by Ian O'Connor
The players immediately quit on Modell and Belichick, and the season descended into chaos. It was a season that had started with the ill-fated decision to give $17 million to Andre Rison as the alleged missing-piece playmaker to a championship team. (Modell said he had to take out a loan in his wife’s name to pay Rison.) It was a season set ablaze by the announcement of the franchise’s move before Rison poured gasoline on the fire by saying he couldn’t wait to get to Baltimore.
Browns fans were cheering for the visiting teams, and there were reports of bomb threats at the stadium and the Browns’ facility. Modell and Belichick were hung in effigy, but only the coach was around to answer for a crisis of someone else’s design. “The owner was nowhere to be found,” Belichick would recall. “He was in Baltimore. Kind of felt like you were on a deserted island, fending for yourself.”
The environment was so hazardous to the team’s mental health after four consecutive defeats that Belichick decided to fly his 4-8 team to San Diego two days earlier than planned. Some 2,400 miles away from home, the coach showed both his punitive and softer sides. Rob Burnett said Belichick practiced the Browns in full pads for two hours on Friday, normally a light walk-through day, after being dissatisfied with Thursday’s practice. The defensive end would later tell his coach on the flight back to Cleveland, after San Diego’s 31–13 victory, that he’d erred in pushing the team so hard. “I said, ‘Bill, listen, we’re human,’” Burnett recalled. “I always had to say that to him. ‘We are human beings, flesh and blood and bones and water, and having to see everything live is not the answer.’ He didn’t really answer. He was kind of lawyerish. At one point he said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have gone that long Friday.’”
But earlier that week in San Diego, Leroy Hoard said Belichick gave credit cards to coaches and ordered up vans to transport players and told them to have some fun on the coaches’ cards. Steve Everitt recalled that Belichick actually met up with the players. “Bill would come out and hang out with us,” the center said. “He knew where we were going to be. He’d show up and talk to the older guys.”
Down three touchdowns in the Chargers blowout, Belichick absorbed some ridicule for calling timeout with one second left to allow Matt Stover to kick a 40-yard field goal. The kicker was touched. Belichick had to know he would be mocked, and yet he was willing to take the hit to reward a player who was having a good year for him.
“I go out there and make the field goal,” Stover said, “and I looked at him and said, ‘Wow, Coach, wow. Thank you. That says a lot.’ That means he had my back.”
On December 17, the 4-10 Browns hosted the 6-8 Bengals in the final football game ever played in Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Fans who had shown up over the years in rain, sleet, and snow had come armed with things to throw onto the field, and with crowbars, wrenches, and saws to cut out pieces of the stadium just as cleanly as Modell had cut out their hearts. Browns sponsors didn’t want to be associated with anyone as radioactive as Modell, so all of their signage in the stadium was covered in black. Phil Savage recalled that the black spray paint had fuzzy edges to it, making the covered advertisements look as if they’d been burned. “The stadium looked like it had been put on fire,” Savage said.
Though security guards and cops were everywhere, and police choppers circled above, the game took on the feel of a lawless event. Belichick actually felt fear on a football field for the first time. Anytime a team crossed midfield during the game and headed toward the end zone in front of the Dawg Pound, the officiating crew turned that team around and pointed it toward the opposite goal, to avoid the debris being thrown from the Pound. Cleveland and Cincinnati were essentially playing the equivalent of a half-court basketball game.
For once, the Browns played like the Super Bowl contenders they were supposed to be. Testaverde threw two touchdown passes. Earnest Byner, the tragic figure responsible for “the Fumble” in the bygone loss to Denver, had returned to Cleveland after five seasons of exile in Washington and delivered, in this game, his first rushing performance of at least 100 yards in three years.
In the fourth quarter of what would be a 26–10 victory, all anyone could see and hear was the raw sights and sounds of a construction site. Fans used their saws to cut out wooden benches and their tools to unfasten seats and either throw them onto the field or take them home.
