Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  “God, it was a slam dunk as far as I was concerned,” Reeves said.

  Reeves had spoken to the Colts before the draft, but the asking price was much too high. Kaiser once tried to buy the Colts franchise from Irsay, and he had a relationship with him. The Broncos knew the Colts were interested in Hinton before the draft, and so it helped that they drafted him. Kaiser stayed in touch with Irsay after the draft and then called Reeves when he had the parameters worked out.

  “You got a pencil?” Kaiser said.

  He gave Reeves the terms.

  “I would do that in a heartbeat,” Reeves said.

  Elway was traded to Denver. Accorsi quit after the 1983 season and was hired by Art Modell in Cleveland in 1985 as the Browns’ general manager. The Mayflower trucks showed up at the Colts’ offices at 2 a.m. on March 29, 1984, and the Colts were off to Indianapolis.

  The Elway deal never stopped haunting Accorsi. Elway prevented Accorsi’s Browns from getting to the Super Bowl with victories in the AFC championship game after the 1986, 1987, and 1989 seasons. The football gods made it up to Accorsi in 2004 when Eli Manning refused to play for the Chargers, who had the first pick, and traded him to the Giants, whose general manager at the time was Accorsi. Even though Accorsi retired one year before Manning won the first of his Super Bowl titles, he was the architect of the trade that brought Peyton’s little brother to New York. Here’s the irony: when Elway was hired to run the Broncos, he reached out to Accorsi to help him as a consultant.

  Shanahan’s career path changed once he teamed up with Elway in 1984. Elway had a difficult rookie year and needed a mentor. Reeves named Elway the starter for the 1983 season opener in Pittsburgh, and it looked like it was the first time he’d ever stepped on a football field. He had played so well in the preseason, but the defenses he saw in the practice games were just the appetizer. The Steelers served up a five-course dinner at Three Rivers Stadium and had Elway thoroughly confused. He threw for 14 yards and was sacked four times.

  “I remember it didn’t last very long because I got benched at halftime. I was one for eight with a pick,” Elway said. “I wanted to click my heels together, and say, ‘Auntie Em, bring me home. You can have your signing bonus back; I don’t want to stare at Jack Lambert spitting and drooling at me anymore. What the hell have I gotten myself into?’ ”

  It was the days before the NFL introduced radio helmets that allow the coach to communicate with the quarterback from the sidelines to send in the plays. Elway received the plays by hand signal or messenger. “He was just lucky to get a play off, much less look over and anticipate what the defense might do,” Reeves said.

  Even though Elway showed only flashes of greatness his rookie year and was benched for a stretch in the middle of the season, the Broncos made the playoffs as a wild-card team with him as the starter. “By then, you knew you had something special,” Reeves said. “He was unbelievable.”

  Shanahan struck gold in getting this job. It would be the starting point on his journey to being a head coach. He had spent nine years in college football and considered it a dream come true to work with Elway. They became close friends. They played a lot of golf together. Shanahan introduced Elway to lifting weights for the first time in his life. His father never had him lift weights in the football off-season because it would interfere with baseball. “He started off in the weight room as a complete novice,” Shanahan said.

  Elway worked under the guidance of the Broncos’ conditioning coach, but Shanahan was constantly by his side. They started to build a relationship. Elway trusted Shanahan, and Shanahan became the buffer between Elway and Reeves. “He knew I was going to work him hard and do everything I could to make him better,” Shanahan said. “He knew I cared about him, and he was willing to do the little things the right way.”

  As Elway’s career took off, so did Shanahan’s. After the second of the Broncos’ three Super Bowl losses, Shanahan was offered the Los Angeles Raiders’ head coaching job by Al Davis in 1988. Davis rarely went outside the organization for key management hires. This certified Shanahan as special. He lasted four games into his second season before Davis fired him. He coached only twenty games for the Raiders and won eight. Davis didn’t give him much of a chance. “I think the first time I knew it wasn’t going to work is when he would come to practice and he would substitute guys,” Shanahan said. “He would come out and say, ‘You guys don’t have to practice.’ He took them out of a drill. That’s when I knew, OK, I won’t last long here. It was early—like the first five or six days of summer camp.”

