One of Walsh’s frequently repeated decrees was “Don’t be a copycat.” It made him crazy when opposing coaches would attend clinics on the West Coast offense just so they could steal his play designs, mostly because it implied that pass routes were the key to the 49ers’ success. They missed the fundamental point, the true genius of it all, and that angered Walsh no end.
The inevitable failures of those wannabes—and the particular cautionary tale of George Seifert, for that matter—led me to formulate a little theory of my own: “The Emeril Lagasse Theory.” Lagasse, you may know, is a longtime New Orleans restaurateur and bestselling cookbook author who was a television personality in the first wave of celebrity chefs. His food is delicious and his recipes are easy to follow, yet he never feared that another aspiring cook would usurp his work and put him out of business. He knew that being able to follow a recipe is a very different thing from duplicating a particular and personal culinary ethos. It is the creator alone who understands just what the dish is trying to accomplish, and so he’s the only one who knows just how to make the ingredients work together. Lagasse also knows that, as with an assembly line or a football franchise, the smallest deviation from the process upends the final product (especially if it’s andouille gumbo). That’s why there is no need to worry about knockoff restaurants. If copycatting were a useful shortcut to success, there would be Lagasse-style restaurants in every city and San Francisco 49er clones in every football stadium.
Or, today, New England Patriots clones. The now-famous Patriot Way, the unique and uniquely powerful culture Belichick has honed over the last decade and a half, is a living tribute to Walsh’s Standard of Performance and his revolutionary organizational philosophies. And like Walsh, many of Belichick’s disciples, most prominently Charlie Weis and Josh McDaniels, have failed as head coaches after—to keep the cooking metaphor going—stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire. They knew all their mentor’s recipes; they just didn’t know how to cook them. Few grasp what was behind the dynasty in San Francisco then or in New England now: the details, the mind-set, the superhuman sacrifices made every second of every day to establish and maintain an utter commitment to the culture.
Every NFL owner wants his team to be the next Patriots, the next link in the Walsh chain, until, realizing how challenging the task is, they all lose their appetite to see an overhaul through to the end. You can’t cook up a success unless you have created the right culture. It doesn’t work.
Just ask Emeril.
2
THE COACH
A STUDY IN LEADERSHIP
Flying by the seat of his pants always suggests to me a leader who hasn’t prepared properly and whose pants may soon fall down.
—BILL WALSH
In The Godfather: Part II, Michael Corleone asks Frank Pentangeli to make peace with the Rosato brothers. Pentangeli hates the idea. He knows that neither side has an interest in settling and that any meeting will be a waste of his time.
In 1996 I had my own Godfather moment. John Shaw, then president of the St. Louis Rams, asked me to meet with his vice president of football operations, Steve Ortmayer. The team had no openings in its personnel department; Shaw just wanted to gauge if Ortmayer was open to some outside assistance. Like Pentangeli, I knew Ortmayer would be against the idea—strongly. He was going to guard his turf. I expected that the trip to Macomb, Illinois, new summer home of the recently relocated Rams, was going to be like a meeting with the Rosato brothers: a total waste of time.
Instead, my Frankie Five Angels meeting with the Rams was the beginning of a bizarre but fascinating and insightful summer I spent navigating the secret (and sometimes highly dysfunctional) subculture of the NFL’s highest executive levels. And although this adventure didn’t lead to any great job offers, it did bring me something even more valuable—a deeper understanding of, and improved procedures for, the most challenging and important transaction in sports: hiring a head coach.
After spending the 1995 season in Cleveland as director of player personnel, I was offered a chance to stay in another role but chose to move on. I had two years remaining on my contract, but my phone was ringing off the hook for meetings and special assignments, in part because potential employers figured they could get me on the cheap. In the NFL, no one is allowed to get paid twice, to double dip. Every contract has an offset clause that essentially says that a team is only responsible to make up the difference if a former employee’s new job pays less than his old deal. This language is often enforceable even if a person takes a job in television. Any job connected to football activates an offset.
That was all fine with me, though. It gave me an opportunity to fulfill a career goal.
When I was a scouting assistant in San Francisco in the 1980s, Bill Walsh told me that Al Davis had taught him more about football than anyone else, and ever since I had dreamed of working for the Raiders. While I waited for that moment, I read everything I could about what Davis thought and how he behaved, anything that helped me understand what made him so successful. Inevitably, our paths crossed—at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis—and we became friends. Not surprisingly, our friendship centered on football. Before long, he was calling my home, usually late at night, to talk about the draft, or a coach, or some player who had caught his eye. Once, in 1992, my mother, Jane, was over, watching our kids while my wife, Millie, and I were out celebrating the end of draft season. Davis called while we were out, and my mother, who had no earthly idea who he was, had a 10-minute conversation with him about the jazz singer Billy Eckstine. Davis was a charmer when he wanted to be. When Millie and I returned home, my mother said: “Michael, this nice man Al called. You better hurry up and call him back.”
