by Ian O'Connor
The truth is, Belichick agreed that his strategy had been successful because the Giants’ offense stayed on the field forever. “We didn’t have to play that much defense,” he said. “That really helped.”
The Cleveland Browns cared about none of that. The Browns cared about none of George Young’s concerns, either. They needed a head coach to wake up the echoes, and they decided to hire the man a former Notre Damer, Mark Bavaro, described as “the biggest football geek or nerd that’s ever stepped foot in the NFL.”
Some 45 miles from where his father had landed his only head coaching job, at Hiram College, Bill Belichick would run his own team for the first time. Steve Belichick used to bring his young son to Cleveland Browns camp at Hiram so he could watch Jim Brown, Lou Groza, and Gary Collins. They were true Cleveland greats, young Bill thought, and all these years later he suddenly had a chance to join them.
7
Cleveland
In January 1989, Ernie Accorsi met Bill Belichick for lunch at the Marriott in Mobile, Alabama, site of the Senior Bowl. The general manager of the Cleveland Browns needed a head coach, yet at the start of the interview he did not consider the 36-year-old defensive coordinator of the New York Giants a serious candidate for the job.
Some five and a half hours later, Accorsi left that meeting shaking his head. He recalled, as a college kid, watching a young Jack Kennedy in his first presidential debate and thinking Kennedy had been preparing himself for the White House since he was ten years old. Accorsi had a similar feeling about Belichick. He’d never met someone who had so clearly started preparing to be an NFL head coach when he was such a young boy.
Marty Schottenheimer had just lost another heartbreaking playoff game, this one to the Houston Oilers, before rejecting owner Art Modell’s mandate that he hire an offensive coordinator and getting himself run out of town. Accorsi had now lived through two epic AFC Championship Game losses to the Denver Broncos, forever known as the Drive and the Fumble, both of which propelled to the Super Bowl the very quarterback Accorsi had drafted for the Baltimore Colts in 1983: John Elway. The Stanford star had bluffed that he would quit football and play for the New York Yankees if the dreadful Colts kept him, and Colts owner Bob Irsay blinked by dealing him to Denver against Accorsi’s wishes.
The GM hadn’t recovered from the fact that the quarterback he’d drafted No. 1 overall was the one who denied him two trips to the Super Bowl. Accorsi ignored the warning signs that the aging Browns needed to be rebuilt, and he decided he needed a veteran coach to take one last shot at stealing a title.
But the young Belichick floored him. They met at noon and blew right through the Senior Bowl practice they were both expecting to attend that afternoon. Belichick locked his eyes on Accorsi’s the whole time and spelled out his vision for giving Cleveland its first NFL championship since 1964. Decades later, Accorsi would call it the most impressive job interview he’d ever conducted.
“You were ten strokes behind,” the GM told Belichick near the end of the meeting. “But you just shot a 64 and made it close.”
Accorsi would’ve hired him if he’d been able to persuade Modell to approve it. He would’ve hired Belichick if he’d been ready to start over with the Browns. Only the GM thought he could squeeze one more run through that rapidly closing window of opportunity. Bud Carson, 58-year-old defensive coordinator of the New York Jets and former architect of the Steel Curtain defense in Pittsburgh, seemed like a strong win-now choice, and Chuck Noll swore by him.
Carson got the nod, in part because Accorsi worked with him in Baltimore and thought he was a football version of Earl Weaver—crusty, cantankerous, and brilliant. In his first season, 1989, Carson actually led the Browns into contention but lost the AFC title game to—who else?—Elway’s Broncos. In year two, Carson disintegrated and was fired after a 42–0 home loss to Buffalo that Modell called “an embarrassment to all of us.” The second time around, Accorsi wasn’t going to swing and miss on Belichick. Modell liked Mike White, the quarterbacks coach of the Los Angeles Raiders, and Accorsi brought in former Browns assistant Bill Cowher, who had gone with Schottenheimer to Kansas City. Cowher aced his interview, but Accorsi still favored Belichick, and Modell wasn’t about to hire a Schottenheimer guy anyway.
