by Ian O'Connor
Nobody saw Young’s choice as being any more charismatic than Belichick. Asked to react to the Handley appointment, Belichick congratulated his former staffmate and said it had been “a pleasure” to work for Parcells. He called his former boss “instrumental in my development and philosophy as a coach. I can only hope to be as successful as Bill in my new role with the Cleveland Browns.”
Toward that end, Belichick had started trying to get his soft and ill-conditioned Browns into Giants shape, Belichick shape, in the weeks after he took office. “Dear goodness gracious,” said the kicker Matt Stover. “All you have to do is ask people about that off-season conditioning program . . . Everyone was going, ‘Wow.’”
The rookie head coach carried the punishing workouts into the summertime heat of training camp. “Just a straight bloodbath camp,” Rob Burnett said. The defensive end recalled week after week of two-a-days, long practices in full pads, starting in the morning with what he called “the coffee-and-doughnut drill.”
The coffee-and-doughnut drill, Burnett explained, involved a linebacker and a defensive lineman on one side and an offensive lineman, a fullback, and a ballcarrier on the other. “You have a ten-foot space with cones, and you can’t go outside the cones,” he said. “Basically, it was nothing but collisions, head-on collisions. We did it right after stretching, that first drill. We called it the coffee-and-doughnut drill because if you weren’t awake, you were awake after that.
“That was college and high school stuff,” Burnett continued. “We’re professionals. We didn’t need that drill.”
Belichick thought otherwise. He thought the Browns needed to get tougher, sturdier. Joe Morris, the former Giant who was playing his final NFL season in ’91, said the coach had very real concerns with the amount of practice time some Browns missed with injuries, and with the power wielded by the team doctor, John Bergfeld. “Bill said, ‘Joe, I’ve got to take this team from the doctor,’” Morris recalled. “I said, ‘You’re right.’”
The players weren’t the only ones having a rough go early in camp. The reporters who regularly covered the team—men and women who had grown accustomed to dealing with relatively friendly, agreeable faces behind the head coach’s desk—were suddenly facing all kinds of restrictions. Belichick announced that the locker room would be closed to the news media throughout camp, that interviews would take place only in an auxiliary gym, and that interview requests needed to be made in writing. Reporters were barred from team flights to and from games and were told they weren’t allowed to call players in hospital rooms. Belichick also announced that the team’s medical staff would not be permitted to comment on injuries or a player’s physical condition. Upon review of these new terms of engagement, Plain Dealer columnist Bill Livingston called the camp “Fort Belichick.” Akron Beacon Journal beat writer Ed Meyer described it as “Stalag Belichick.”
The Browns and Giants took part in joint practices at the Browns’ camp, and some of the New York–area writers who enjoyed a regular on- and off-the-record dialogue with Belichick in his days under Parcells were stunned at how secretive and uncooperative he’d become in a matter of months. “Coming away,” said one writer, “all of us were saying, ‘Holy shit, this guy has changed.’”
Modell wasn’t happy with Belichick’s approach to media relations, yet the owner wasn’t about to pick an unnecessary fight with the man he predicted would “return us to the old days of glory.” Beat writers and columnists were on their own. The Plain Dealer’s Tony Grossi landed a heavy blow on Belichick over his policies and his threat to bar reporters from practice if they dared to report anything they saw on the field.
Grossi pointed out in his column that Belichick was far more pleasant and expansive when answering questions on his four radio and TV shows, which paid him more than $200,000 a year. Belichick had a weekly half-hour radio show on WKNR-AM, a daily five-minute show on the Browns’ flagship radio station, WHK-AM, a weekly spot on WJW Channel 8, and a weekly half-hour show on WOIO Channel 19. After the coach refused to answer a benign question and a benign follow-up about sitting significant players in a preseason game against Minnesota, and then answered a similar question three nights later on one of his shows, Grossi wrote, “Are we to surmise from Belichick’s act so far that he will only be civil for a price? Do reporters have to wave $20 bills at him for post-game comments?”
The columnist reported that in their earlier days together with the Giants, Young had sent Belichick to a class to improve his people skills. It was becoming clear to the Cleveland media that the new Browns coach didn’t exactly ace the class.
