Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Parcells angrily denied that he had turned a blind eye toward Taylor’s behavior. Either way, even in his diminished state, Taylor performed at a once-in-a-generation level and proved to be among the smartest, most instinctive players Belichick had ever seen. LT had a knack for identifying the critical plays in a game that demanded he find his superhuman gear. “Some guys,” Belichick would say, “you look at those plays and you kind of say, ‘C’mon, this is the biggest play of the game,’ and that’s not his best play. I don’t think I ever said that about Taylor.”

  Belichick motivated Taylor by pumping up pass rushers on other teams, or by praising the one player—running back George Rogers—who was taken ahead of him in the draft. Fully established as one of the finest coordinators in the league, and a potential head coach, Little Bill wasn’t afraid of conflict with anyone, Parcells included. He even teamed with Parcells once to dress down Giants linebackers coach Al Groh. According to Parcells’s good friend and former high school basketball coach Mickey Corcoran, Belichick noticed in one practice, which Corcoran attended, that Groh was letting a player coast through a drill.

  “Belichick said, ‘Look at this goddamn asshole farting around,’” Corcoran recalled. “He got all over the guy. It was Al Groh, a good coach. He pissed off both Belichick and Parcells, and Belichick noticed he wasn’t coaching a guy the right way and he told Parcells. They were both pissed. Parcells started screaming at Groh, too.”

  Little Bill started flexing some Big Bill muscle. In 1989, after Landeta met Jon Bon Jovi at the China Club, in New York, the punter invited the diehard Giants fan to practice, and drive to Giants practice in his Ferrari the rocker did. Bon Jovi became close friends with Belichick, who one day saw four men he didn’t recognize—including two invited interns from the New Jersey Nets—standing near Bon Jovi at practice.

  “Suddenly Belichick comes over and looks at the other guys and says, ‘Who the fuck are you?’” recalled one of the Nets interns, Brian Walker. “They didn’t have much of an answer, and Belichick told them, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ Then he turns to us and asks the same question. We showed him our credentials and he allowed us to stay.”

  Whether or not George Young saw it, Belichick was starting to take on the personality of a head coach. But before he became one, Little Bill would vie for a title against the first NFL head coach to give him a job.

  The Giants had just beaten the two-time defending champion 49ers for the 1990 NFC championship without scoring a single touchdown. They had eliminated the dynastic duo, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, with Matt Bahr kicking his fifth field goal on the final play, a week after he’d suffered a severe concussion on a tackle against the Chicago Bears.

  They had just booked a trip to the Super Bowl with a backup quarterback, Jeff Hostetler, who had taken over after Phil Simms broke his foot in the 14th game of the season, against the team the Giants were now about to face, the Buffalo Bills. And they didn’t want to leave their Candlestick Park locker room.

  “We didn’t want it to end,” Steve DeOssie said. “There was more hugging and intensity in that locker room than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  DeOssie had snapped the ball on the winning kick, and had shouted at his delirious teammates to avoid hitting Bahr in the head in the celebration. After the ball passed by the left upright, and after Belichick and Parcells jumped into each other’s arms, former Giants kicker Pat Summerall told his CBS audience, “There will be no three-peat.” The Giants boarded their buses and headed to the airport for a trip to Tampa, site of the Super Bowl.

  Nearly everyone described it as the most joyful flight of their lives. Players danced to blaring music in the aisle of the plane, players and coaches were drinking, and Parcells—his shirt unbuttoned at the top and his tie knot hanging loose—looked into a camera and said, “Happy New Year’s, guys. We’re going to the show.”

  Belichick had played a 3-4 defense with split-safety coverage against the 49ers a week after switching to a four-man front against the Bears, and suddenly he needed to come up with something entirely different for a Buffalo Bills offense that looked unstoppable. After the Giants’ plane landed in the predawn hours in Tampa, Belichick immediately went to work on his most unconventional plan yet. Just as they had been against San Francisco, the Giants were big underdogs against Buffalo. The Bills had led the league in scoring during the regular season, with 428 points, and they’d scored 95 in their first two postseason games, destroying the Los Angeles Raiders in the AFC title game, 51–3. They had future Hall of Famers at quarterback (Jim Kelly), running back (Thurman Thomas), and receiver (Andre Reed and James Lofton). They also had at the controls of their no-huddling K-Gun offense the man who’d decided in 1975 that a 23-year-old Wesleyan grad was worthy of a job with the Baltimore Colts: Ted Marchibroda.

