Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  He told his coaches on that jog that Walker had to go. “The way this process is, number one, you build your team through the draft, and I understand that. But that’s a long process the way the system is now. And we’re the worst team in the league, by far. We were the worst team before I got there, and we were the worst team my first year,” Johnson said.

  Here is what he told his coaches: “We’ve got to look for a way to speed up the process. Only way you could speed up the process is to get more picks. And the only thing we’ve got that anybody wants is Herschel Walker. Nobody wants any of our other players. What are your thoughts about trading Herschel Walker?”

  Johnson’s coaches were shocked. Was he nuts? Walker was all the Cowboys had going for them.

  “The defensive coaches, they were lukewarm. Our offensive coaches were vehemently against it. They said, ‘Hey, we won’t score a point if we don’t have Herschel,’ ” Johnson said. “David Shula and Jerry Rhome, they were all against it. They said no way, don’t trade him. But I told them there was no way we can improve our football team two years down the road just by going through the draft. I said I’ve got to do something to speed up the process.”

  Fortunately for Johnson, two teams were interested. Browns general manager Ernie Accorsi would set the market, and Johnson planned to use Cleveland’s interest to drive up the price on Vikings general manager Mike Lynn, who had casually mentioned being interested in Walker over the summer. Johnson had dismissed it at the time, saying Walker was his only Pro Bowl player. Now, with the regular season having arrived, he realized that dealing Walker would be taking a step back in the short term but could lead to big long-term gains.

  Johnson would go on to win Super Bowls in his fourth season and fifth and final season with the Cowboys, and if he hadn’t pulled off the deal of the century with the Vikings that fast tracked the Cowboys’ ability to compete for a championship by at least three years, he said, “I’d have found a way. I’d have done something.”

  Landry planned to draft Aikman first overall in 1989, but there is no way he ever would have approved trading Walker. He loved Walker’s skill set, admired him as a person, and considered him the foundation of the Cowboys’ future. Johnson turned him into the draft picks that became the Cowboys’ foundation.

  The Walker trade turned out to be the most lopsided trade in NFL history. How did it happen?

  “It actually came about when Ernie Accorsi called me. They wanted Herschel Walker,” Johnson said. “They felt like that was the missing piece for them. I just told them what I wanted. I wanted three ones, three twos, and three threes. He said that’s awful steep. He was our only Pro Bowl player on a horrible team.”

  Accorsi was the general manager in Baltimore in 1983 when the Colts drafted John Elway even though Elway said he would never play for them. Accorsi fielded numerous trade offers before the draft but turned them all down. He was a big believer that you always take the franchise quarterback. One week after the draft, Colts owner Robert Irsay traded Elway to the Broncos behind Accorsi’s back. Throughout his front office career, Accorsi was always enamored with big names.

  Johnson was now intent on dealing Walker and continued to negotiate with Accorsi. “They didn’t have a one the next year,” Johnson said. “They had an outside linebacker that they had drafted from Florida, Clifford Charlton. What they would do is they would give us him and a one the following year and a one the following year and then the twos and threes. I said let me give that some thought. I said I think we could probably pull the trigger on it, so let’s talk tonight. He said I got to get Art Modell to talk to you before it’s a finalized deal anyway. He said let me have Art call you tonight. I said fine.”

  Johnson felt he had the parameters for a trade that he could now shop around the league. He went to Jones, and they elected to see if they could do better. Jones called Falcons owner Rankin Smith. Walker had played at Georgia and was still a big name in Atlanta. Walker would help sell tickets. Johnson called Lynn, who had reached out in the preseason about Walker. The October 17 trade deadline was one week away. The Cowboys were 0–5, and the only intrigue left was whether they would be the first 0–16 team in NFL history. That honor eventually went to the Detroit Lions in 2008. The Vikings were 3–2 but felt Walker would make them instant Super Bowl contenders.

  Johnson got on the phone with Lynn. He put a 6:30 p.m. deadline on Lynn to top Cleveland’s offer.

  “Here’s what I’ve got on the table. If you can get something better, maybe we can pull this thing off,” Johnson told Lynn.