  As soon as Davis fired Shanahan early in the 1989 season, Reeves offered him the opportunity to come back to Denver to work with Elway again. He left the Raiders on bad terms—to the day Davis died in 2011, Shanahan claimed he still owed him money—and returning to Denver gave Shanahan an opportunity to restore his reputation and get some measure of revenge against Davis in the AFC West. The Broncos made it back to the Super Bowl in the season Shanahan returned but again were not competitive, losing 55–10 to the 49ers, the largest losing margin in Super Bowl history.

  Shanahan’s relationship with Reeves had begun to deteriorate. Reeves felt Shanahan and Elway were scheming behind his back and tinkering with the game plan and suspected that too much of what was being said in staff meetings was being relayed to Elway through Shanahan. Newspaper stories detailing Elway’s dislike for Reeves caught Reeves by surprise, and he believed Shanahan knew but didn’t tell him. He felt Shanahan’s loyalty should have been to him, not to Elway. Shanahan was incredulous that Reeves claimed to be oblivious to what seemed obvious: his quarterback despised him.

  After the 1991 season, Reeves fired Shanahan, citing “insubordination.”

  Reeves admitted he had no proof. Shanahan was stunned that Reeves questioned his integrity. “I got tired of hearing about it,” Shanahan said. “I thought I was close to Dan. I was probably Dan’s best friend. We played golf together. We did all those things. I am the one that got Dan and John together when they were having the problem. I said, ‘Hey, you don’t like him, he doesn’t like you. You are two grown men; let’s try to solve this problem.’ I was kind of the buffer. When you are the buffer as an assistant coach, especially as a coordinator, it doesn’t always work out well between the head coach and the coordinator.”

  The years have not softened the hard feelings. “I’ve been fired a few times, and it’s hard for me to have the same feeling for people who fired me, and I fired him,” Reeves said. “That’s never going to change.”

  Shanahan had been fired by Davis, then fired by Reeves. He needed a gentle landing spot. Mike Holmgren had just accepted the job as the Packers’ head coach, and so his job as the 49ers’ offensive coordinator was open. Montana was still recovering from elbow surgery, but Steve Young was establishing himself as one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. The 49ers were going to be a Super Bowl contender in 1992, and Shanahan knew the 49ers were a classy organization that did things the right way. After his experience with Davis and then having his relationship with Reeves blow up over Elway, he needed less drama and more football. George Seifert offered him the job. San Francisco was the perfect place at the perfect time.

  His departure meant that Reeves and Elway were left to settle their problems on their own. In Shanahan’s last season as an assistant in Denver, the Broncos were 12–4 and lost to the Bills in the AFC championship game. They dropped to 8–8 in 1992 and didn’t make the playoffs. Broncos owner Pat Bowlen stunned Reeves by firing him. He had been there twelve seasons and had gone to three Super Bowls but had a lousy relationship with the franchise quarterback—he once was rumored to have considered trading him to the Redskins—and angered him even further when he selected twenty-year-old UCLA quarterback Tommy Maddox in the first round of what turned out to be his final draft in Denver.

  In Shanahan’s first season in San Francisco, Young was voted the most valuable player in the NFL and the 49ers went to the NFC championship game, where they we
re upset by the Cowboys at Candlestick Park. Shanahan had hardly settled into the Bay Area when Bowlen called. He had fired Reeves and wanted Shanahan to return to Denver as the head coach. Finally, Shanahan could work with Elway without having Reeves’s paranoia get in the way. Bowlen and Shanahan had an excellent relationship. Shanahan and Elway were close, probably too close for a player and a coach, but it was better than the alternative of not talking.

  There was a problem. Shanahan didn’t want the job. Not yet, anyway. He was bitter about the way things had ended for him with Reeves. He didn’t like the perception that he’d undermined the head coach. He didn’t share Bowlen’s belief that the Broncos were close to winning a Super Bowl. He wasn’t happy with the budget Bowlen had given him for assistant coaches. Plus, he had just gotten to San Francisco and wasn’t ready to pack up. He felt he had made more than a one-year commitment to the 49ers.