  “I am really happy for Billy,” said Buffalo’s offensive coordinator. “I just wish I didn’t have to coach against him from the other side.”

  Belichick said that he thought often of Marchibroda in the days before the Super Bowl, and that he knew Marchibroda thought often about him. Little Bill had learned so much about the league from the coach, and he’d also learned a ton about the coach himself. He remembered that his first boss had Bert Jones call his own plays in Baltimore, and figured he’d have Kelly do the same in Tampa. According to author David Halberstam, Belichick didn’t believe Kelly was among the league’s best quarterbacks at reading defenses and seeing through disguises used to make one look like another. And since Belichick was already one of the sport’s preeminent tweakers and adjusters, a coordinator who changed his alignments almost on a weekly basis, this appeared to be a critical mismatch in the Giants’ favor.

  The Giants led the league in fewest points allowed. (Belichick always judged a defense on points allowed, turnovers forced, and yards allowed, in that order.) Little Bill’s unit had held the Bills to 65 rushing yards on 24 carries and a reasonable 212 yards in the air in Buffalo’s 17–13 victory at Giants Stadium in December (though Kelly had left that game in the second quarter with a knee injury).

  Belichick knew the Giants could contain the Bills and make this fast-breaking team play the Giants’ half-court game, if he could persuade his proud men to embrace what would seem on the surface to be an emasculating scheme. Belichick told his unit that if it allowed Thomas to gain 100 yards or more rushing, the Giants would end up as Super Bowl champs. Pepper Johnson heard his coordinator say it this way: “I will quit this business if Thurman Thomas runs for over 100 yards and we lose.”

  Belichick was delivering this edict to the same defense that had surrendered 100-yard games to only two running backs in the past two years. “Guys like LT, Carl Banks, Leonard Marshall—that pissed them off,” defensive back Everson Walls said. “They were like ‘What? Hold up, Bill. We’re not going to let these guys punk us.’”

  Players all over the room were shaking their heads and shooting incredulous looks at one another. Belichick had to sell it, and sell it hard. “I think the running game was the least of our concerns in that game,” he would say. “Thurman Thomas is a great back; we knew he was going to get some yards. But I didn’t feel like we wanted to get into a game where they threw the ball 45 times.”

  So Belichick came up with a plan to primarily use two defensive linemen, Leonard Marshall and Erik Howard, and sometimes a third, and drop as many as eight Giants into coverage. He was inviting the Bills to run the ball, and to bleed the clock in doing so. Belichick knew that Marchibroda and Buffalo’s head coach, Marv Levy, preferred to throw underneath the Giants’ coverage. “Pepper and Carl and Lawrence and those guys—that’s what they live for,” Belichick said. “Go ahead, you can catch it for four or five yards, but you’re going to pay the price. And that’s the way we wanted to play.”

  Punish the receivers. Force the run. Keep Kelly and the offense off the field. Make the Bills more uncomfortable than they’d been all year. Over time, the defense came to accept Belichick’s vision as the proper me
thod of attack.

  Some veteran Giants knew this was a much-easier-said-than-done proposition. Mark Bavaro said he’d watched Buffalo beat L.A. by 48 points in the AFC title game with an offense that made the Giants’ look Jurassic in comparison. “I remember in the Candlestick locker room saying to myself, Do we really want to win this game and go get embarrassed in the Super Bowl?” Bavaro said. “As good as San Francisco was, Buffalo was something we hadn’t seen before, scoring that many points . . . But that was always tempered by the fact that Belichick was on our side. That gave us a lot of confidence that he’d find a way.”

