Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (10 page)

Not only was Parcells leaving the Patriots, he was going to a division rival. That made it much worse for Patriots fans. The way New York football fans looked at it, New England had just borrowed Parcells for the four years, and now he was coming home. The way New England fans looked at it, it was the coaching equivalent of the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Hess signed Parcells to a six-year $14.4 million contract as coach and general manager.

Hess was a hero to the long-suffering Jets fans. He was going to let Parcells do the shopping and cook the groceries and hopefully pick the menu for the Super Bowl party. “I just want to be the little boy that goes along with him and pushes the cart in the supermarket and let him fill it up,” Hess said. “He’s going to run the show, and it’s not going to be two or three cooks in the kitchen. It will be just him.”

Kraft, who was looking to protect the Patriots’ interests during every step of the Parcells process, felt bloodied at the end. “I got roughed up pretty bad, and all I was doing was looking out for my team,” he said. “I got the crap beat out of me because I wasn’t just doing whatever Bill wanted.”

Kraft eventually established a cordial relationship with Parcells in the years after he left the team. “All that being said and done, we were lucky to have him,” Kraft said. “The only objection
I had to him is that he was not always respectful to me or my family or people close to me.”

If they had to do it over again, Kraft and Parcells admit they would have been a dynamic team. Kraft gave his coach what he needed to be successful. Parcells knew he had built a potential powerhouse in New England, and he bailed out.

“That was one of my greatest regrets,” Parcells said. “I had young players, a good team. I had Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy, Shawn Jefferson, Ben Coates, Curtis Martin, Bledsoe was young. Willie McGinest. Chris Slade. Sam Gash. That was hard to give up.”

When he was a candidate for the Patriots’ Hall of Fame in 2011, Parcells conceded that he really didn’t want to leave New England. He was insulted by having his power diminished and had not realized Kraft was going to be one of the best owners in the NFL. In the first eighteen seasons Kraft owned the Patriots, his accomplishments were outstanding: New England went to six Super Bowls, winning three, and the Patriots led the league in victories. Kraft was instrumental in ending the 136-day lockout in 2011 during a time when his wife was dying. He was also influential in the blockbuster network television contract signed after the lockout that guarantees the NFL immense profitability and popularity for years to come.

If Parcells remained in New England, it could have been he, not Belichick, winning all those Super Bowls. Who knows if he would have had the same conviction about Tom Brady to take him in the sixth round in 2000, but Parcells had put so many pieces in place to ensure success. He felt Kraft, because he was new, was letting himself be influenced by other people.

“Let’s say we had a couple of domestic misunderstandings with the ownership,” Parcells said. “I do regret that. Those things have since been resolved. I think retrospectively, I would have handled things substantially differently than I did. And I was always saddened by the fact that I had to leave there, and in all honesty
didn’t really want to. And I’m sure Bob would say something along those lines himself because we have talked about that.”

Bill Walsh always regretted leaving the 49ers after they won the Super Bowl in 1988. He handed George Seifert a championship team that went on to win two more titles. Dick Vermeil never has forgiven himself for leaving the Rams two days after they won the Super Bowl following the 1999 season. Walsh and Vermeil were best friends, and they made the same mistake. Parcells was always fond of Walsh and was close to Vermeil. Coaches make emotional decisions, often involving their egos, and when they realize they should have been more flexible or given it more thought, it’s too late.

“I thought I left a pretty good team there,” Parcells said. “We had just been to the Super Bowl, and it was a very young team. Now we needed some more help. It wasn’t a finished product by any stretch of the imagination, but we were on the way up. I don’t think there was any question about that. And we needed a little help defensively and maybe another offensive lineman or two. But we had the skill people and some of the defensive pressure players in place. So I did regret that.”

Parcells was never fired in the NFL. He left the Giants, Patriots, Jets, Cowboys, and Dolphins, where he ran the front office but didn’t coach. All but the Dolphins were in significantly better shape when he left than when he arrived. New England is the only place he’s admitted that he should have stayed.

