Gridiron Genius

by Michael Lombardi

  Section 3 featured current coordinators who displayed the leadership qualities I laid out in the first section. My guys (and in my ordered ranking): Chan Gailey, Pittsburgh Steelers’ offensive coordinator; Emmitt Thomas, Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive coordinator; Gary Kubiak, Denver Broncos’ offensive coordinator; Pete Carroll, 49ers’ defensive coordinator; Vic Fangio, New Orleans Saints’ defensive coordinator; Sherman Lewis, Packers’ offensive coordinator; Bill Belichick, Giants’ assistant head coach; Jon Gruden, Eagles’ offensive coordinator; and Cam Cameron, Washington’s quarterback coach.

  Section 4 covered college coaches and focused on Michigan State’s Nick Saban, Northwestern’s Gary Barnett, Florida’s Steve Spurrier, Miami’s Butch Davis, and Cal’s Steve Mariucci. Most of my recommendations in this section included a caveat. Because I hadn’t worked with most of those guys, I’d need to interview them before I could give them the full Lombardi stamp of approval.

  Section 5 was devoted to organizational structures of successful NFL teams. It was a not-so-subtle message to the Rams’ brain trust: This is how winning franchises operate.

  Section 6 was my gratis breakdown of the Rams roster and how Shaw should tweak it if he wanted to win.

  Section 7 was my official recommendations. I graded my top choices in all the leadership areas and offered examples to illustrate my assessments. I explained that any candidate who wasn’t strong in these pillars simply didn’t make the final list. I included the career arc of each and insight from former coaches and players. I also predicted the ability of each to handle the job.

  I hoped I would have the chance to spell out for Shaw a couple of other broad takeaways as well. In particular, I wanted to talk about what happens when an owner hires a guy because he has at least shown proficiency managing one side of the ball with the hope that he will cover his blind spots with other talented coaches. The problem, though, is that such a setup makes creating a unified culture almost impossible. I call it the “Vienna problem.” Austria’s capital offers alluring highlights of many different countries: the coffee of Turkey, the intellectualism of Germany, the pastries of France, the brandy of Armenia, the art from all over the world. It is that cultural variety that makes Vienna an international tourist destination. But what works for cities doesn’t cut it for teams.

  Vienna would never win a Super Bowl. The little-of-this, little-of-that approach has a very slim chance of overall success. And that’s what you get when you have lots of subcontractors and no visionary architect. Take Rex Ryan, former head coach of the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. Ryan is great with a quote and quick with a prediction, and in his first two seasons with the Jets he appeared to have the qualities of a successful head coach. But in the end it was a mirage. Rex knows defense and loves coaching it. When he became a head coach, though, he still acted like a defensive coordinator. He left his offensive staff on an island. He subcontracted out half his team so that he could stay in his own familiar world. It got so bad that, in training camp, drills were set up for the defense to “win,” and most of the important preparation for the season focused on that side of the ball. The offensive staff never felt like it was part of Ryan’s inner circle.

  I was ready to tell Shaw that this division never works. The coaching staff has to be united. Ryan’s Vienna approach makes success impossible.

  I also planned to warn against copycatting. Hire an assistant coach from a succcessful program, this thinking goes, and hope he’ll duplicate that success. Kind of like how horse breeders count on former champions to produce future ones. It’s a practice that makes for contented stallions and a whole bunch of colts who never get out of the gate. Check your racing form for one Marty Mornhinweg.

  Many head coaching candidates come to their interviews with a huge notebook filled with a season’s worth of practice sessions. I don’t understand why this is perceived as a selling point, but I know how it became one. Blame it on Mike Holmgren’s former teaching colleague Bob LaMonte, who quit his school job and began to represent Holmgren in 1992 after he became head coach of the Packers. Since then LaMonte has expanded his agent business, becoming a league power broker with a stable of young coaches and front-office candidates. He is known for spending lots of time preparing his candidates for their interviews, preaching attention to detail and thoughtful planning. He has even written a popular book on how to impress owners that pushes those skills.