Belichick spent the summer wearing a godforsaken rubber sweat jacket that resembled a trash bag. He cut the sleeves off his jackets and windbreakers, and he wore cutoff sweatpants, too. He was lifting weights, jogging, working the stair machine (at the highest possible resistance), riding the stationary bike, and sweating every bit as much as his players, yet somehow poring over notes and tapes during his workouts.
His staff was expected to maintain a brutal schedule, too, a pace that would’ve left many of the players doubled over trash cans and losing their lunch. Those demands were the same at the bottom of the organizational flow chart as at the top. At the bottom, a 26-year-old coach with college and World League experience named Phil Savage was hired as a quality control assistant to help on one side of the ball. He’d accepted a $20,000 salary until the day Belichick walked up to his desk, introduced himself (Savage wasn’t interviewed by the head coach when he landed the job), and told him he would instead be handling offense and defense and doing the work of two quality control coaches instead of one. Belichick didn’t offer to double Savage’s wage. He gave him a $5,000 raise for the additional workload, then walked him down the hall to meet Saban.
“Seven months later,” Savage said, “I was ready to give him a refund.”
A couple of weeks into the preseason, Belichick called Savage into his office and told him his film breakdowns weren’t meeting the team’s needs. Belichick threw on a tape and started analyzing the splits of the offensive linemen and receivers, the linemen’s stances, the quarterback’s head movements, the depth of the running backs—every conceivable detail about the 22 men on the field. Belichick spent 20 minutes on one play, and a stunned Savage did the math in his head. Three plays an hour, 60 plays on offense, 60 plays on defense—that’s 40 hours for one game! The young staffer thought he’d never again sleep or go to the bathroom.
“He said, ‘We’ll train you, and then we can train the next slapdick who comes in here,’” Savage recalled. “We hired Kevin Spencer in December. I was never more thankful to have someone else come on the scene to help. It was a long, long year.
“That was the hardest I ever worked,” Savage continued. “Bill gets on the treadmill of football and he doesn’t see seasons. It’s just one day stacked on top of the other, whether it’s training camp or the regular season or free agency or draft prep. He gets on the treadmill and he starts walking, and you say, OK, can I keep up? And he keeps going and going and going and going.”
Young staffers were required to work up what Belichick called “the pads”—detailed diagrams of every movement from every player on every play. Browns staffers and assistants had the damnedest time keeping up with him. Even Saban, who could never sit still. Steve Belichick recalled working with him at Navy and thinking Saban was a brilliant football mind but also a nervous, nail-biting wreck. Steve joked that he watched Saban wear out ten miles of carpeting while pacing during a three-minute phone call.
Saban had worked for a man in Houston, Jerry Glanville, who didn’t allow his assistants to fraternize with peers on other teams. To maintain his relationship with Bill Belichick, then with the Giants, Saban would quietly meet with him in different places to exchange ideas. “West Point seemed like a place that we could hide out,” Saban said. “So we went there and stayed for weekends, stayed in a hotel up there, and talked ball.”
They were kindred Croatian spir
its born six months apart, Belichick with roots in the western Pennsylvania steel mills and factories, Saban in a West Virginia coal-mining town, Monongah, that in 1907 had been the scene of an explosion that killed 362, the worst mining disaster in American history. Football had changed the arc of their families’ narratives and given them a chance to become rich and famous men.
They both believed in the 18-hour workday, which made them a perfect match in Cleveland. Years later, Saban described his four seasons under Belichick as the toughest of his career for a reason: The head coach, quite literally, drove him into the ground. One late night, after yet another full day of Browns practices and meetings and film sessions, a gaunt-looking Saban staggered into a room and told Savage and a few others, “Guys, I can’t go another minute. I promise you I’ll be here at 5:30 in the morning. I’ve got to get out of here.” And then Saban dropped all the way to the floor and slumped against the wall, a totally beaten man.