  He outlined the Browns’ proposal. “Well, when I got in from practice, he had faxed me his proposal,” Johnson said. “His thinking was, he was going to unload some players who were better than anything we had, but a couple of them were injured, a couple of them were toward the end of their career. They were expendable for the Vikings, but again, they were better than anything we had.

  “He said we would tie a draft pick to each player, and if I kept the player, I wouldn’t get the pick. But if I cut the player or released him, then I’d get the pick. Well, when I looked at it, I could see that as the year would go on, if I didn’t fall in love with these players, I could get the picks and I could have leverage on him to keep the player and the pick.”

  Lynn offered his first-round pick in the 1992 draft and linebackers Jesse Solomon and David Howard, cornerback Isaac Holt, running back Darrin Nelson, defensive end Alex Stewart, and six conditional draft picks. Each of the picks was tied to one of the players Minnesota traded to Dallas. The players could help Johnson during the 1989 season, and then he would decide between the player and the draft pick. It sounded like a game show.

  Solomon was attached to the Vikings’ first-round pick in 1990. If he was on the roster on February 1, the Vikings would keep the pick. If Johnson cut him, Dallas would get the pick. Howard was attached to a 1991 first-round pick, Holt to a second- and a third-round pick in 1992, Nelson to a second-round pick in 1991, and Stewart to a second-round pick in 1990.

  Johnson liked the Vikings’ offer better than Cleveland’s. He called Accorsi after getting the Minnesota proposal and told him he was making the trade with the Vikings. The deciding factor was Cleveland not having a first-round pick in 1990. “That was an important pick for us,” Johnson said.

  He called Lynn and told him they had a deal. Johnson knew from the moment Lynn made the proposal that he would release all the Vikings’ players and take all the draft picks. There was no reason to tell Lynn.

  “If I cut them all, he would get nothing and I’d just get all these picks,” Johnson said. “So I didn’t say anything about it, but I knew what I was going to do. For that reason, even though the players were the best players we had, like David Howard and Jesse Solomon, I wouldn’t let our defensive coaches start them because if they started for us, the fans would fall in love with them, our coaches would fall in love with them, and I wouldn’t be able to pull off the deal. So I told them they have to be second teamers, so don’t put them in until the second quarter even though they are our best players.”

  Lynn visited Walker’s home in Dallas to ease any concerns he had about coming to Minnesota. The Cowboys kicked in $1.25 million as a going-away present. “I’m out of here, but I got a lot of good memories,” Walker said as he was packing his bags in the Cowboys’ locker room.

  The Vikings had nine Pro Bowl players in 1988, and they judged Walker to be the piece to put them over the top. “When I went to Herschel’s house in Dallas, I told him if we don’t win the Super Bowl in the next two years, this deal has failed,” Lynn told the Boston Globe a few days after the trade. “This was all done to win a Super Bowl. Our coaches told me this is what we needed, a back that could really produce, so that’s what we got for them.”

  As part of the trade agreement, the Vikings could not sign any of the players they traded to Dallas if Johnson released them, and Dallas would not receive the corresponding Vikings draft choices if it traded one of the playe
rs. When Nelson refused to report, Johnson wanted to trade him. The Chargers were offering a fifth-round pick. Johnson was not going to trade Nelson and forfeit the second-round pick he was attached to in the trade. Cutting Nelson would not benefit the Vikings, either, because they couldn’t sign him. Johnson had Lynn backed into a corner. In exchange for Minnesota waiving the no-trade agreement regarding Nelson, San Diego’s fifth-round pick was sent to the Vikings. In return, the Vikings sent their sixth-round pick to Dallas. The Cowboys still received the second-round pick for Nelson. The Walker trade just kept getting better. Johnson thus squeezed another draft pick out of the deal for a player he had no intention of keeping.

