Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  They won two Super Bowls together with the Giants and then made it to one Super Bowl with the Patriots and one AFC championship game with the Jets before their bitter parting in 2000. When they were apart, Belichick did much better. Parcells never made the Super Bowl in any of the seven seasons he coached without Belichick on his staff. Belichick made it to five Super Bowls without Parcells in his first twelve seasons in New England.

  Simms says he’s looked at the team picture from the 1986 championship team and wondered, “Were we that good or were we just coached that well?”

  Parcells let his coaches coach, especially Belichick. In the 1990 playoffs, the Giants played a four-man front against the Bears, a three-man front against the 49ers, and then a two-man front against the Bills in the Super Bowl. Belichick devised the schemes. They all worked.

  “I had a lot of faith in him, but never to the point where I didn’t know or have a pulse on it,” Parcells said. “The conversations were much shorter because we had been together so long. I could say, ‘Bill, remember when we did this against Roy Green?’ He always knew. Of course, he had ideas, too. It worked well.”

  The cold war between Parcells and Belichick finally ended at a Hall of Fame luncheon for Carson in summer 2006 at Gallagher’s Steak House in Midtown Manhattan. There were speeches by Parcells, Belichick, and Schottenheimer, who was Carson’s first position coach after he was drafted in 1976 and helped him in the transition from defensive end at South Carolina State to linebacker with the Giants. It was a very nice affair. As it was winding down, Parcells and Belichick sat at a table with Schottenheimer and finally broke the ice. It had been six years since they had worked together or really communicated. They repaired their relationship that day.

  They will always have one thing in common: they loved their time with the Giants. It was unfortunate that business got in the way of their friendship. “Hey, that’s life,” Parcells said. “Things go forward, and everybody has to make their own decision. So he made some of his and I made some of mine. Time goes on. It’s not in anybody’s best interests to have things the way they temporarily were. We were back on pretty good terms pretty quickly.”

  Ten former assistants of Parcells went on to become NFL head coaches: Belichick (Browns, Patriots), Tom Coughlin (Jaguars, Giants), Sean Payton (Saints), Romeo Crennel (Browns, Chiefs), Al Groh (Jets), Chris Palmer (Browns), Eric Mangini (Jets, Browns), Tony Sparano (Dolphins), Todd Haley (Chiefs), and Ray Handley (Giants). Charlie Weis, another Parcells assistant, has been the head coach at Notre Dame and Kansas, and Mike MacIntyre was hired as the San Jose State head coach in 2010. He worked for Parcells in Dallas.

  There were four general managers in the NFL in 2012 who also worked in the front office for Parcells: Mike Tannenbaum (Jets), Scott Pioli (Chiefs), Jeff Ireland (Dolphins), and Trent Baalke (49ers).

  Belichick has won three Super Bowls with New England. Coughlin, who joined the Giants in 1988 and was the receivers coach for their second title, won two Super Bowls with New York in his first eight years as the head coach. Payton, who worked three years for Parcells in Dallas, won the Super Bowl for the Saints.

  “Obviously, Bill made some pretty good choices along the way of the people that would work for him,” Coughlin said. “So you have to add that ability to his long list of things that he has done extremely well in his career.”

  Coughlin learned Giants football from Parcells, which means being a physical team that plays great defense and doesn’t turn the ball over. “That was driven home very easily for me,” Coughlin said. “We played a certain way, we practiced a certain way. We had an element of toughness about our teams. Our guys were very proud of that.”

  Payton was a coaching star after the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2009—and before Bountygate brought him down in 2012—and he counted on Parcells for direction as the game against Peyton Manning and the Colts approached. By then, Parcells was running the Dolphins and the Super Bowl was being played in Miami. Over a four-day stretch between the Saturday eight days before the game and the Tuesday leading up to the game, Parcells’s phone kept ringing and Payton kept calling for advice. He also saw him once when the Saints worked out at the Dolphins’ facility that Monday.

