL’s fourth leading rusher all-time with 14,101 yards, was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2012, and picked Parcells to present him in Canton. He is a high-ranking officer in the Parcells Guy club. “It’s an exclusive club in Parcells’s mind,” Martin said. “A lot of times, you don’t come to understand until the end of your career that you are a Parcells guy. Or he even tells you that you are a Parcells guy. At these little moments, he would stop by and say a few words with a little nugget of wisdom. I use so many of Parcells’s principles in my business affairs. One time he came up to me and said, ‘You know, Boy Wonder, I think you got it. A lot of guys don’t get it. I find it a problematical situation when I want someone to succeed more than they want to succeed.’ That is what separated Parcells. He had that insight.”

  He knew Martin was a different kind of guy from Simms and Taylor and that penetrating his ears with four-letter words was not going to get the best out of him. “That just wasn’t effective with me,” Martin said.

  Martin survived growing up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Tough talk from Parcells was not going to intimidate him even though Martin had tremendous respect for him. When Martin was just nine years old, he was devastated when his grandmother was found in her apartment by his mother stabbed to death by an intruder. She was lying on her back with a knife in her chest that went clear through and was stuck in the bed. Martin had to identify the killer from mug shots. Friends of his were killed. “Growing up in a really bad neighborhood, you begin to decipher the difference between people who are book smart and street smart,” he said. “You look at some coaches; they are more book smart. Parcells is more of a street smart coach. He understands all the different moving parts. I’ve never seen a man who has the wisdom and insight the man has about people.”

  When Parcells jumped from the Patriots to the Jets in 1997, he left Martin behind. But one year later, Martin was a restricted free agent and the Jets constructed a poison-pill six-year $36 million offer sheet that New England decided not to match. The Patriots took the Jets’ first- and third-round picks as compensation instead, and Martin played two more years for Parcells before the coach “retired” for three seasons and then ended his coaching career in Dallas.

  If Parcells had remained in New England, so too would have Martin. He was not unhappy with the Patriots. Unlike Parcells, he was very fond of owner Robert Kraft. But the Jets’ money was right. And Parcells was there. “I left because of Parcells,” Martin sa
id.

  If LT was the problem child son, Martin was the son who always did the right thing. Parcells had great admiration for him. “I can only tell you, he’s one of those players who inspire you as a coach. He really does,” he said. “From the first day I ever met him, he wanted everything I ever had. I knew he was going to put it to use. He wanted to know what to do to be successful. ‘Give me what you got, coach, I’m taking it,’ ” he said. “He’s a great kid. He’s a wonderful person. I can’t tell you enough about him.”

  Before Parcells’s final season with the Cowboys, owner Jerry Jones signed wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had been a locker room problem in San Francisco and Philadelphia. He was never going to be a Parcells guy, and Jones signed him over Parcells’s objections. Parcells knew Jones was consumed with bringing in T.O. and knew it was a lost cause trying to stop him. “I talked him into about seven other things,” Parcells said. “He’s got three or four of his really best players that I fought my ass off for. He knows that.”

  Witten was one of them. In the one season he coached Owens, Parcells almost never referred to him by name. It was always “the player.” Parcells lasted four years working for Jones in Dallas, about three years longer than many predicted for this pairing of volatile personalities and big egos. “I really liked Jerry,” Parcells said. “You know why? Jerry just wants to win. He will put his money where his mouth is.”

  Part of the Parcells legacy as a head coach was his job hopping. That turned off a lot of people. “Hey, that doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “Our society is transient.”