  Walker got off to a fast start for the Vikings, rushing for 148 yards on 18 carries in his debut against Green Bay at home. On his first rushing attempt late in the first quarter, he ran for 47 yards. Minnesota defeated the Packers. Lynn was looking good. That turned out to be the highlight of Walker’s season and his short Vikings career. He rushed for just 669 yards in eleven games in 1989. The Vikings finished 10–6 and won the NFC Central in a tiebreaker over the Packers, giving them a bye in the first round of the playoffs. But they lost in the divisional round to the 49ers. Walker obviously was not all that was missing in the Super Bowl puzzle for Minnesota.

  Dallas finished the season with one victory. If Johnson had not taken Walsh in the supplemental draft, he would have owned the first pick in the 1990 draft and could have drafted Southern Cal linebacker Junior Seau or defensive tackle Cortez Kennedy, who had played for Johnson at the University of Miami. But he wasn’t complaining. He soon would trade Walsh to the Saints for three premium picks, and he had the incredible haul from the Walker trade. Lynn was counting on the Cowboys keeping the players, but the reason Johnson traded Walker was to speed up the rebuilding process through the draft. He liked the Vikings players, but not enough to keep them instead of the picks he would receive by cutting them.

  “At the end of the year, I told Mike, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get anything; let me give you a couple of late picks and let us keep these players,’ ” Johnson said. “He said they were just getting beat up for the trade already and he said, ‘Jimmy, I’m getting just killed up here.’ He said, ‘I can’t do it. You just got to keep the players.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to keep the players.’ So he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and I sent a certified letter to him and the commissioner, saying all these players were released as of this date and the only person that could stop that release of those players was Mike Lynn of the Minnesota Vikings. It was right at the end of the season.

  “After I sent the certified letter to the commissioner and to him, Mike called me; he said, ‘just help me out,’ ” Johnson said.

  Johnson had cut Stewart in November but now had Lynn in a bind once again. If he released the players, Lynn would lose all the draft picks. Johnson gave him a chance to save face, but barely. One month after the season, Johnson and Lynn came to an agreement: Dallas sent its third-round picks in 1990 and 1991 and its tenth-round pick in 1990 to the Vikings and kept Solomon, Howard, and Holt and all the conditional picks from the original trade.

  Advantage: Dallas

  Big advantage: Dallas

  “I thought of the players that we sent them; they would keep a number of those players,” Lynn, who died in July 2012, once told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “So I thought the number of draft choices would not be as great as it was.”

  The Vikings finished just 6–10 in 1990 and 8–8 in 1991. Walker rushed for 770 yards in his first full season in Minnesota and 825 yards in 1991. The 1,595 yards was barely more than he’d had in 1988 for a very bad Cowboys team. Incredibly, the Vikings cut Walker in May 1992, less than three full years after making the worst trade in NFL history. They were 21–22 with him. Lynn lost his power in Minnesota on January 1, 1991, when Roger Headrick became the team’s president and CEO.

  On the twenty-year anniversary of the trade, Lynn told the Star Tribune that he had “no regrets” about making the Walker deal. “I did what I thought was the right thing at the time,” he said. He still hadn’t figured out why the trade went so badly for the Vikings. “It’s been a mystery to me all along what happened,” he said. “All that we lacked on that team was a big back. Herschel was the best big back in the league. He gained 1,500 yards the previous year. He was in marvelous shape when he got here. It would have worked out.” He went on to say, “Everybody sure thought it was a great trade that day. But something happened. I don’t know what it was, but whatever he had, he didn’t have it any longer. It was like a great horse not having it. Just gone overnight or in a week.”

  After he was released by the Vikings, Walker signed with the Eagles and rushed for 1,070 yards in his first season in Philadelphia. He played three years with the Eagles and then spent one year with the Giants before returning to finish his career with the Cowboys in 1996 and 1997. By then, Johnson was no longer with the Cowboys. He had only sixteen carries in those two years; his primary job was returning kickoffs.

  Were the Vikings better off without Walker? They were 11–5 and won the NFC Central in 1992. Terry Allen took over at running back and rushed for 1,201 yards. He was a ninth-round draft pick in 1991 who rushed for 563 yards backing up Walker in his rookie year.