  He rejected Bowlen’s offer. Bowlen then promoted defensive coordinator Wade Phillips. Shanahan didn’t want anybody saying he was targeting Reeves’s job all along. “I got so tired of listening to that crap,” Shanahan said. “I just didn’t like what went on with Dan, the rumors about me wanting to come back and my relationship with John. I didn’t feel comfortable going back.”

  Elway was angry. How could Shanahan do this to him? He was finally free of Reeves and thought his good friend was on his way back to Denver. It wasn’t easy for Shanahan to break the news to Elway. He felt he couldn’t give Elway the real reason he was staying in San Francisco—he was still bitter. He didn’t think it would be fair to the organization. So he made something up. “This is an interesting story,” Shanahan said. “I never really told this story to anybody.”

  He leaned back in his chair in the head coach’s office at Redskins Park—he was hired by Washington in 2010—and relayed the conversation he’d had with Elway.

  “Hey, John,” Shanahan said.

  “Why aren’t you coming?” Elway said.

  “John, it’s a little bit financial, and they are not willing to make that commitment,” Shanahan said.

  “Well, what is it?” Elway said.

  “I don’t want to go down there,” Shanahan said.

  “No, I want to know what it is,” Elway said.

  Shanahan lied. He told Elway that Bowlen’s financial package was insufficient and he wanted a couple more courtesy cars than Bowlen was offering.

  “We’re probably $300,000 off on the total package,” Shanahan said.

  “How many years?” Elway said.

  “Three or four years,” Shanahan said.

  “That’s no problem. I will take care of that,” Elway said.

  Elway was prepared to write a $300,000 check to Mike Shanahan.

  Twenty years later, as the executive vice president of football operations for the Broncos, Elway remembers trying to buy Shanahan’s way back to Denver by offering to pay the difference between Bowlen’s offer and what Shanahan said he wanted. “When he turned that down, I knew it was something else,” Elway said.

  Elway could afford the $300,000. He was about to sign a four-year $20 million contract. But paying part of the salary of the head coach not only would have been unprecedented, it would have caused friction in the locker room when his teammates found out. And they would find out. “He was going to pay me out of his salary what I was short,” Shanahan said. “That kind of gave you an idea how much he wanted to win. I had totally made up the financial stuff, thinking he would back off. He said, ‘No, no, I’ll take care of that. I got enough money. Money is done. Car is done.’ He didn’t blink.”

  Elway was not concerned about any backlash in the locker room. “That’s how much I believed in him at the time. I thought he was the right guy,” he said. “I was running out of time. That was my eleventh year. I wasn’t a young buck at the time. I wasn’t too concerned as long as we went out and won, which I thought we would do. My selfish feeling is I wanted him to come back. I was in a little bit more of a hurry than he was.”

  Elway was so upset that he didn’t talk to Shanahan for an entire year. “He was mad at me for obvious reasons,” Shanahan said. “We were very close friends. I had a chance to come back to be the head coach and didn’t.”

  Phillips lasted just two seasons with the Broncos. By that time, the 49ers had lost another NFC championship game to the Cowboys, but then they beat them in 1994 in the title game and went on to win the Super Bowl with a lopsided victory over the San Diego Chargers. This time when Bowlen called, enough time had passed and Shanahan accepted. But things didn’t get better right away. The Broncos were 8–8 in 1995 and missed the playoffs and were the AFC’s number one seed with a 13–3 record in 1996 but lost in the divisional round to the Jacksonville Jaguars, a second-year expansion team. Maybe it wasn’t Reeves’s fault. Maybe it was Elway.

  Maybe not.

  Elway ended his career in style by winning the Super Bowl the next two years, his final two years in the NFL. He beat the heavily favored Packers and Brett Favre after the 1997 season when he was the sentimental favorite. When he stood on the podium with Bowlen and Shanahan after the game, Bowlen held up the Vince Lombardi Trophy and declared, “This one’s for John.”