As the game ended, players and coaches were being instructed to retreat to their locker rooms as soon as possible. But some Browns stopped and headed for the Dawg Pound, where grown men were weeping like newborns. The players were crying, too. Byner paid his respects, and those who saw him embrace the fans and slap their hands on a victory lap said it appeared as if they were absolving him of his mortal AFC title game sin. Everitt, a 6´5˝, 310-pound hulk with rock-star-length hair and a pro wrestler’s countenance, was as emotional as anyone as he buried himself in an unwieldy tangle of fans grabbing at him, slapping his shoulder pads, and pulling on his jersey. They didn’t want to let him go. They didn’t want to let the team go.
The field was littered with the nuts and bolts and batteries and garbage hurled from the stands. One family in a Dodge caravan pulled out of the stadium parking lot with three rows of seats—30 seats in all—strapped to the roof with bungee cords. About an hour after the game had ended, Jim Mueller, the co-host from Belichick’s Browns Insider show, decided to take his son onto the field for one last look around. The stadium was practically empty, but Mueller noticed a middle-aged man walking around the upper concourse with his arm inside his trench coat. The man walked down near the baseball dugout, entered the field, and walked by Mueller and his son with his arm still tucked inside his trench coat. The broadcaster wondered if the stranger was carrying a weapon, a gun, maybe.
“Then he walked out into the end zone,” Mueller said, “opened his coat up, and laid a single red rose down on the turf. And then he turned around and walked past us into the stands with tears in his eyes.
“That’s a Cleveland Browns fan, and that’s what happened to this city.”
Art Modell fired Bill Belichick by phone on Valentine’s Day 1996, with two years and $1.6 million left on his contract.
“Valentine’s Day,” the coach’s son Stephen would comment years later. “How many coaches get fired on Valentine’s Day?”
Stephen was eight years old when Modell made that phone call, and he would later say the firing had an “enormous” impact on him. Stephen’s father was his hero. He had a life-size photo of his dad on the wall of a bedroom he shared with his younger brother, Brian.
Bill Belichick likely made this day inevitable the moment he decided to fire the hometown hero, Bernie Kosar, who by then was finishing his career as Dan Marino’s backup in Miami. When Belichick heard that Kosar was holding some silly, endless grudge against the Washington Post’s Christine Brennan over something she’d written while covering his Miami Hurricanes teams in the 1980s for the Miami Herald, Belichick sent Brennan a letter. (He’d sent the sportswriter another handwritten note a decade earlier, to thank her for a feature she wrote on his father.) “Don’t worry,” the coach wrote to Brennan. “Bernie doesn’t like me, either.” If Belichick had shown a little more of that humor and humanity in Cleveland, he might’ve survived the move to Baltimore.
As it turned out, the karma was all wrong for Bill Belichick and the entire organization throughout 1995. The Browns were all set to take Penn State tight end Kyle Brady with the tenth pick in the draft (Brady said Cleveland had called Penn State’s equipment manager for his helmet and shoe size) before the Jets stunned everyone and took him at No. 9, sending Belichick and his personnel director, Lombardi, into a tailspin. They panicked and traded their pick to San Francisco and dropped down to No. 30, where they selected Ohio State linebacker Craig Powell, a complete bust who played all of nine games in his career. Fortuitously for the franchise, if not its outgoing coach, that trade did secure the draft choice that Modell’s new team, the Baltimore Ravens, would use to select future Hall o
f Famer Ray Lewis, two months after Belichick was fired.
In all, Belichick drafted 41 college players for the Browns, and 40 of them failed to make even one Pro Bowl throughout their careers. The Browns often held early, desirable picks in each round, thanks to their losing records, and yet Belichick and Lombardi failed to convert them into championship-level depth. Their second-round pick in ’91, Auburn guard Ed King, never made any discernible impact. Their second-round pick in ’92, San Diego State receiver Patrick Rowe, finished his career with three catches for 37 yards after he tore up his knee in a preseason game. Their second-round pick in ’93, Florida State defensive lineman Dan Footman, spent only two years of his NFL career as a primary starter (though he did have 10.5 sacks for the Colts in 1997). Their third-round pick in ’94, Romeo Bandison, never appeared in a game for the Browns before he was cut in his second season. Their six drafted players in ’95 started a combined 24 NFL games in their careers; Georgia quarterback Eric Zeier accounted for half of that total, and he went 4-8 in his starts.