As the Giants were making their push toward their Super Bowl matchup with Buffalo, Accorsi got word to Belichick that he was his first choice. Mike Lombardi, his pro personnel director, also had numerous conversations with Belichick, Accorsi said, though the GM hadn’t asked him to engage the candidate. John Madden’s on-air praise of the Giants’ defensive coordinator also got Modell’s attention.
Modell and his wife, Pat, ultimately met with Belichick and his wife, Debby, for dinner at the owner’s home. Modell’s son David, a team executive, and his wife, Olwen, were also present. The next day, David Modell raved to co-workers about Belichick’s binderful of ideas for the Browns, and told people his mother loved the candidate. “He’s got a plan,” David quoted his mother as saying, “not like the other guys in the past.”
Art Modell was sold. He listened to the recommendations he got from Accorsi, Harry Carson, and Bob Knight, the three-time national championship basketball coach at Indiana, who had met Belichick through his former colleague at West Point, Bill Parcells. Modell and Belichick came to terms on a five-year contract between midnight and 1 a.m. on February 5, 1991, that made the 38-year-old the league’s youngest head coach by six years. When Belichick and his new boss met with the news media later that day, Modell made it clear that Knight’s phone call had influenced his decision.
“He spoke very highly of Bill’s integrity,” Modell said, “his sense of honor and discipline . . . I thought it was extraordinary coming from Bobby Knight, a man I’ve respected from afar.”
Belichick arrived at his Browns presser in a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. Behind him walked Debby, cutting a handsome figure in a conservative pink dress. They sat at a conference table cluttered with an unwieldy knot of microphones and tape recorders. Belichick sat in the middle, to the right of his wife and to the left of his boss. Accorsi, a former sportswriter and team publicist, had given the new coach a scouting report on the area media. The GM told Belichick that two major newspapers covered the team, the Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal, and that he thought the Beacon Journal’s coverage was especially negative.
“I knew what Bill’s personality was like,” Accorsi would say, “but I didn’t care. Even though I had a PR background, I didn’t care. I wanted to win, and that’s all that mattered to me. My impression of him was absolutely no-nonsense and all business. [The media] wasn’t even a factor. Coming off of Bud, who was insecure and thinking people were against him, this guy came off as cocksure and he didn’t give a shit.”
For his first press conference as a head coach, Belichick had written key words to talking points on his left palm. Modell introduced the tenth coach in Browns history, and the youngest since the legendary Paul Brown was hired at 37.
“I know there will be some questions about my age and experience relative to this job and this type of responsibility,” Belichick said. “You know, when I came into professional football, I was 23 years old with the Baltimore Colts, and I heard those same questions then, and the next year with the Lions and then the Broncos, and so forth . . . I feel like all those questions have been met. I’ll stand by my record.
“I feel like I’ve been in coaching for 30 years, through my father and the people I’ve met with him.”
Modell explained that he had given Belichick a five-year deal—two years more than he preferred to give coaches—because he wanted stability at a time when the Browns were in some disarray. He also maintained that Belichick would have 24/7 access to him, that he would be more involved in running football operations than past coaches, and that he would have “total consultation and input” into Accorsi’s supervision of the draft—all things that had to be a bit unsettling to Accorsi, who was losing influence with Model
l after sticking him with Carson.
“It’s a gamble,” Modell conceded of his Belichick hire. “For every success story, I’ll point out ten failures. Maybe I’ve struck gold on this one.”
Bill and Debby Belichick were starting this adventure with their two children, six-year-old Amanda and three-year-old Stephen. “We’re ready for a change,” Debby said. “This has been Bill’s ambition for some time.” Debby said Bill no longer brought home game films to review, and she described her husband as having tunnel vision when it came to his professional and personal lives. “When it’s football season and when he’s coaching,” she said, “that’s what he does. It’s like a file cabinet. Pulls out the drawer, pulls out ‘football,’ he sticks it back in. And he comes home and he pulls out ‘family.’ Very organized person.”