  LaMonte filled an important void in helping men prepare for the big job, holding summer seminars on team building. Andy Reid, now the head coach of the Chiefs, was an early LaMonte success story, hitting the ground running in his first head job with the Eagles even though he had never even been an NFL coordinator. But Reid has thrived at least as much because of his leadership qualities as because of LaMonte’s curriculum. (He has never quite lived up to his early promise, though, for reasons I will discuss later.)

  Mornhinweg, the former head coach of the Detroit Lions, is another of LaMonte’s clients, well versed in the Holmgren school of detail and planning. (In fact, Mornhinweg’s mannerisms and inflections remind you of Holmgren’s.) Mornhinweg has always been a good offensive coordinator, but when it came time to don the headset, it didn’t take long to see that he did not possess the leadership skills of a Holmgren or Reid, skills he couldn’t learn at LaMonte Academy or read out of a notebook. When he won just five games in two years in Detroit, it reaffirmed for me that although organization is important, leadership is what really rules in the coaching ranks.

  My first suggestion to Shaw would be to surreptitiously gauge Parcells’s interest in running the entire organization. He checked off all the boxes, but there was no reason to court Parcells if, as I suspected, there was no chance he’d accept the position. It diminishes the team and whoever they eventually hire if it leaks out that the guy wasn’t exactly their first choice. A little high schoolish? Yes, but optics matter.

  After Parcells, my top picks were Saban, Belichick, Barnett, Carroll, Gailey, and Fangio.

  I felt so strongly about Saban that I told Shaw not to let money or control get in the way. As for some of my other recommendations, Carroll certainly has proved my faith; Barnett has as well. Why Fangio never got a chance, I’ll never know. And Gailey? If he never reached his potential as a head coach in Dallas, I’d suggest that not many do operating in Jerry Jones’s world.

  I didn’t know then that history would vindicate my research, but in any case I was proud of the work I had put in and the product I’d produced. On the cab ride from O’Hare, I collected my thoughts and went over my presentation one more time. I was dressed in a coat and tie, hoping to project a sense of gravity, professionalism, and attention to detail. That made one of us.

  I handed over the notebook and watched Shaw halfheartedly scan in seconds what took me months to compile. He seemed instantly disappointed. Shaw thought I had a blind spot for Belichick, and he was probably right. I favored a guy who would become the greatest coach of all time; go figure. Remember, though, this was a long time before all the Lombardi Trophies in New England, and at the time Belichick was a newly fired sub-.500 head coach who had a terrible reputation as a guy who couldn’t get along with the media or persuade established players to buy into his concept. Belichick also had to answer for his handling of local hero Kosar’s release, which infuriated the city of Cleveland. (Shaw and the other naysayers had no idea what a disruptive force Kosar had become in the locker room after losing his job to Vinny Testaverde.) Shaw dismissed my Belichick recommendation out of hand without reading one bit of the research.

  As for Saban, he was even less enthused, if that was possible. Shaw’s first experience with a college coach (Brooks) hadn’t gone well, and he had no interest in hiring another. It didn’t matter that Saban had coached more than five years in the NFL and had run a defense that allowed only 204 points in 1994. Saban arrived in Cleveland as Belichick’s first hire. After one
year as the head coach of the University of Toledo, he was chosen to be the Browns’ defensive coordinator. From the first practice, any football observer could tell he had the makings of a fruitful head coach: He had a strong plan and an effective way of communicating that plan, and his ability to be self-critical earned the players’ trust in a way that rivaled their feelings for Belichick. Saban was different from his old boss in many ways. For starters, he was more vocal and quicker to anger, and he was always well dressed and well groomed, never a hair out of place. Belichick was the opposite, hair usually messed up from sleeping on the couch, always in some form of team gear, with his trademark scissor-cut sleeves. But these two were similar in the ways that counted—intelligence, decision making, leadership—making them a true odd couple and an incredible team. Separately, they are simply two of the finest coaches I have ever seen.

  But sitting in his hotel-suite chair, mindlessly leafing through my work, Shaw had the look of a guy who considered my information and conclusions to be worthless, which might explain why he never paid me a dime for any of it. And I had the distinct feeling he was going to throw away my notebook as soon as I left.