  The Giants barely worked on offense all week, even though they were facing Bruce Smith, who had 19 sacks on the year and had replaced LT as the most feared defender in the game. Parcells had asked Taylor to start a practice fight with Giants tackle Jumbo Elliott to get him fired up for Smith, but other than that, the entire focus was on getting the defense ready for the pace of Buffalo’s no-huddle attack.

  “We told our offensive players all week long they needed to hold the ball and get first downs,” said Fred Hoaglin, the offensive line coach. “Didn’t tell them to score. Just hold the ball and keep it from them. We had two huddles on offense in practice, and the coaches would go in one huddle and that team would run a play, and then we’d walk over to the other huddle and call another play. And we’d do it in rapid fashion for ten minutes, fifteen plays, stop and take a break and do it again and again. That’s all we did in practice. We had no offensive practice overall, and that concerned me. But we knew we needed the defense to practice at that kind of pace.”

  Belichick had his group in Olympic shape, and he was so laser-focused on the monumental challenge at hand that in a Wednesday meeting with the media, when he was asked for a third or fourth time about his reported candidacy for the Cleveland Browns job, he snapped. He used profanity to hammer home the point that he was thinking only about the Buffalo Bills. “No more questions about head coaching jobs in this league,” he said. “Period.”

  When the Giants made their Super Bowl Sunday arrival, they found a Tampa Stadium that had been converted into something resembling a military state because of the ongoing war in the Persian Gulf. The security presence was massive. Armed soldiers were everywhere, and Tom Coughlin remembered staring at a helicopter gunship hovering above the press box. Tens of thousands of fans waved small American flags in the stands. Whitney Houston sang a rendition of the national anthem that left many of the hulking men around her shaking or in tears, feeling goose bumps on top of their goose bumps, before four F-16 fighter jets roared across the sky.

  The Bills won the coin toss, and, despite Belichick’s wishes and plans, they threw the ball on the first three snaps. The good news? They didn’t get the ten yards required for a first down and were forced to punt. On the Giants’ sideline, Elliott turned to Hoaglin and joked about Buffalo’s hurry-up offense. “Fred,” he said, “what was that? The hurry-up-and-get-off-the-field offense?”

  The Giants took the ball, worked the clock with their run game, and kicked a field goal on their 12th play. The tone had been set. The Giants possessed the ball for a remarkable 40 minutes and 33 seconds of the 60-minute game, 34-year-old Ottis Anderson ran like he was ten years younger, and Jeff Hostetler, second-string quarterback, managed the game like a first-string conductor. Hostetler had waited nearly seven seasons to get a chance to play, and he’d told his wife, days before Simms went down, that he was frustrated enough to retire. He’d come a long way since 1984, when, in a 7-on-7 drill in his first year, he accidentally bounced a pass off the back of Belichick’s head. “His stuff went flying,” Hostetler said, “and as a rookie I’m thinking, ‘I’m done now.’ But afterward, all the defensive guys were giving me high fives because a lot of guys said they’d wanted to do the same thing. He was so mad at me. I can’t repeat what he said.”

  By the night of January 27, 1991, Belichick had long since forgiven Hostetler, who gave the defense a chance in Super Bowl XXV to make Little Bill’s scheme a winning one. Thurman Thomas indeed cleared 100 yards (135 on 15 carries, including a 31-yard touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter), and the Giants’ 2-3-6 and 2-4 and 3-3 nickel packages indeed held the Bills’ passing game to reasonable gains. The linebackers and secondary had also pounded Buffalo’s receivers; Banks, who had recovered from wrist surgery, was among the difference makers. Andre Reed conceded that he’d never been hit so hard in his life. “They bruised up my whole body,” he said.

  Belichick used Walls, a career cornerback with Dallas, at safety and asked him to do something he’d never done: act as the play caller in the secondary. It was a fascinating move. Belichick always thought Walls was a wildly unorthodox man-to-man cover guy, the most unique defensive back he’d coached, but Belichick told Walls he wouldn’t change his footwork or technique because they had worked so well for him in Dallas. And yet here was Belichick suddenly asking the ten-year veteran to embrace a brand-new responsibility. If the pace got too hectic for him, Walls would look to the defensive coordinator, his outlet, for help.