As good a secondary coach as his players and co-workers had ever seen, Saban could be just as demanding on the slapdicks beneath him—on Savage and others. Unlike Belichick, the defensive coordinator had a volcanic temper that could erupt at any minute. Saban was an equal-opportunity ripper, shredding young assistants for making errors in film breakdowns and jumping on young players for blowing assignments in coverage.
“Bill was very sarcastic but much more low-key,” Savage said. “He’s going to come in and needle you with a really sarcastic comment and make you feel an inch tall and feel like the biggest dummy. Nick would just rip you apart with a barrage of verbal [insults]. Bill would just come in and shrug his shoulders and say, ‘This is the worst film breakdown I’ve ever seen in my entire NFL career.’”
No, Little Bill was not a Big Bill–styled screamer, though he once treated a Browns assistant the way Parcells had treated him in the heat of a game. On his headset, Belichick told the assistant to “shut the fuck up,” and the assistant wanted to climb down from the press box and strangle him on the spot, before cooler headsets prevailed.
Belichick did demand that his subordinates show up early for meetings and practices. Dom Anile, a holdover scout from the Rutigliano-Schottenheimer-Carson days in Cleveland, found out the hard way after the 1991 draft. Belichick had just promoted Anile to director of college scouting. Anile thought this was his big career break, and one day—the first day of practice after that draft—he was on the phone with an agent trying to get some bodies into camp.
Anile finished his call and headed out to practice. Players were merely stretching; they hadn’t started any drills. But when Belichick spotted Anile walking toward him from the field house, he made an urgent beeline for the scouting director and cornered him near the sideline.
“You’re late,” Belichick barked.
“Practice hasn’t started yet, Coach,” Anile responded.
“You’re late,” Belichick said again.
“I have no excuses,” the scouting director said. “I will never be late again.”
And Anile never was.
“According to the Vince Lombardi and Bill Belichick clock,” Anile said, “I was late, because you’re supposed to be ten minutes early.”
Modell said that he’d never seen anything like Belichick’s work ethic, and that at times he advised him to slow down and catch his breath. In mid-August, the Browns moved into their state-of-the art, $13 million complex in Berea, which included four beautiful grass fields. After a couple of weeks, Belichick asked the grounds crew to tear out some grass on one field and install some dirt to simulate the infield at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which the Browns shared with the Cleveland Indians. Some of the crew members felt like crying; they were in the business of growing grass, not ripping it out. They did as Belichick told them, and afterward realized that it made perfect sense.
“If you look at old films of what that [Municipal Stadium] field looked like before Bill got here,” said Tony Dick, a member of the grounds crew, “nobody cared if there was grass there or not, and that goes back even to the eighties. That field was awful—the game field especially, and the practice field, too. But when Bill got here, everything had to be perfect. Before games, he would go out there and say, ‘Hey, we have to take an eighth of an inch off the grass.’ We would have lawn mowers on the field right before the game, as people were coming into the stadium. He wasn’t maniacal; he just wanted everyone to do their job correctly.”
If some influential figures in the building looked down on the groundskeepers, Belichick wasn’t one of them. “He thought more of us,” Dick said, “than anyone else in the organization.”
Dick was a full-time college student at nearby Baldwin Wallace, and yet he worked 80 to 100 hours a week, at eight bucks an hour, trying to make Belichick’s fields look exactly as he wanted them to look. The coach even found a constructive use for the dirt that was dug out for the Berea facility and piled high next to the building to be hauled away.
“Bill told them not to haul it away,” Dick said. “They turned it into a ramp. They eventually called it Mount Belichick. It was probably a 20-foot-tall mountain of dirt, and they rolled it into a ramp, seeded it, and he used it as a conditioning hill . . . Bill was looking for an edge and had a mountain on the side of the facility and put the fat guys on it.”
Michael Dean Perry, younger brother of Chicago Bears cult hero William “the Refrigerator” Perry, was among the “fat guys” who would ultimately spend some time scaling Mount Belichick. Perry also happened to be the Browns’ best player, a Pro Bowl defensive tackle who had managed a career-high 11.5 sacks in 1990. Perry ended his contract holdout on August 27, his 26th birthday, five days before the season opener against Dallas. He immediately found out he wasn’t in the shape he thought he was in.