The draft wasn’t the only story to tell about this failed regime. One team official said that the Browns had brought in “a lot of questionable guys” beyond Andre Rison, and that the departures of veteran linebackers Clay Matthews and Mike Johnson following the 1993 season left a character void that showed up in 1995. “When things did go south,” the official said, “we had no internal fortitude.”
During the ’95 season, said defensive coordinator Rick Venturi, “we had a million breakdowns.” Venturi was one of them. As Saban’s replacement, Venturi was drinking coffee by the gallon and working around the clock when he suffered what he called “a brownout” while Cleveland was scrimmaging Chicago in the blistering training-camp heat in Platteville, Wisconsin. “Worked myself into oblivion,” Venturi said. He blamed himself, not Belichick. He said he was out three to four weeks.
That summer, Belichick annoyed some in the organization—particularly Jim Bailey—by hiring a young staffer, Mike Tannenbaum, as an extra set of eyes on the salary cap. Only Browns executives on the business side didn’t want another set of eyes on the salary cap. Bailey confronted Belichick on Tannenbaum’s presence, told the coach he couldn’t “hire guys on my side of the building,” and warned that Tannenbaum wouldn’t be given any access to his cap information.
Bailey described Belichick’s relationships in the building as “edgy,” dating all the way back to the Ernie Accorsi days. Yet according to Bailey, Modell initially planned to bring along Belichick to Baltimore, as he’d promised the players. Early in the off-season, Belichick himself thought he’d be making the trip to Baltimore, where it had all started for him with the Colts in 1975.
Ultimately, those edgy relationships ended up changing Modell’s plans. “The transitional time was very difficult,” Bailey said, “and we had a lot of things going on with our finances, with the league, and Bill was demanding that attention be paid to football operations, just like normal and without regard to all the other things. He wanted commitments to coaches and players, and we weren’t in position to do that. We were dealing with banks, financing, the league—it was a big state of flux. It got real testy and tough, and Bill was mad at us, and we were mad at him.
“Art said, ‘I think we’re going to have to make a change. I hate to do it, but this can’t work.’ And I couldn’t disagree with him. I felt the team could do pretty well under Bill, but all the extraneous stuff got in the way.”
So Modell made the call from his West Palm Beach, Florida, residence, and told Belichick he wouldn’t be coaching a short drive from his Annapolis childhood after all. Nobody was surprised to learn that they quarreled over what Modell would say publicly about the firing, and over how much blame he’d be assigning Belichick for the 5-11 record.
“We’ve had some success with Bill, including an 11-5 playoff team in 1994,” Modell said in the statement he eventually released. “However, I believe to get to the next level, a change at head coach is necessary.” The owner spoke of the respect he had for Belichick’s work ethic, yet he also spoke hopefully of the fresh start that Baltimore allowed.
Belichick put out his own statement—not on Browns letterhead—thanking Jim Brown for his friendship and loyalty and the fans for their support. “I will always cherish the many memories of being part of the rich tradition and history of the Cleveland Browns,” Belichick said.
And that was that. The old Browns center, Mike Baab, remembered Belichick standing in front of the team in his first meeting after getting hired in February 1990 and shouting, “I’ve worked too long and too hard for this chance to let you guys fuck it up for me.”
The players didn’t end up fucking it up for Belichick as much as the owner did, or as much as Belichick fucked it up for himself. In a cruel twist of fate, Modell hired Ted Marchibroda to return to Baltimore and replace the kid from Wesleyan he had agreed to take on in 1975. Belichick talked to his good friend Jimmy Johnson, the Miami Dolphins’ head coach, about running his defense, but instead he agreed to accept an offer from his former boss Bill Parcells to join the New England Patriots as assistant head coach and secondary coach; Al Groh was already in place as defensive coordinator.
Belichick cleaned out his office in Berea and left the facility for the final time. Terry McDonough, a scout on his way to Baltimore, looked out from a second-floor window as Belichick headed to his car with a backpack strapped to his shoulders.