  “I bet you the son of a bitch called me ten times. Ten. Not one. Ten. Saturday he’s still in New Orleans. How about Monday? What do you think about Monday? What do you think about Friday at the end of the week? What happens if one of my guys gets in trouble? How would you handle that? Every fucking question,” Parcells said. “I said I told my team that if any of you get drunk, any of you get arrested, you’re going home. You’re not playing in the game. You’re going fucking home. So I said write it down, right now, look them all in the face, I don’t care who you are. Just do it and you are going home.”

  Parcells also let him in on a big-game secret that obviously stuck.

  “I told him you got to have balls to win this game,” Parcells said. “He was asking me about all these things. You ran these fakes in these biggest games. Why did you do it? You got to have balls. But I said you got to calculate this shit. You can’t just indiscriminately decide to run it. I’m sure that was in his head with the onside kick.”

  Payton called for Ambush, an onside kick to start the second half. The Saints recovered, and it gave them an extra possession, which they converted into a key touchdown in their victory over the Colts. Parcells pulled off a fake punt—Arapahoe in the Giants’ playbook—on fourth and one from his own 46 on the Giants’ first possession of the second half of his first Super Bowl against Denver. They trailed 10–9, picked up the first down and scored a touchdown, and never trailed again. It was a risky call. If the Giants had failed, they would have given John Elway a short field.

  Payton never tipped Parcells off to the onside kick, but Parcells was proud of him. “I don’t want any credit for any of this,” he said. “This kid is his own guy. He really is. You can influence people because you do have to have balls. And your team has got to know you have them.”

  Parcells was not happy when Payton called a reverse in the second quarter to wide receiver Devery Henderson that lost 7 yards. He told him the day after the game, “Sean, what the fuck are you doing? You bringing out the jugglers and the clowns? Why fucking do that?”

  He had warned Payton not to “start bringing extra furniture into your house now because it’s not going to look good once you get it in there,” meaning don’t clutter up the playbook this late in the season. “You better give them a song they know by heart, but if they don’t know it, the pressure of the game is going to get them,” he said.

  Payton said that working for Parcells “for three years, it was like law school.”

  Haley was hired in Kansas City by Pioli, Parcells’ son-in-law, but he was fired with three games remaining in his third season, in 2011. He was then hired by the Steelers, the team his father Dick helped stock with wise personnel decisions during Pittsburgh’s tremendous Super Bowl runs in the ’70s, as the offensive coordinator. Parcells had given Todd Haley his first coaching job with the Jets in 1997 and later hired him in Dallas. Dick Haley worked for Parcells with the Jets as well.

  “In my mind, Bill is the best there is at what he does,” Todd Haley said. “I know any business he was in he would have been at the top also. He just knows how to handle people and how to push the right button, on top of knowing football as well as anyone. There isn’t a day that goes by that something doesn’t come up that I don’t think, ‘What would Bill do in this situation?’ ”

  Parcells was just passing down wisdom he picked up along the way from Al Davis and Tom Landry, Chuck Knox, Mike Holovak, and Bucko Kilroy. He never forgot how they helped him out when he was a young head coach, and he’s been committed to helping the next generation of coaches. He was touched when Payton called him the morning after the game and starting crying, telling Parcells he was a father figure to him. “I told him I was honored,” Parcells said.

  Parcells doesn’t want to take any credi
t for the success of his assistants. “We all work from our experiences. Organizationally and how to approach things, they all took a lot,” he said. “But they are their own guys. They have their own identity.”

  In the end, they are all Parcells guys.

  SECOND CHANCES

  The rain was slamming down on Tony Dungy as NFL officials hurried to assemble the podium for the Super Bowl XLI trophy presentation. The Indianapolis Colts had just defeated the Chicago Bears in a driving rainstorm in Miami. It was the tenth Super Bowl in southern Florida and the forty-first overall and the first played when the NFL would have been better off indoors.