“Hey, that’s life, and you learn from things as you go on,” he said. “I probably retrospectively would have approached it a little differently than what I did.”

There is still a bit of sadness and regret in Kraft that it didn’t work out with Parcells. “I think it would have been a great partnership,” he said. “I forgot to tell you, today I love Parcells. I really believe that he knows he had something good. He was his own demon.”

Stepping in and replacing a legendary coach can be a nightmare. Before the Parcells dispute with the Jets was resolved by Tagliabue, Kraft hired Pete Carroll as his new coach. Carroll had limited head coaching experience. He joined the Jets’ staff as defensive coordinator when Bruce Coslet was hired in 1990. Coslet was fired after four seasons, and Carroll was promoted by Hess and general manager Dick Steinberg to replace him. Carroll was a fun guy. He had a basketball court constructed in the parking lot of the team’s facility and created a diversion during training camp with bowling night, but these were still the Jets, a team with only Super Bowl III on its résumé.

The results on the field for Carroll weren’t so good. The Jets were 6–5 when they played the Miami Dolphins in a crucial game late in the 1994 season. They held a 24–6 lead deep in the third quarter but lost on Dan Marino’s famous fake spike play, in which he motioned as if he was about to stop the clock by slamming the ball into the ground but instead fired a touchdown pass to Mark Ingram. The Jets didn’t win another game the rest of the season, finishing with a five-game losing streak, and ended 6–10. Carroll, who had three years remaining on his contract, was shocked when Hess fired him after just one season.

“I really feel no bitterness,” Carroll said a few days after he was let go. “I hate talking about this. It’s not worth it.”

Carroll went to San Francisco to resurrect his career. The 49ers were coming off their fifth Super Bowl championship and were the model franchise in the NFL. He was hired by George Seifert as the defensive coordinator to replace Ray Rhodes, who had been hired by the Eagles to replace Rich Kotite, who had been hired by the Jets to replace Carroll. Kraft admired the 49ers, and Carroll was the anti-Parcells. He would not make the owner feel like an outsider.

But Carroll was not Kraft’s first choice. He had grown close to
Belichick in his year with the Patriots after Art Modell fired him as the Browns were moving from Cleveland to Baltimore. Belichick had alienated Browns fans with his secretive ways, lack of personality, painful-to-watch news conferences, and his controversial decision to cut popular quarterback Bernie Kosar, who grew up in nearby Boardman, Ohio. Modell knew that to get started on an upbeat note in Baltimore he could not take the morose Belichick with him. Parcells threw Belichick a career-saving lifeline and brought him to New England to help with the defense for what turned out to be a Super Bowl year. Kraft and Belichick became buddies.

“We had our budget full when Belichick got fired,” Kraft said. “Parcells said, ‘Look, this is a guy I think we should have in the system. You talk to him and you see if you agree.’ I liked him from the minute I met him. That’s when I realized I would eventually hire him as a coach.”

Kraft and Myra and Belichick and his wife, Debby, went to dinner after Parcells left, and Kraft explained why he had to make a clean break from the Parcells era. “I probably should have hired him,” Kraft said. “But in the important decisions in life, I go with my instinct. I don’t think Belichick would have been right in ’96. I told him when I didn’t hire him that I thought he had to work on how he handled the media, how he handled things. But the real problem I had with him was he was so tight with Parcells. I thought Parcells had stuck it to us. Belichick wanted to stay with us. He didn’t want to go.”

It shows the depth of Kraft’s enmity for Parcells at that point that he dismissed Belichick, whom he considered a friend, “because I didn’t want anything to do with Parcells,” he said. “Anyone who could live with Parcells for so many years and be under his thumb, I needed someone as a head coach I could trust, and I hired a guy who is the antithesis. As soon as I met Pete, I knew I wanted to hire him.”