McDonough felt a sense of sadness and waste. He shook his head and said to himself, “There goes a very good football coach.”
9
Border War
Bill Parcells reacquired Bill Belichick after his firing in Cleveland, and voilà, the New England Patriots surrendered a total of nine points in two playoff games to give Big Bill a chance to become the first head coach to win Super Bowls with different franchises. With Belichick in Cleveland, Parcells had gone 21-27 in his first three seasons in New England. Big Bill liked to say you are what your record says you are, and his record said he needed Little Bill by his side.
The Patriots were set to play Brett Favre’s Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans, and yet the game had been reduced to a mere afterthought. Win or lose against Green Bay, Parcells wanted out from under Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was just as fed up with the head coach as the head coach was with him. So, in the days before his AFC Championship Game victory over Jacksonville, Parcells put himself very much in play with his former employer the Giants, and he planned to take Belichick with him on a potential return trip to New Jersey. In fact, Giants GM George Young told his preferred candidate, Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator Jim Fassel, that he should root for the Patriots to beat the Jaguars because he didn’t think ownership wanted to wait until after the Super Bowl to make the hire.
Wellington Mara had watched Parcells’s New England team overcome a 22–0 deficit to beat his team in Giants Stadium, 23–22, to close out the regular season. He badly wanted Parcells to return, but his 50-50 partner, Bob Tisch, was sensitive to Young’s position. Young didn’t personally like Parcells any more than he liked Belichick, he didn’t think Big Bill had the energy for the job anymore, and he told Mara in early January 1997 that he’d resign if Parcells returned.
Young strongly favored Fassel or Belichick’s former defensive coordinator in Cleveland, Michigan State’s Nick Saban, whom the GM described as one of the most impressive candidates he’d ever interviewed. Mara and his son John, a Giants executive, reluctantly agreed that it wasn’t fair to force Parcells on Tisch, and that they should go along with Fassel for the good of the partnership. Young was summoned to John Mara’s office and told that he could hire the Arizona coordinator, who had flown into town on a private jet under the assumed name Jeff Smith and checked into a New Jersey hotel.
“I think that’s the first time I ever saw George sprint down the hallway,” John Mara said of the rotund GM.
Minutes later, the phone rang in Mara’s office. Tisch was calling to say that
he’d had a change of heart and that if his partners really wanted to hire Parcells, he wouldn’t stand in their way. John told his father, and Wellington shouted, “Get George now.” Only by the time John tracked down Young, it was too late. He’d already offered the job to Fassel, and the Maras weren’t about to tell their new coach that there had been some terrible misunderstanding.
That left Parcells with one appealing option: the New York Jets, who had fired the bumbling Rich Kotite and were coming off a 1-15 season. The Jets were appealing because 82-year-old Jets owner Leon Hess was desperate for a winner and more than happy to give Parcells the personnel power Kraft had stripped from him and handed to front-office man Bobby Grier, who selected Ohio State receiver Terry Glenn in the 1996 draft, over Parcells’s objection that the team should pick a defensive player.
Will McDonough, of the Boston Globe, a friend of Kraft’s and Parcells’s, had blown the lid off Super Bowl week before the alcohol started flowing on Bourbon Street when he opened his breaking news story on Monday, January 20, 1997, with this paragraph:
Bill Parcells will coach his last game for the Patriots Super Bowl Sunday, but what happens next may turn into an ugly situation between him and team owner Bob Kraft concerning Parcells’ contract.
McDonough reported that Kraft would be seeking compensation from any team that hired the coach, and that Parcells’s agent, Robert Fraley, was contending that his client’s expiring contract allowed for no such thing. Kraft and Parcells were making the Art Modell–Bill Belichick marriage in Cleveland look blissful by comparison. Parcells had been hired in 1993 by James Orthwein, who had purchased the team from Victor Kiam in 1992 with the intent of moving it to St. Louis. Kraft was the man who, two years later, prevented the New England Patriots from becoming the St. Louis Stallions, and inherited Parcells in the process.