And this seemed like a very organized process. The Browns needed a head coach who could lead them to their first Super Bowl appearance, and they’d just hired a coordinator who helped the Giants win two Super Bowls and who had contained a Buffalo offense that was advertised as unstoppable.
The fan base certainly bought in. Ticket sales picked up heavy steam in the immediate wake of Belichick’s hiring, and Modell said a dinner crowd of 500 stood and cheered at the mention of his name three nights after the coach’s press conference. Modell had given his man exactly what he wanted—power and security—and on the surface it looked like a perfectly sustainable NFL marriage.
In reality, the owner and the coach were wildly different human beings. At heart, Art Modell was a self-made showman. He was a Brooklyn-born son of an electronics retailer who went bankrupt in the Great Depression and died when Art was a teenager. He dropped out of high school, worked as an electrician’s helper in a New York shipyard for 57 cents an hour, and served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Modell became a successful TV and advertising executive who bought the Browns in 1961. Two seasons later, in a reported clash of personalities, Modell fired the franchise namesake, Brown, and his seven championships (four in the old All-America Football Conference) in the middle of a bitter Cleveland newspaper strike that tempered fan backlash. Modell was a driving force behind the TV network deals that ultimately turned the league into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut, including the birth of Monday Night Football, and he booked preseason doubleheaders in his stadium that helped turn the exhibition season into a moneymaker.
Some people thought he was funny enough to be a stand-up comic. Modell was a media charmer who liked a little panache, a little style to go with his substance. If there was anyone on the planet who embodied the opposite approach, it was the man Modell had just hired.
On Bill Belichick’s first day of work, there were small signs of potential trouble to come. In a nod to Belichick’s youth and defensive expertise, Modell compared Bill to Don Shula, who went from defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions to head coach of the Baltimore Colts at age 33. “I hope the analogy holds up in years to come,” Modell said, “because Shula, next to Lombardi—maybe including Lombardi—is probably the greatest of all time.”
Belichick’s response: “To be compared to Don Shula is really a joke. The guy is a Hall of Fame coach, and I’ve never coached one game in this league. I hope he’s not insulted.”
Modell also stated that the Browns, holders of the second overall pick in the NFL draft, were interested in possibly selecting Notre Dame’s Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. Though nearly every team coveted the explosive playmaker, Belichick would never publicly reveal the identity of a prospect he might be considering.
The day after his announcement, Belichick showed up for work at 6 a.m., earlier than the Cleveland staff was accustomed to arriving. He interviewed some of the holdover assistant coaches and met one-on-one with beat writers covering the club, in an attempt to start building some mutual trust. At the time, there were no strong signals that the existing policies of full access to players, coaches, and staff would be coming to an end.
“It was like his opening pitch,” said Tony Grossi, of the Plain Dealer. “He extended his hand and he was very nice. We were like, ‘Oh, all right, this is great.’”
In the eighties, Sam Rutigliano was a quotable and gregarious media favorite. His successor, Schottenheimer, always made time for reporters, and his successor, Carson, was a grandfatherly presence and a big believer in the freedom of the press; he was honest to a fault. Belichick would turn out to be something completely different, and the Cleveland media would either learn to live with it or not.
Belichick had more important matters to tend to. He boarded a flight for Indianapolis and the NFL Scouting Combine to look for some players who could win the Browns a championship, and to see if an old friend from the college ranks would be willing to run his defense. His name was Nick Saban.
Bill Belichick stood before the 1991 Cleveland Browns in an auditorium at Lakeland Community College, 25 miles outside of Cleveland. Belichick was holding his first training-camp meeting as a head coach, and he spoke for about three minutes, no longer. Brian Brennan, an eight-year veteran with the Browns, remembered the speech vividly a quarter century later, if only because the new coach was so clearly in control.