Kraft needed to heal, and Carroll was exactly the right medicine
to help Kraft get over Parcells. Carroll has an infectious personality, and players liked playing for him.

Parcells was the tough Jersey guy. He had friends in the Boston media. Carroll was California cool, and that didn’t play well in one of the toughest sports towns in America. He used to wear sandals to work, not that there is anything wrong with that; it just didn’t play well in Beantown. “Can you see Bill Parcells coming to a meeting in sandals?” Kraft said. “Pete is one of the truly great guys in the coaching fraternity, and I didn’t give him all the support he needed. Pete was inclusive. Look, in the end, I needed someone to make me feel good. It was good for me to have a guy like Pete Carroll because he’s my kind of guy. I mean, we loved Pete. You want Pete to marry into your family. I love the guy to this day. He’s an awesome guy.”

Kraft just didn’t want him as his head coach anymore. Three years was enough. The team was going backward. Carroll won the AFC East with a 10–6 record in his first year in New England and lost 7–6 to the Steelers in Pittsburgh in the second round of the playoffs after beating Miami in the wild-card game. He made the playoffs his second year but lost in the wild-card game to the Jaguars. The Patriots won just nine games that year, and making things worse, Parcells and the Jets finished 12–4 and won the AFC East for the first time since the division was formed in 1970. New England avoided further embarrassment when the Jets blew a 10–0 second half lead in Denver in the AFC championship game and failed to make the Super Bowl. In 1999, the Patriots started 6–2 and looked like one of the better teams in the NFL, but they went just 2–6 in the second half of the season and missed the playoffs at 8–8. They had gone from eleven victories in Parcells’s final season down to ten, then nine, then eight with Carroll. Kraft fired him.

“Pete was very good, but I probably went overboard in cutting down his influence over personnel to the point where I didn’t give him a fair chance,” Kraft said.

The scars had healed from Parcells, and Kraft felt the time was right to bring Belichick back to New England. Even though Belichick came off looking like a stooge when he ran interference for Parcells in the 1997 scam by taking the head coaching job as a way to get Parcells to New York, it wasn’t something Kraft held against him. He remembered how as Belichick was leaving the Patriots, he not only spoke to him about the personnel on the team but how thorough he was in his presentation. That was his guy, and it was the right time.

It was also the start of another chapter in what had become known in the New York tabloids as the Border War between the Patriots and Jets. Parcells’s move to the Jets got it started. Then in 1998, Parcells had his salary cap specialist Mike Tannenbaum construct a six-year $36 million offer sheet filled with poison pills to Patriots restricted free agent running back Curtis Martin, who Parcells drafted in the third round in 1995. Kraft didn’t match the offer and received first- and third-round draft picks as compensation. Advantage: Parcells. Martin played eight years for the Jets and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2012.

The Jets went to the AFC championship game in 1998, and Parcells was loading up for a Super Bowl run in 1999 amid speculation that his third year back in New York would be his final year coaching the Jets. In the second quarter of the season opener against the Patriots, the Jets’ season ended when quarterback Vinny Testaverde tore his Achilles chasing after a fumble by Martin and was lost for the year. Parcells lost interest for weeks, and the Jets stumbled. Not until he switched at quarterback from Rick Mirer, the player he passed over in 1993 to select Bledsoe, to Ray Lucas halfway through the season, did Parcells seem to have the old fire. Lucas went 6–3 and helped the Jets rally to finish 8–8. But it didn’t prevent Parcells from quitting as the Jets coach within minutes of their season-ending victory over Seattle.

There was a reason he acted so quickly: there was a clause in
Belichick’s contract that automatically elevated him to Jets head coach the moment Parcells stepped down. Hess had even given him a $1 million bonus the previous year to entice him to remain and turn down opportunities to interview for head coaching jobs. Belichick had met with Al Davis for the Raiders job that went to Jon Gruden in 1998. The bonus was intended to make it attractive for him to wait out Parcells.