Belichick had him run in a way the 6´1˝, 290-pound tackle wouldn’t soon forget. The Browns’ coach mandated that his players run gassers—sprints the width of the field, 53 yards from sideline to sideline and back. Two back-and-forth trips equaled one rep. “After I ran those gassers that everybody’s talking about,” Perry said, “I felt like going to bed and never getting up again.”
Cleveland desperately needed Perry and an improved pass rush after its first-round draft pick, UCLA safety Eric Turner, went down with a stress fracture in his leg, leaving an already battered secondary decimated. Belichick had to use a trash can to climb over an eight-foot stone wall at a locked-up UCLA field to work out Turner before the draft; the safety vaulted the wall in a single bound and then blasted Belichick in a contact drill after the Cleveland coach insisted he deliver his best shot. “He pounded the crap out of me,” Belichick said. “But he didn’t knock me down. No matter how much it hurts, you never show it.”
Belichick had done everything humanly possible to prepare the Browns to be what they hadn’t been the previous year under Carson: competent. He impressed his most important player, Kosar, with his command of concepts that didn’t revolve around his specialty, defense, and with his presence in offensive meetings that Carson hadn’t attended. But the 1991 Browns weren’t the 1990 Giants. They weren’t even the Browns of the eighties. It was going to take time to make Cleveland a contender, to build a team worthy of its association with Paul and Jim Brown. And there would be a considerable amount of pain suffered along the way.
Bill Belichick had coached 32 games as head coach of the Cleveland Browns, winning 13 of them, and yet his biggest victory unfolded three days after the 1992 season ended. That was the day the New York Giants fired Ray Handley, George Young’s choice to replace Bill Parcells. The same George Young who had told those closest to him that he would never hire Belichick to coach the Giants.
The bookish Handley was emotionally ill-equipped to handle the top job, and he began losing his grip on it the day he stormed out of a news conference when pressed by a reporter about his preference at quarterback—Jeff Hostetler or Phil Simms. Even Belichick, as brutal as he could be to the Cleveland media, with his mumbling and dismissive nonanswers, h
ad never done that.
Belichick had to be enjoying this Young/Handley shit show from afar. He also had to be taking a measure of satisfaction in the performance of his Browns defense. In 1990, Belichick’s Giants unit had held opponents to a league-best 211 points, while the Browns surrendered what would be a decade-worst 462 points. In 1992, Belichick’s Browns (with an assist from Saban) gave up 275 points, while Handley’s Giants allowed 367.
Slowly, surely, Cleveland was making progress that was ripped right from the loose-leaf pages of Belichick’s three-ring binders. He kept all his pro personnel information in blue ink, said scout Chris Landry, and all of his scouting information in red ink. Belichick never stopped studying those binders. At 4:30 one morning, Landry dropped a completed report on a table in what he thought was the vacant head coach’s office, only to hear Belichick’s voice from the desk behind him. “Scared the crap out of me,” Landry said. And then Belichick immediately asked the scout to look at film of some preseason games. Of course, the head coach never asked his subordinates to look at more film than he himself had watched, often with a lollipop in his mouth.
In going 6-10 in ’91, the Browns lost six games by four points or less. They won seven games the following year, despite the fact that Kosar twice broke his ankle. After a miserable 1990 under Carson and interim replacement Jim Shofner, Kosar, when healthy, had played fairly well in two seasons under Belichick, throwing 26 touchdown passes against 16 interceptions and completing 63 percent of his attempts. But there were rumblings that tension existed between the quarterback and the coach over the conservative nature of the offense.
This much was clear: Belichick was now in total control of the Browns’ football operations. Realizing he was steadily losing his voice in the organization, Accorsi had resigned in the spring of 1992. The GM admitted that he’d made a mistake almost immediately after hiring Belichick when he told the rookie coach that he was pursuing the job of president of the Green Bay Packers, which Accorsi saw as the best front-office job in football. Belichick didn’t say much of anything in response. In retrospect, Accorsi wasn’t sorry that he’d been honest with his coach. He was sorry that he was looking into another job.