This is what Brennan remembered Belichick telling his team, in part:
I’ve been a ball boy in the league. I’ve been a special teams coach in the league. I’ve coached defensive halfbacks. I’m currently coming to the Browns as the defensive coordinator of the world champion football Giants, and I’m now the head coach. And I’m going to tell everybody in this room right now that there’s no question we’re going to win, and you’re either going to be a part of this team or you’re not. And if you’ve played more than five years in this league, I respect you. If you haven’t played five years yet, in my eyes you still have a lot to prove. All right, break. Offense, stay here; defense, go there.
It was going to be a long, hot summer at Lakeland Community College, and Belichick had set up his camp specifically to see who would melt and who would not. The Browns were going to practice twice a day, and they were going to constantly engage in full-contact drills. This was not going to be Bud Carson’s camp.
Carson smoked in meetings, and his players sometimes smoked in the locker room. At halftime of the 1990 season opener against Pittsburgh, rookie defensive end Rob Burnett looked on in amazement as four prominent Browns each held smoldering cigarettes in one taped-up hand and markers in the other to draw on a board. “I’m like Where am I? A law firm or office building, or am I at halftime of a Steelers game?” Burnett said. “These guys are smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. That was my introduction to the NFL.”
Burnett said Carson was late for more practices “than I’ve ever seen in my entire time playing football.” Belichick wanted dramatic change in Cleveland, and he hired a tough-guy coordinator to help him with the transition. A former defensive back at Kent State, Nick Saban had been an assistant at Ohio State when he first got to know Belichick. Saban later worked at Navy with Steve Belichick, whom he and fellow Navy assistants called “the Emperor.” In his first go-around as a head coach, at Toledo, Saban went 9-2 in 1990, before resigning to go to work for Steve Belichick’s son. He was a 5´6˝ ball of fire. The day he resigned at Toledo to take the Cleveland job, Saban said, he cried for the first time since his father died, 18 years earlier.
On the other side of the ball, Belichick inherited an excellent receivers coach, Richard Mann, who had a deeper understanding of offense—especially on protections and the adjustments needed on blitzes—than any receivers coach Bill had encountered. Belichick also brought back into the league his old friend Ernie Adams, who had spent the previous five football seasons making a Wall Street killing as a municipal bond trader. Adams had been the Giants’ director of pro personnel before leaving the NFL, and it was often said that he’d left because he was bored and needed a fresh challenge. But neither Giants GM George Young nor coach Bill Parcells was as enamored with Adams’s ability to memorize a playbook in a day or two as others
seemed to be, and Young wanted Adams gone so he could hire Tim Rooney, former personnel man for the Steelers and the Lions, a move Young later called one of the smartest he ever made.
Accorsi knew Adams from their college scouting days: They had frozen their asses off together on the roof of the University of Maryland press box while scouting Clemson quarterback Steve Fuller. Adams had already established himself as a man of mystery, a coach and personnel guy who preferred to blend into the background. Three or four days after the Browns hired Belichick, Young called Accorsi and the two executives had this exchange:
YOUNG: Tell me, has there been an Ernie Adams sighting yet?
ACCORSI: As a matter of fact, he just appeared.
YOUNG: How did he?
ACCORSI: I think he just came through a floorboard. He just appeared.
Over time, Accorsi came to see Adams as a legitimate genius in a sport where that term was thrown around as casually as a wet towel in a locker room. “I can tell you this,” Accorsi said. “Every time I talked to Bill, I turned around and Ernie was right there.”
Belichick was going to need all of Adams’s brainpower and all of Saban’s rage to rebuild a declining cast of entitled veterans from teams that had lost three conference title games to Denver in four years. He was also going to need Bernie Kosar, the beloved quarterback and local boy from Boardman, Ohio, to recover from the ten-touchdown, fifteen-interception season he’d had in 1990.
Things would’ve been easier for Belichick back in New Jersey, where he could’ve been the head coach of the defending world champs. Parcells had abruptly walked out on the Giants in May, partly because of health concerns and partly because he simply felt it was time to move on. Young, as expected, replaced him with Ray Handley, a math wizard who said he’d been banned from a casino in his hometown of Reno, Nevada, for counting cards at the blackjack table, and who twice nearly left the Giants for law school.