  “I’d never played safety until Bill Belichick, the mad professor, saw me as a guy who could do it,” Walls said. Inside the final two minutes, with the Giants holding a 20–19 lead, Walls made the open-field tackle on Thomas that likely prevented an 81-yard touchdown run and ultimately forced Buffalo to send out Scott Norwood to try a 47-yard field goal with eight seconds left.

  The kicker who landed the Giants in this game, Matt Bahr, approached Parcells on the sideline. “Bill,” he said, “[Norwood] hasn’t made one from 47 yards on grass all year. He’s going to overkick it.”

  As Norwood lined up near the right hash mark, some players on both sides of the field held hands. Some knelt, and some stood. Some looked, and some turned away. In the crowd, Norwood’s wife, Kim, had tears in her eyes as she held the hand of Janine Talley, wife of Buffalo linebacker Darryl. Ann Mara, wife of Giants owner Wellington, held her rosary beads and prayed for Norwood to miss while Bills officials stared at her from an adjacent box.

  Her prayers were answered. Norwood launched his kick wide right into infamy, and the Giants players and coaches erupted as Norwood staggered off the field. With four seconds still on the clock, DeOssie grabbed a video camera to shoot the sights and sounds of victory. Soon enough, he was thanking Belichick for the opportunity to be part of the special night he’d just scripted with a game plan that would end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

  “In the two years I played for Bill Belichick,” said DeOssie, the former Tom Landry player, “I learned more football than in my previous 15 years playing football combined.”

  Belichick found Bon Jovi taking photos of the madness in the locker room. Bill and the other assistants would join Parcells and the team at the hotel that night for a party highlighted by the hilarious scene of Coughlin muttering the words “world fucking champs” over and over. (Parcells had those words stitched onto Coughlin’s souvenir Super Bowl blanket.) Big Bill won his second championship with an all-time staff that included five future NFL head coaches (Belichick, Coughlin, Romeo Crennel, Groh, and Ray Handley), a former NFL head coach (offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt), and a future head coach at Notre Dame (assistant special teams coach Charlie Weis).

  Coughlin was on his way to Boston College, and the 49-year-old Parcells was on his way to a temporary retirement that would be announced in a stunning news conference in May. In between, Belichick had no choice but to walk away from a franchise he never wanted to leave.

  Upon his arrival in New Jersey in 1979, Wellington Mara had co-signed a loan for Belichick so he could buy a house. Bill had spent years taking a knee near the Giants’ bench, imploring his players to do more while taking his marker and drawing up his plan on a grease board. Little Bill wanted nothing more than to keep showing up at Giants Stadium on Saturday mornings to ride the bike and study three or four tapes of the next team on the schedule.

  Yet even after Belichick toppled his first NFL men
tor, Marchibroda, in the Super Bowl, George Young still wanted no part of him as a head coach. The GM wanted one of the other assistants to replace Parcells whenever Big Bill decided to leave, and with Coughlin booked for Boston College, it was Handley, a position coach not exactly in leaguewide demand, who was first in line.

  Belichick’s road to a head coaching job would have to run through Cleveland. Harry Carson wrote a letter of recommendation on Little Bill’s behalf to Browns owner Art Modell. Parcells told Modell that Belichick was “going places in this business.” Big Bill had spent some time preparing his best assistant for this moment, grooming Little Bill to run his own team. He solicited Belichick’s opinion on many global Giants decisions and educated him on contracts and player discipline. “Bill, here’s the situation I’m in right now,” Parcells told Belichick. “Someday you’ll be in this position.”

  But the subject of what Little Bill did in Super Bowl XXV was a bit of a sore spot with his boss. Of that game plan, Parcells would say years later, “I don’t know whose idea that was to put it in the Hall of Fame. If anything should be in the Hall of Fame, it should be Ron Erhardt’s game plan. We had the ball for 40 minutes and some seconds. That takes work, consistent play. We were only on defense for 19 minutes. To me, we had a good plan against them. It was well thought out, a couple of things we did, the two-man lines in that game. But I’m not diminishing anything. I’m just telling you. I don’t know how that happened. I’m not knocking anyone here.”