Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  The Giants were angered when they found out Parcells might be trying to get out of his contract days after they won their first Super Bowl so that he could take a job as coach and general manager of the Atlanta Falcons in 1987. Commissioner Pete Rozelle had to step in and prevent Parcells from breaking his contract. Parcells tormented himself and tormented his employers with his indecision by claiming he was coaching year to year, which is not what owners wanted to hear, and by following a career path that made him and Marty Schottenheimer the only coaches in the modern era to be the head coach for four different teams. The difference was that Parcells was never asked to leave. He was never fired. He did it to himself.

  On the day after the 1999 season, he stood in front of a huge media contingent in the team meeting room at the Jets’ headquarters at Weeb Ewbank Hall on the campus of Hofstra University to announce his retirement. “This is definitely the end of my football career,” he said. “Bill’s not coming back. You can write that on your chalkboard.”

  He probably meant it at the time, but he still had a lot left to give. “I never thought after I left the Jets that I would coach again,” he said. “Things happen; things change.”

  One thing that changed: Jerry Jones offered him a four-year contract worth $17 million to coach America’s Team.

  Parcells is the self-proclaimed Jersey guy. He attended Colgate University, then transferred to what is now called Wichita State, where he played linebacker. He was drafted by the Detroit Lions but was cut before he had a chance to play in a game. He began his coaching career in 1964 at Hastings College in Nebraska, where he worked with linebackers. It was the first stop on a college tour that took him to seven schools. At Army, he became lifelong friends with the legendary basketball coach Bob Knight.

  He was the head coach at the Air Force when Ray Perkins, the Giants’ new head coach, offered him a job in 1979 as the linebacker coach. Parcells initially accepted but wound up changing his mind for personal reasons. He stayed in Colorado for one year working in real estate, which didn’t provide the same adrenaline rush as coaching football. The next year, he was coaching linebackers for the New England Patriots. When Perkins had an opening for a defensive coordinator in 1981, he reached out to Parcells, who this time took the job. There was a huge carrot: the Giants were going to take Taylor, the linebacker from North Carolina, with the second overall pick in the ’81 draft.

  After Perkins left to succeed Bear Bryant at Alabama, his alma mater, after the 1982 season, Giants general manager George Young elevated Parcells to head coach. It was a gut-wrenching year for Parcells. It started off when he made the biggest mistake of his coaching career, picking Scott Brunner to start over Simms at quarterback. Simms had been injured for much of Parcells’s first two years with the Giants. It had been Brunner who led the Giants to the playoffs in 1981 when Simms was hurt. He knew more about Brunner than about Simms and despite the huge talent edge that favored Simms, he began the season with Brunner as his starter. When Parcells realized Simms was the right quarterback for the Giants, he put him in during the third quarter of the sixth game of the season right after Brunner threw an interception. Simms completed his first four passes but had a season-ending injury when he sustained a compound fracture and dislocation of his right thumb on his fifth pass, an incompletion, when he hit the face mask of Eagles defensive end Dennis Harrison. His hand was a bloody mess from the bone that had penetrated the skin.

  Before the injury, Simms had spoken about being so frustrated that he wanted to be traded. Then Parcells gave him his old job back two days before the trading deadline, and he couldn’t make it through the game without getting hurt again. Even without the injury, it was unlikely that the Giants would have dealt Simms. The injury made it a moot point. The Giants lost the game to drop to 2–4 and won only one more game the rest of the season to finish 3–12–1. During the season, both of Parcells’s parents passed away. When the season mercifully came to an end, Young nearly fired Parcells and hired University of Miami coach Howard Schnellenberger, who had been on the Colts’ staff when Young worked in Baltimore’s front office. Young thought the trauma of the 1983 season was going to be too difficult for Parcells to overcome.

  “It had to be unbelievable, between his parents and the season,” Simms said.

  Not long after the season was over, Simms sat down with his coach. “He said one day in the weight room, ‘If I survive this, I swear we are going to do it my way,’ ” Simms said.