  There were a lot of thoughts spinning around in Dungy’s mind. He and Bears coach Lovie Smith, one of his former assistants with the Bucs, were the first African-American head coaches to take their teams to the Super Bowl. That made the game historic even before it was played. Dungy then carved a deeper and unforgettable place in history as the first African-American coach to win the Super Bowl. It could have happened earlier for Dungy, but he could never get the Bucs to the next level in the six years he coached in Tampa. He turned around a moribund and ridiculed program and even brought the Bucs all the way to the NFC championship game in just his fourth year after the 1999 season, where they lost to the Rams.

  The Bucs held the explosive Rams to just 11 points, but Tampa managed only two field goals. It typified Dungy’s Tampa years: great defense, no offense. His offense lacked firepower and played not to lose. In the next two playoff seasons, Tampa’s offense produced a total of four field goals, and the Bucs were outscored in back-to-back wild-card games in Philadelphia by a combined 52–12. There were rumors after that first loss to the Eagles that the Bucs were on the verge of being sold and the new owners wanted to replace Dungy with Bill Parcells. The team remained with the Glazer family, and Dungy remained the coach. But he was on the hot seat going into the 2001 season. Unfortunately, his team didn’t play as if it were motivated to save the coach. Dungy heard the Parcells rumors again and was angered by them. This was supposed to be a fraternity, and it was bad form to covet a job that wasn’t open. The Bucs went into the playoffs knowing Dungy’s job was at stake, but they lost again to the Eagles, and this time Dungy was indeed fired. Parcells was the first choice of the Glazer family. Tampa thought it had a deal with Parcells—he had stood up former Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse at the last minute in 1992—but he backed out again. Parcells was so close to taking the job that he had Mike Tannenbaum, the Jets’ assistant general manager who had been Parcells’s right-hand man when he was with the Jets, fly to Tampa to meet with Bucs executive Rich McKay. If Parcells had closed the deal, Tannenbaum was his choice to be Tampa’s general manager. A long and winding search led the Glazers to Jon Gruden of the Raiders. He was under contract but at odds with Oakland owner Al Davis. When the Glazers offered the exorbitant price of two first-round picks and $8 million, Davis was happy to send Gruden to Florida.

  It paid off immediately for the Bucs. Gruden won the Super Bowl in his first year in Tampa with the core of the team constructed by Dungy. It was made even sweeter for Gruden by the fact that the Super Bowl victory came against Davis and the Raiders. Gruden’s knowledge of the Raiders’ offense and quarterback Rich Gannon was instrumental in forcing the usually precise Oakland quarterback into a Super Bowl record five interceptions.

  It had not taken Dungy long to find a job after the Bucs fired him. He had his choice of Carolina or Indianapolis, and who wouldn’t want to coach Peyton Manning? It was an easy decision. His first season with the Colts, however, ended miserably when they lost to the Jets 41–0. The Jets were coached by Herm Edwards, a former assistant to Dungy with the Bucs and one of his best friends. A few weeks later, it got even worse. Dungy was back home in Tampa on the night the Bucs were winning the Super Bowl in San Diego. As he drove back to his house after watching the game on television with friends, it was an emotional thirty minutes in the car. Fans were celebrating in the streets of Tampa as Dungy sat in traffic. None of the fans recognized him. Gruden won with Dungy’s players, but the former coach was yesterday’s news. The Glazers had taken his team away from him, and now they had won it all without him.

  He had put his heart into building the Bucs, made the community proud of the team, insisted that his players give back, but then missed out on the grand prize. “It was really bittersweet,” Dungy said. “Not to be there to see it to fruition; it was hard. It was disappointing for me, but I was happy for the city. I was happy for the guys because you remember the orange uniforms and 22,000 people in the stands, people saying you stink. There was a little bit of a hollow feeling; as proud as I was of those guys and what they had done, it was difficult not being there with them.”