When he called in the summer of 1996, it was about a job as a senior assistant. Of course, I accepted, not realizing that I had just stepped into the cross fire of one of the NFL’s longest-running feuds between two of its highest-profile (and stubbornest) owners. In one corner, Browns owner Art Modell—a buttoned-down, league-first company man. In the other, Davis—one of the game’s great renegades. My summer in NFL exile was just getting started.
Davis was prepared to hire me at a reduced rate knowing (gleefully, perhaps) that Modell would have to make up the difference. But when I told Modell about the deal and his tab, he was not pleased. In fact, he made it perfectly clear that there was no way in hell he’d pick up Davis’s bill. His stance was not about the money or me; it was about who was on the other side of the transaction. Modell went so far as to tell me he’d pay my whole salary just to prevent me from helping that “son of a bitch” in Oakland.
I knew then there was no way Modell would let me out of my contract to work for Davis. Blocked from my dream job by my old boss, I began to look elsewhere. I spent one lovely day in the desert with Arizona Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill. I had heard that in the 1970s Don Coryell got the head coaching job with the Cardinals after writing a note to the Bidwills that impressed them. So I had done the same thing, knowing that the team wasn’t happy with its front-office situation. But because the guy whose job I wanted was still under contract, we had to be a little secretive.
Bidwill picked me up at the airport himself and drove me to his house, where we talked all day in his pool cabana. He must have enjoyed the conversation as much as I did because as we headed back to the airport, he blurted out, “I don’t care if anyone knows we’re meeting; let’s stop by the office. I want to show you our facility.” (It was a late Friday afternoon in June, though, so really there was little risk of anyone being around to spot us.)
Once Bidwill brought me to the office, I figured I was in. Now, you might think it wrong to interview for a job that isn’t open, but morality and NFL management have a dicey relationship. Campaigning for someone else’s job is just part of the landscape. We’ve all had it done to us, and we’ve all done it to someone else. Whenever you hear a front-office guy
talk about transparency or trust, make sure to take it with a grain of salt. First, if I declined the interview, Modell most certainly would have argued that I was violating my contract by not actively looking for work. Second, how was I to know what Bidwill told anyone about our meeting? That was on him. You just cannot say no to an owner who wants to meet. As it turned out, Bidwill never offered me a job or made changes to his front office, but I didn’t regret the trip one bit.
A few months later the Rams called, and I found myself jetting off to the Midwest for my Frankie Five Angels meeting. Well, not exactly jetting. The view out the window of the small prop plane—basically, cornfields and more cornfields—might have appealed to some but not to a guy who left a New Jersey beach town on a way-too-early flight. Upon landing at the General Wayne A. Downing Peoria International Airport, I was greeted by a familiar face: David Razzano, a West Coast area Rams scout whose dad gave me my NFL start in San Francisco. Over the next 90 minutes, heading south along Highway 24, we traded “remember when”s as Razzano made it rather clear that the Rams were pretty much devoid of every positive organizational quality we’d experienced with the Niners.
For starters, Shaw, who had orchestrated the team’s move with Ortmayer from Los Angeles after the 1994 season, was still running things remotely. Like the Wizard behind his curtain in Oz, Shaw controlled everything in St. Louis from his office 2,000 miles west on Pico Boulevard. From my initial conversation with him, it was also clear that he already was thinking of making a coaching change if he didn’t see dramatic improvement in 1996.
Razzano and I were used to one man running the show. In San Francisco there never was any confusion about who set the direction and made the decisions: Walsh. But in St. Louis, the GM, Ortmayer, had little authority over roster moves. When it came to college prospects Shaw listened only to John Becker, vice president of player personnel, and on the subject of free agents and other pro prospects, Shaw relied on the Giddings scouting service. Teams pay a lot of money to companies such as Giddings to help evaluate their own roster and players around the league, and in the car headed to my meeting, Razzano indicated that this service was Shaw’s bible. All of which left Ortmayer with little power—or juice—in the Rams hierarchy.
The previous season had been the Rams’ first in St Louis. Despite the move from LA and a first-year NFL head coach, Rich Brooks, the Rams finished 7–9—and that was after losing their final three games, all at home, while giving up 121 points in the process. Seven wins under those circumstances should have created optimism in the Rams’ camp, but by the time Razzano turned into the Western Illinois University parking lot, I had a pretty good sense that no one was happy with Brooks. The rest of the front office, I was about to learn, already had gone to the dogs.
Having just spent five years with Bill Belichick in Cleveland, three as director of pro personnel and two as player personnel director, essentially fulfilling the duties of a general manager, I knew I could help this team. But when I sat down for my meeting, Ortmayer’s assistant was busy training her puppy in the team office, and it was clear from the get-go that the Rams GM was way more interested in the pet than in discussing what I could offer. Ortmayer used every yelp the pup made to avoid engaging with me. I mean, I like dogs as much as the next guy, but if he asked how the “little fella” was doing one more time, we were going to have a different kind of Godfather moment on our hands. Belichick, by the way, is a real dog lover, too, but I promise you he never wasted one minute of one day playing with a mutt in the office. I thought I was being punked by Ortmayer, I really did.