  Young brought Parcells back, and he did change. Parcells was close to many of the defensive players from his two years as an assistant coach. He needed to make a break and be the head coach. He did that. His relationship with Young was never the same. It was hard to overlook the fact that his boss came close to firing him during the toughest year of his life. Young picked the players, and Parcells coached them. That was about all they had in common.

  “There were a lot of things that went on that year. I don’t want to say it served me well, but really it probably did,” Parcells said of his football troubles. “You develop an attitude that you eventually know that nobody cares and that it’s a results business. Nobody is ever going to understand why things are the way they are. So you just have to try and go forward the best you can.”

  Simms was his quarterback despite a brief off-season flirtation that Young had with Warren Moon, who’d had a successful career in the Canadian Football League and was sought after by many NFL teams. Moon signed with the Houston Oilers. The Giants traded Brunner to the Broncos in the off-season, leaving Simms as the starter and journeyman Jeff Rutledge as his backup.

  As Parcells developed as a head coach, he came to understand that creative tension produced better results. He preyed upon the insecurity of players. If his team was cruising along winning week after week, he manufactured a crisis to keep the players on edge. If they were losing, he had plenty of material at his disposal. Parcells knew Simms could take it, so he often used him for target practice. By picking on Simms, one of the faces of the franchise, the other players knew they would be held accountable.

  “Every day there were two things you knew you were going to get: mental pressure and physical pressure,” Simms said. “The man just didn’t let up. You would see him first thing in the morning, and he would be Mr. Grumpy.”

  Simms would ask, “What is the crisis today?” Then Parcells would say, “The stupid offensive line stinks. My defensive backs can’t tackle.” Simms realized, “There is always a crisis, and whose turn was it going to be today? I hated it when it was me. It was really a tension-filled day. I would come home exhausted from the tension. Practice was real. I got nervous before the seven on sevens. I got nervous before the team drills. I knew the performance had to be good. No exaggeration, just a fact. That was his MO. He loved friction. If it wasn’t there, he created it. A lot of times, I was the perfect foil.”

  Parcells would never let Simms relax. He was the Giants’ first-round draft pick in 1979 from tiny Morehead State in Kentucky. The 49ers didn’t have a first-round pick—it had been traded years earlier to the Bills in the O.J. Simpson trade—and Walsh was hoping to take Simms at the top of the second round. But the Giants took Simms seventh overall, and Walsh had to settle for Joe Montana with the last pick in the third round. The draft was being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. That was long before the days of the Internet and an endless number of draft publications that allowed fans to familiarize themselves with all the players from big schools and small in the months before the draft. Few Giants fans knew of the existence of Morehead State and as a result had absolutely no idea who Phil Simms was. The draftniks in New York started booing when Rozelle made the announcement: “With the seventh pick in the 1979 NFL draft, the New York Giants select Phil Simms, quarterback, Morehead State.”

  What? Phil Simms? Maybe the Giants meant Oklahoma running back Billy Sims, who wasn’t eligible to be in the draft until 1980. NFL Films was caught off guard by the Simms pick and also by the re
action of the fans in the Roosevelt’s ballroom. They asked Rozelle to make the announcement again so that the fans could boo again, allowing NFL Films to capture the moment. Rozelle obliged with a big grin on his face. When Simms found out about the reenactment, he was not happy.

  He became entrenched as the starter in 1984, his sixth year in the league. “We were walking out of the locker room before the opening game of the season,” Simms said. “When I tell this story now to head coaches in the NFL, they laugh. But Bill says to me, ‘Simms, if you don’t throw at least two interceptions today, you’re not taking enough chances. Take some chances now.’ Wow, what head coaches say that to a quarterback?”

  Simms didn’t listen to Parcells. He didn’t throw an interception against the Eagles. But he did throw four touchdown passes and completed twenty-three of thirty passes for 409 yards in New York’s 28–27 victory. The Giants made the playoffs but lost in the second round to the 49ers. They made the playoffs again in 1985 but were shut out in the second round by that great Bears defense. The next year, the Giants were clearly the best team in football. They finished 14–2, mauled the 49ers and Redskins by a combined 66–3 in the first two rounds of the playoffs, and then beat the Broncos 39–20 in the Super Bowl.