  Four years and nine days later, it was Dungy who was about to lift the Vince Lombardi Trophy proudly over his head with Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, by his side. Dungy was thinking about his junior high school coaches, his high school coaches, the different teachers he’d had. He thought about Grambling’s Eddie Robinson and Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither and others who had coached in the historically black colleges and never were given the opportunity to coach in the NFL. “Lovie and I have been able to take advantage of the opportunity,” Dungy said after the game. “But we’re certainly not the best, certainly not the most qualified, and I know there’s some other guys who could have done it, given the chance. So I just feel good I was the first one to be able to do it and represent those guys that paved the way for me.”

  He thought about the route he had taken to be a head coach in the NFL after fifteen years as an assistant with the Steelers, Chiefs, and Vikings. And he thought about failing to get a head coaching job after interviewing with the Eagles twice, the Packers, and the Jaguars and getting fired by Tampa.

  Most of all, he was thinking about his father, Wilbur Dungy, who died in the summer of 2005. Wilbur was devoted to physical fitness and enjoyed bicycle riding and swimming but had been diagnosed with leukemia. He died at the age of seventy-eight. He missed by less than two years seeing his son reach the pinnacle of his profession. As he was standing on the podium with the massive amounts of confetti coming down along with all that rain, it turned out Wilbur Dungy was right after all.

  “Don’t worry about what’s wrong; look at what’s right and make it better,” Wilbur had always told his son.

  That was what Dungy thought to himself on the car ride home in Tampa the night the Bucs won the Super Bowl. It was how he kept calm after getting passed over for all those head coaching jobs. It was easy to doubt during those years that he would ever get his chance as a head coach or if that special moment hugging the trophy would ever come. But he didn’t let it consume him. He had his faith. He had his family. Everything else would fall into place. He had an inner peace and calmness that made the many teams that interviewed him wonder if his personality was strong enough to deal with so many diverse and powerful personalities in the locker room. He wasn’t a yeller or screamer. He didn’t curse. Like father, like son. “My dad was really just a quiet, quiet guy,” he said.

  Tony Dungy was just a really nice guy, maybe too nice to handle the knuckleheads in the locker room. One time, Dungy was complaining to his father about the lack of playing time his high school football coach was giving him, and his father told him about his days as a teacher in Arlington, Virginia. It was a lesson in the inequities in life. It was 1951, Wilbur Dungy’s first teaching job. This was four years before Tony was born, and Wilbur was at an all-black school because the schools were segregated and he wasn’t allowed to teach in the all-white school. Every day, Dungy and his students would walk past the all-white school on their way to class. “All I could do was make sure my kids knew as much as the students in the all-white school,” he told Tony. “Then, it was, what was I going to do to make the situation better?”

  Make it better, he told him, and don’t complain. His father told him that when he graduated from high school, he wanted to go into th
e service. “They wouldn’t let us fly the planes, didn’t want us to fly the planes, so we taught ourselves,” Wilbur Dungy said.

  He didn’t say it was because he was African American, but it was implied. “I knew the point he was making, but I never knew it until his funeral,” Dungy said. “One of his friends talked about my father being in the Tuskegee Airmen. It was an all-black kind of air force regiment. It was segregated. It was a very decorated group, but it was still segregated at the time. But I had no idea he was even involved in it. I just kind of got the message: Don’t complain. Make the situation better.”

  Dungy always tried to make the situation better for his own children as he worked to survive in a competitive business. He never slept in his office. He drove his kids to school in the morning. He never bought into the idea that extra hours bring better results even though he was aware that his peers were picking up frequent-stay awards for sleeping in their offices. Beds pulled out from the wall. Air mattresses. Sleeper sofas. Dungy slept in his own bed every night. He encouraged his assistants to spend quality time with their families. He learned how to do it the right way playing and coaching for Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll, the only coach to win four Super Bowls. Gruden was well known for showing up at his desk hours before the sun came up.

  “I felt that we could start work at 8:15 or 8:30 and get done what we needed to do,” Dungy said. “I was very fortunate I was ten years with Coach Noll: two as a player and eight working for him. I saw you can win and be very successful and still have outside interests. He was a tremendous family person. He had his nephew and son working in training camp, and that made a big impression on me. Then I worked the last four before I got a head coaching job working for Denny Green, and he was the same way.”