It was just another reminder of what a professional, well-run workplace Belichick had created in Cleveland and just how rare that kind of an atmosphere is in the NFL. After three long, odd, and totally wasted hours, I was on my way back to the Peoria airport with Razzano, and even though Ortmayer promised to call in a few days, I knew a full-time job with the Rams was a longer shot than that puppy getting properly housebroken.
With my job search going nowhere, I had no choice but to head to my summer home in New Jersey to wait and see how things might shake out. Luckily, I live within driving distance of NFL Films’ headquarters. Steve Sabol, keeper of the archive there, was kind enough to give me access to the latest game tapes. Two things happen when you are between NFL jobs. The first is that you fall behind on league trends. The second and more important is that you quickly lose touch with the incoming draft class. Before you know it, you’ve become obsolete. I was determined to avoid those pitfalls, and so each day I commuted 100 miles to stand in front of one of Sabol’s tape machines. Sabol was a real retro guy—a lover of the 1950s, old music, and old-school diners. He loved the history of the game most of all, and that was displayed in the archival photos that lined the walls in his office and every other wall in the building. Visiting NFL Films is like walking around the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
But the nostalgia and independent study distracted me for only so long. The truth was that in a matter of months I had gone from watching games in a cushy chair on my own big screen at the Browns facility, to coming tantalizingly close to breaking down film in Oakland with Al Davis, to manning a five-by-eight monitor with no remote and no chair, crammed in a corner of a warehouse in South Jersey. But hey, if you love the game, you make do.
Meanwhile, the Rams started the 1996 season 1–5, reinforcing Shaw’s lack of faith in his leaders. Not that anyone in St. Louis had any clue what he was thinking. Because he remained in LA and worked for an absentee owner, Shaw was free to operate in the shadows, making moves and wielding all the power without being seen or sharing his thoughts with the people doing the work on the ground in St. Louis. Shaw’s way of doing business might seem mysterious and less than ideal, but it’s a pretty good example of why so many coaches hate front-office types.
Walsh always believed that general managers of losing organizations survived because they were “firmly in the owner’s comfort zone,” commanding quite a salary while doing very little. He loved to speculate about what a dinner would look like with an owner, a GM, and a personnel man of a losing team. Over martinis, the GM says, “Look, we have the best facilities and administration and exhibition schedule. We set up everything just right to get the job done.” Over appetizers the personnel man says, “Well, we had a great draft; I know because I read it in the papers.” By the time dessert arrives, the owner would have been convinced that his team had everything it needed to win a Super Bowl. Except they’d be wrong, because they wouldn’t have the most important thing: a decent coach.
Give him credit; that’s exactly what Shaw was thinking when he called me later to arrange a second meeting in St. Louis. For that one, Shaw also invited his first lieutenant, executive vice president Jay Zygmunt. Hailing a cab from the airport, I headed to Shaw’s apartment in downtown Clayton, Missouri, a weekend retreat that was both office and residence for him when he was forced to come east for games or organizational get-togethers. Because of the tight travel turnaround his assistant had scheduled for me, I knew Shaw was going to get right to the point. There would be no puppies this time.
When I arrived, Shaw was sitting at the far end of a long banquet table, where he announced that he was not happy with the direction of the team—which was a little weird considering that he was its main architect. What he wanted me to do was spend the next two months researching the qualities of successful NFL head coaches and then create a list of candidates who fit those parameters. He was emphatic about me being thorough in my research so that he would have the unimpeachable data necessary to dump Brooks at the end of the season.
As I cabbed back to the airport, a thousand ideas ricocheted around my head, and I was excited and grateful to get out of the NFL Films basement and into an actual assignment. I just wasn’t at all sure how or where to begin such a monumental task. I’ve always been fascinated with the careers of great coaches. My last name is Lombardi, after all; I already knew
everything there is to know about the Green Bay legend. That would be good groundwork for my portfolio of great-head-coach characteristics. I also had extensive firsthand knowledge of both Walsh and the young Bill Belichick.
Lombardi. Walsh. Belichick. What traits did those men share, and how could I assess them accurately for Shaw? My head swam the whole way home. Quickly, though, I mapped out a plan. Over the next month, I evaluated every head coach who had led his team to a Super Bowl since 1984, the year I entered the NFL. I devoured all I could on all of them—their beginnings, influences, career trajectories—trying to uncover common threads. I didn’t care if they had gotten their start on the offensive or defensive side of the ball; winners come from both. Nor did I care what positions they might have coached early on. If the Steelers had listened to those who said offensive line coaches don’t make great head coaches, they never would have won four Super Bowls under Chuck Noll. Plus, having just spent three seasons in Cleveland with another tremendous offensive line coach, Kirk Ferentz, I knew they could definitely be head coaching material. (Ferentz eventually got his dream job and proved me right with 143 career wins and counting at the University of Iowa.) But the deeper I dug—the more data I accumulated—the further it took me from a conclusion. Before I knew it, I had dozens of amazing, highly successful coaches with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences on my list.
Gridiron Genius Page 4