  Simms was twenty-two for twenty-five in that game—the 88 percent completion percentage is a Super Bowl record—and really could have pitched a perfect game. A case could be made that all three incomplete passes should have been caught. Was Parcells happy with Simms? When he threw a 6-yard touchdown pass on third down to wide receiver Phil McConkey that first bounced off the hands of tight end Mark Bavaro with 10:56 left to give the Giants a comfortable 33–10 lead, Simms came to the sidelines feeling pretty good about himself. He had quickly forgotten taking a 5-yard sack on a play action pass on the play right before the touchdown, which pushed the Giants from the Denver 1 to the Denver 6. It was to be the only time he was sacked during the game. Parcells, of course, didn’t forget and didn’t forgive.

  Simms came to the sidelines and was summoned for a conference by Parcells.

  “Hey, hey, come here. You can’t take a sack there,” Parcells said.

  “Shut up. Don’t be coaching me now. We just won the Super Bowl. You are going to coach me up about taking a sack? You’re unbelievable,” Simms said.

  By then, Simms had learned to deal with Parcells picking on him. “There were probably ten guys on the team he could say anything to, brutally honest mean things, and it wouldn’t be taken that way,” Simms said. “Everybody understood why he said it. If he was yelling at me in front of the team, all the other players were allowed to laugh at me. He didn’t care.”

  Did Simms ever want to tell Parcells to stick it or something worse? “I probably mumbled that under my breath every day for eight years,” he said. “I once threw an awful interception, even bad for me, and oh, my God, I didn’t even want to walk by him. He walks over to me and says, ‘Come here a second. [Offensive coordinator] Ron [Erhardt] and I just want to know if you’re watching the same game we’re watching.’ ”

  Their most public fight came in a Monday night game in Indianapolis in 1990. Simms came to the sidelines, and he and Parcells started screaming at each other. The national television cameras caught every last f-bomb. It became big news. “He knew he fucked up, and he was mad at himself,” Parcells said. “He was trying to make it look like it was something else. I said, ‘Go sit the fuck down.’ ”

  Simms put the skirmish in context. “On a scale of one to ten, it wouldn’t have even been point one,” Simms said. “Unfortunately, it was on television. I’m definitely not proud of it. That was Bill. He egged us on. There was just a group of guys on the team he said things to that he wouldn’t say to other guys. That relationship allowed us to bark back a little bit. What coach can do that in the NFL now? There might be a couple of players around the league that have a relationship with a coach where they might yell at each other for half a second.”

  Parcells would get on Taylor, too, even though it was hard to come down on the best player on the team, the best player in the league. On plays in which Taylor was out of position, he made up for it because he was so much better than anybody else. “Bill always got something to say. You think you are doing good and you are playing like shit, he will let you know,” Taylor said. “My rookie year, he told me, ‘You look like a deer in the headlights. You just look fucking lost.’ We would cuss each other out all the time. At one point, we wouldn’t even talk during practice, I wouldn’t stand beside him. At the end of practice, all the players would pick up on it and were egging us on. They would say, ‘Okay, you two, come up here and make up, get up there and kiss and make up.’ It was a father and son argument.”

  When the Giants lined up on the sideline for the national anthem, Taylor was always by Parcells’s side. “That was his way of saying, ‘I’m with you.’ That was kind of an unspoken thing that I liked very much and that I think he felt,” Parcells said.

  Before a huge December game in the 1986 season at RFK Stadium against the Redskins that would decide the NFC East champion, Parcells and Simms were in the baseball dugout, getting ready to walk onto the field. Parcells, Simms, and Taylor loved those games at old RFK, where the lower deck of the stands would bounce when the fans really got into it, which was all the time for Giants-Redskins games.

  “You ready?” Parcells said.

  “I’m ready,” Simms said.

  “You know, boy, these fans hate us so much that they like us,” Parcells said.

  “I think you’re right,” Simms said.