  All those picks burned a hole in Johnson’s pocket. He turned the Walker trade into a cottage industry, making fourteen trades with the assets he’d picked up from Minnesota. In some form, almost sixty players were affected by the Walker trade. It usually takes a few years to evaluate a trade fully. Because the Vikings didn’t even have Walker for three full seasons—that still seems unimaginable considering how much they gave up to get him—the trade was completely lopsided.

  By the ’92 season, all the Vikings had left to show for the deal was wide receiver Jake Reed. The Cowboys had running back Emmitt Smith, safety Darren Woodson, defensive tackle Russell Maryland, wide receiver and cornerback Kevin Smith, and cornerback Clayton Holmes. Johnson used picks from the Vikings to maneuver into position to draft those players. He traded every one of the Vikings’ picks to move up or move down. Smith, of course, was the biggest addition. Johnson, who didn’t have his own number one in 1990, used the Vikings’ pick, the twenty-first overall, in a trade to move up four spots to the Steelers’ slot at number seventeen to take Smith, who retired as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher.

  “There’s no way that you could actually say here’s what we got for those players for Herschel because I made half a dozen other trades with those picks that I got,” Johnson said.

  By 1991, the Cowboys were in the playoffs. The next year they won their first Super Bowl since the 1977 season. And then they repeated in 1993, Johnson’s fifth year in Dallas. Johnson and Jones had built a minidynasty. Despite major free agent losses, the Cowboys were incredibly deep and young with Aikman, Smith, and Irvin—the Triplets—along with Woodson and a defense that was fast and quick. All Jones and Johnson had to do was keep the core intact and happy and they might have won another two or three Super Bowls in a row. They were that good. They were that much better than anybody else. As it turned out, the most unhappy person was Johnson.

  Dallas wasn’t big enough for Johnson and Jones to coexist after they had all that success. There wasn’t enough credit to satisfy both of their Super Bowl–size egos. At the league meetings in Orlando in March 1994, Jones minimized Johnson’s contributions, claiming that “five hundred coaches” could have won those Super Bowls with the Cowboys’ talent. Of course, it was Johnson, not Jones, who had accumulated all that talent. He was talking at 3 a.m. in a hotel bar and might have been better off going to bed. He revealed in that chat with two reporters from the Dallas Morning News that he was thinking about firing Johnson and hiring Barry Switzer, the former Oklahoma coach. Earlier in the evening, Jones felt he was snubbed by Johnson at a league party. No rich man likes to be shown up by one of his employees.

  Considering that at that point only Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, an
d Chuck Noll (twice) had repeated as Super Bowl champions, it appeared that Jones was letting his heart do the speaking instead of his head do the thinking. Just five years earlier, he had declared that Johnson was worth more than five first-round picks and five Heisman Trophy winners, and now, after Johnson had helped resurrect a dormant franchise and put a lot of money in Jones’s pocket, all of a sudden five hundred coaches could have done the same thing. Once again, he had made a ridiculous statement.

  Obviously, when Jones’s comments were relayed to Johnson in the morning, his well-coiffed hair started doing backflips. He stormed out of the meetings in Orlando, got in his car, and headed south to his home in Tavernier in the Florida Keys. One week later, he demanded that Jones settle the final five years of his ten-year contract and walked away with a check for $2 million. Jones hired Switzer just as he’d promised. Johnson gave up the chance to be the first coach to win three consecutive Super Bowls.

  That summer, Johnson was sitting on his boat docked 30 feet from his back door loving life. The sun was shining, the wave runners were humming, and the fish were sure to be biting. The Heinekens were cold.

  He was stung by Jones’s words four months earlier. How could he possibly think five hundred coaches could have done what he did? Take over a 1–15 team and win the Super Bowl in his fourth and fifth years? Make the greatest trade in NFL history by dealing off his only star player? Was he kidding?

  “I really feel like I had accomplished a tremendous amount in five years. I was very proud of it. To be sloughed off like I was, it hurt,” Johnson said that day. “Just tossing out that he could hire anybody to coach this team to win the Super Bowl bothered me. It bothered my ego. I put together a team that won two Super Bowls. Evidently, he doesn’t appreciate that. What else could I do for the guy?