  The Broncos won their first fourteen games in 1998 and made it back to the Super Bowl, this time against the Falcons, who were now coached by Reeves. He had lasted four seasons in New York, had been fired, and was hired by the Falcons in a homecoming—he was born in Rome, Georgia, and grew up in Americus, Georgia—and had the Falcons in the Super Bowl in his second season against Elway and Shanahan. That was when a lot of the old wounds from the Denver days were pried open.

  “I don’t think (Shanahan) had my best interest in mind at the time,” Reeves said. “If John Elway had a problem with me, and you’re coaching that position, why did I not know prior to reading it in the paper? If you were the position coach and you’re that close to the quarterback, why didn’t I know that?”

  Shanahan insists Reeves already knew that Elway had no use for him and didn’t need Shanahan to tell him. “Dan Reeves knew his relationship with John,” he said. “There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about that. They know it was a tough relationship from the second year, from the first year.”

  The Broncos beat the Falcons, and months later Elway retired. Shanahan lasted another ten years in Denver and was fired by Bowlen after missing the playoffs three straight seasons. He sat out one year, the 2009 season, and then was hired by the Redskins. Reeves was fired by the Falcons with three games remaining in the 2003 season. Elway and Shanahan see each other occasionally, primarily at league meetings, and Reeves and Elway have decided life is too short to stay mad at each other.

  “You lose three Super Bowls, and the two people who get blamed are the head coach and the quarterback. That will certainly strain anybody’s relationship. Believe me, I had the utmost respect for John,” Reeves said. “People talk about I tried to trade him. That’s the biggest lie in the world. The only time it was ever mentioned was Joe Gibbs called me and asked what it would take to get John Elway. That was right after Wayne Gretzky was traded. That was an unbelievable deal they made. I said it’s going to have to be something like that. And it isn’t going to be me. It’s going to have to be through the owner. I would never have traded John Elway. Hell, they would have run me out of Denver. No way.”

  When Elway was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2004, he invited Reeves to attend the weekend in Canton. Reeves accepted and sat next to Elway’s mother at the ceremony. “It never crossed my mind not to invite him,” Elway said. “Time heals everything. There are absolutely no ill feelings on my part toward Dan.”

  Their relationship had come full circle. “I was thrilled, to say the least,” Reeves said.

  Reeves had a contentious relationship with Elway in the decade during which he coached him. It wasn’t until Elway wasn’t playing anymore and Reeves was no longer coaching that they finally found common ground. They still managed to get to three Super Bo
wls together. Maybe instead of losing all three, they could have won a Super Bowl ring or two if they had just gotten along.

  In 2011, John Fox enjoyed Tebow Mania while it lasted, which wasn’t very long. The Broncos thought Tim Tebow was a great person and Elway even said he was the kind of guy you want your daughter to marry, but he clearly wasn’t a quarterback Fox and Elway thought could win a Super Bowl. Tebow became the most popular player in the NFL during his incredible playoff run, but when the Colts cut Peyton Manning the next March, the Broncos jumped right into the cross-country chase. Eventually, Manning chose the Broncos over the 49ers and Titans, and then Denver immediately traded Tebow to the Jets.

  This is a cold business that is based strictly on results. Tebow won enough games for the Broncos in 2011 to deserve a chance to build on that success, and Fox was planning for him to be his starting quarterback in 2012. But the Broncos couldn’t push him out the door fast enough once Manning became available. He was the most popular player on the team, but it was just business. “They went a way that they thought was best for the organization. I’ll never blame them for that,” Tebow said. “There’s no ill will toward the Broncos, Peyton Manning, or anybody. I wish them nothing but the best.”

  Manning missed the entire 2011 season after starting every game in the first thirteen years of his career. He had four surgical procedures on his neck in a two-year period. From a football standpoint, it was worth the gamble for the Broncos. They were getting Peyton Manning, a future Hall of Famer. They elected to trade Tebow not so much because it would have required them to reinstall the unconventional Read Option offense for the unconventional Tebow if Manning was injured but because Tebow was such a fan favorite and it was not worth taking the chance that the fans would turn on Manning and demand Tebow if Manning got off to a slow start.