  They walked out of the dugout together. “They started shouting, ‘You motherfuckers,’ ” Simms said. “It made me smile. Those little things Bill would say could really disarm you and put you in a different state of mind.” As soon as the words “and the home of the brave” were sung before that Redskins game, Parcells turned to Taylor. “Are you going to fucking play or not?” Parcells said. Meaning, are you going to play great? Taylor responded, “You just worry about those other sons of bitches you are coaching. Don’t worry about me.” Parcells smiled at LT. He showed him the competition and knew Taylor was all in. LT had three sacks and the Giants won 24–14 and then shut out the Redskins at Giants Stadium weeks later in the NFC championship game putting them in their first Super Bowl.

  Parcells had a special relationship with Taylor even though he caused plenty of aggravation for the coach and the organization. LT had a drug problem, and Parcells did his best to try to get Taylor straightened out. But there were always questions whether he was enabling him by also doing everything he could to keep him on the field.

  “I worried about him a lot. Of course I did. He knows that,” Parcells said. “What really stings my ass is when people say Parcells looked the other way because that is so much bullshit. There’s not a fragment of truth to that. Not a shred. I didn’t look the other way.”

  What was Parcells trying to do for him? “Help,” he said. “Just help. I’m not going to go on about what I did. I did a lot and tried a lot.”

  Taylor knew that he was protected by his production on the field. “That’s a different atmosphere back in the ’80s than it is now,” he said. “It is not as public as it is now. You got to understand back in those days, even though you have a problem, it’s all about what you are going to do on Sunday. So the people will tend to turn a blind eye to that a little bit as long as the law don’t get involved. I know Bill was concerned, but hey, he had a job; he was trying to protect his job, too. He couldn’t say to me, ‘Are you doing drugs?’ You can’t say that to me. On Sunday I was making twelve tackles and two or three sacks; what are you going to say? During that time, I’m not listening to nobody anyway. As long as I can do what I do on Sunday, what is the problem? Luckily, it didn’t get really bad until after my career was over.”

  The mold was broken with Parcells. He was the Giants head coach for eight years. That’s now a lifetime in the NFL. It allowed him to build lifelong relationships wit
h many of his players. Even though he left the Giants after they won their second Super Bowl in 1990 and despite the Giants going into a down period with Ray Handley for two years, there was never any talk of resentment or abandonment from the Giants players. Parcells helped them turn into winners. “I love Simms. I love a lot of those guys,” Parcells said. “I got the nicest letter from Simms [around 2005]. Just wonderful. It’s why you coach.”

  Simms told Parcells in the letter how much he appreciated him. “I had a lot of those. They must think I’m going to die,” Parcells said.

  The Giants held a twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of their 1986 Super Bowl championship team in New Jersey in 2011. Simms said that when Parcells walked into the room, things got quiet. “Bill is here,” they all whispered.

  “They did it out of tremendous respect,” Simms said. “They couldn’t wait to see him. Listen, they all thanked him.”

  When the Giants lined up for a team picture at the reunion, they sat in the same spot as they had for the picture in 1986. “If they filmed it, it would have been the funniest hour on NFL Network,” Simms said. “Guys were telling stories. Bill was talking about the whole team. It was pretty cool.”

  Hall of Fame linebacker Harry Carson was perhaps the wisest of all those Giants. “The thing we can all say about Bill is he put us in a position to win,” he said.

  The Parcells coaching tree has produced eight Super Bowl appearances and six Super Bowl championships, and the two losses came when one of the branches defeated the other. Combine that with Parcells’s three appearances and two championships, and that’s a total of 11 Super Bowls and eight championships in the first 46 Super Bowls. That means there’s been a Parcells connection to nearly 25 percent of all the Super Bowls.

  Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick may have been the two best coaches on any NFL staff since Vince Lombardi was running the offense and Tom Landry was running the defense as assistants for the New York Giants in the late 1950s. Parcells and Belichick first worked together as assistants for Ray Perkins with the Giants in 1981–1982 before Parcells was named head coach in 1983. He elevated Belichick from linebacker coach to defensive coordinator in 1985.