  Eventually, Shaw convinced Dick Vermeil, the old Eagles coach, to come out of retirement to be the Rams head coach and director of football operations. (At least Shaw listened to me about the advantages of picking someone with head coaching experience.) Vermeil didn’t do much initially to justify the hiring. In his first two seasons in St. Louis, he won a total of 9 games. In the third year, his leadership qualities began to shine through and he made the most of his own second chance, winning 13 games and the Super Bowl.

  Things worked out well enough for Shaw and the Rams. As for me, I left that hotel suite in Chicago and headed back to the airport without a job or a paycheck—at least, not until the next January, when the Eagles hired me as pro personnel director. What I did have, though, was something much more valuable: a notebook full of priceless research and insider knowledge regarding the evaluation and hiring of the most important position in sports—information that has benefited me every day since.

  I’ll never say that nothing good came out of that bizarre summer of 1996.

  WHAT TO ASK AN NFL HEAD COACH CANDIDATE

  There’s a popular social media meme that quotes Marcus Aurelius as having said, “The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the nonobvious.” If Chapter 2 has shown anything, it’s that sometimes the nonobvious looks pretty obvious from a different angle. But how can one possibly predict how a potential coach will handle the unpredictable? Our failures in the hiring process in Oakland led me to develop an addendum to my Rams notebook and my pillars of coaching leadership. To help with the interviewing of head coaching candidates, I created an extensive outline of inquiry that explores every nonobvious wrinkle of organization and team building that a head coach needs to control to conquer the modern-era NFL.

  PHILOSOPHY (GENERAL)

  Offense

  Defense

  Kicking game

  Player development

  Player procurement

  OFF-SEASON

  What kind of program?

  Define it: Goals and objectives?

  Fat guys: How are you handling them?

  What are your mandatory lifts?

  What schedule do you adhere to?

  Coaches’ involvement?

  Individual player development: How and why we train?

  OTA [organized team activity] days

  What is the objective of these?

  Team or individual?

  Minicamps

  Objective: Team or individual?

  What is the emphasis?

  What players are to take part? Is it a veteran-based camp or a player-development camp?

  Meals: What do we want to pay for? Which meals?

  Incentive clauses in contracts

  Mandatory?

  How much do we pay?

  What will the housing situation be like?

  Rehab of injured reserve players

  Plan?

  Where and when does it start?

  Clearing of players: Who will make this choice?

  TRAINING CAMP

  Philosophy

  Schedules

  Meetings

  Objectives

  Players who fail physical: How do we handle them?

  Rules different for them?

  Count on the 80-man roster?

  Breaking of team rules: Fines or waived?

  Veteran workdays: Different?

  Conditioning of team: Two-minute drill run or what?

  If failed, what is the punishment?

  Practice for players that are not in condition?

  Treatment of players?

  Deal with major injuries to starters?

  Do we stay at home or go away?

  Meals: Who sets the menu? What extent do we spend?

  Fan access?

  Media access?

  Family members’ access?

  Coaches’ kids ball boys?

  College coaches?

  Give out any information to visitors?

  Scrimmage philosophy:

  With another team?

  With our team?

  Contact? How much?

  Player development days?

  How much padded work?

  Player personnel movement in training camp

  Work roster? Improve the eightieth man? What do you want?

  Move players’ positions around during camp? Put players in right spot?

  Depth chart evaluation: Who plays where? Do we reward practice or games?

  Personnel meetings and evaluations?

  Retired players at camp? How do we treat that with other players?

  Preparation for opener in terms of personnel?

  Preseason games

  Philosophy:

  Offense

  Defense

  Kicking game

  How do we travel?

  Who goes?

  Who stays behind?

  If not playing, then go?

  Kind of plane?

  Reps of veterans, reps of rookies?

  Schedule of game day, schedule of the day before the game?

  How do we handle injuries?

  Who cuts the players?

  Coaches talk to players cut?

  REGULAR SEASON

  Philosophy of the week

  What do you want from the pro personnel department?

  Scouting reports

  Meetings with director?

  Matchup notes

  Weekly workouts

  Emergency list

  Practice squad philosophy: For reps or player development?

  After-practice schedule for practi
ce squad?

  Young player workout? Who will work with them?

  Weekly schedule

  Players

  Coaches

  Players who miss one day of practice, or two, or three, or on injured reserve

  Team meetings versus individual meetings

  Holiday schedules