Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (14 page)

Parcells had a special relationship with Taylor even though he caused plenty of aggravation for the coach and the organization. LT had a drug problem, and Parcells did his best to try to get Taylor straightened out. But there were always questions whether he was enabling him by also doing everything he could to keep him on the field.

“I worried about him a lot. Of course I did. He knows that,” Parcells said. “What really stings my ass is when people say Parcells looked the other way because that is so much bullshit. There’s not a fragment of truth to that. Not a shred. I didn’t look the other way.”

What was Parcells trying to do for him? “Help,” he said. “Just help. I’m not going to go on about what I did. I did a lot and tried a lot.”

Taylor knew that he was protected by his production on the field. “That’s a different atmosphere back in the ’80s than it is now,” he said. “It is not as public as it is now. You got to understand back in those days, even though you have a problem, it’s all about what you are going to do on Sunday. So the people will tend to turn a blind eye to that a little bit as long as the law don’t get involved. I know Bill was concerned, but hey, he had a job; he was trying to protect his job, too. He couldn’t say to me, ‘Are you doing drugs?’ You can’t say that to me. On Sunday I was making twelve tackles and two or three sacks; what are you going to say?
During that time, I’m not listening to nobody anyway. As long as I can do what I do on Sunday, what is the problem? Luckily, it didn’t get really bad until after my career was over.”

The mold was broken with Parcells. He was the Giants head coach for eight years. That’s now a lifetime in the NFL. It allowed him to build lifelong relationships with many of his players. Even though he left the Giants after they won their second Super Bowl in 1990 and despite the Giants going into a down period with Ray Handley for two years, there was never any talk of resentment or abandonment from the Giants players. Parcells helped them turn into winners. “I love Simms. I love a lot of those guys,” Parcells said. “I got the nicest letter from Simms [around 2005]. Just wonderful. It’s why you coach.”

Simms told Parcells in the letter how much he appreciated him. “I had a lot of those. They must think I’m going to die,” Parcells said.

The Giants held a twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of their 1986 Super Bowl championship team in New Jersey in 2011. Simms said that when Parcells walked into the room, things got quiet. “Bill is here,” they all whispered.

“They did it out of tremendous respect,” Simms said. “They couldn’t wait to see him. Listen, they all thanked him.”

When the Giants lined up for a team picture at the reunion, they sat in the same spot as they had for the picture in 1986. “If they filmed it, it would have been the funniest hour on NFL Network,” Simms said. “Guys were telling stories. Bill was talking about the whole team. It was pretty cool.”

Hall of Fame linebacker Harry Carson was perhaps the wisest of all those Giants. “The thing we can all say about Bill is he put us in a position to win,” he said.

The Parcells coaching tree has produced eight Super Bowl appearances and six Super Bowl championships, and the two losses
came when one of the branches defeated the other. Combine that with Parcells’s three appearances and two championships, and that’s a total of 11 Super Bowls and eight championships in the first 46 Super Bowls. That means there’s been a Parcells connection to nearly 25 percent of all the Super Bowls.

Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick may have been the two best coaches on any NFL staff since Vince Lombardi was running the offense and Tom Landry was running the defense as assistants for the New York Giants in the late 1950s. Parcells and Belichick first worked together as assistants for Ray Perkins with the Giants in 1981–1982 before Parcells was named head coach in 1983. He elevated Belichick from linebacker coach to defensive coordinator in 1985.

They won two Super Bowls together with the Giants and then made it to one Super Bowl with the Patriots and one AFC championship game with the Jets before their bitter parting in 2000. When they were apart, Belichick did much better. Parcells never made the Super Bowl in any of the seven seasons he coached without Belichick on his staff. Belichick made it to five Super Bowls without Parcells in his first twelve seasons in New England.

Simms says he’s looked at the team picture from the 1986 championship team and wondered, “Were we that good or were we just coached that well?”

Parcells let his coaches coach, especially Belichick. In the 1990 playoffs, the Giants played a four-man front against the Bears, a three-man front against the 49ers, and then a two-man front against the Bills in the Super Bowl. Belichick devised the schemes. They all worked.

“I had a lot of faith in him, but never to the point where I didn’t know or have a pulse on it,” Parcells said. “The conversations were much shorter because we had been together so long. I could say, ‘Bill, remember when we did this against Roy Green?’ He always knew. Of course, he had ideas, too. It worked well.”

The cold war between Parcells and Belichick finally ended at a
Hall of Fame luncheon for Carson in summer 2006 at Gallagher’s Steak House in Midtown Manhattan. There were speeches by Parcells, Belichick, and Schottenheimer, who was Carson’s first position coach after he was drafted in 1976 and helped him in the transition from defensive end at South Carolina State to linebacker with the Giants. It was a very nice affair. As it was winding down, Parcells and Belichick sat at a table with Schottenheimer and finally broke the ice. It had been six years since they had worked together or really communicated. They repaired their relationship that day.

They will always have one thing in common: they loved their time with the Giants. It was unfortunate that business got in the way of their friendship. “Hey, that’s life,” Parcells said. “Things go forward, and everybody has to make their own decision. So he made some of his and I made some of mine. Time goes on. It’s not in anybody’s best interests to have things the way they temporarily were. We were back on pretty good terms pretty quickly.”

Ten former assistants of Parcells went on to become NFL head coaches: Belichick (Browns, Patriots), Tom Coughlin (Jaguars, Giants), Sean Payton (Saints), Romeo Crennel (Browns, Chiefs), Al Groh (Jets), Chris Palmer (Browns), Eric Mangini (Jets, Browns), Tony Sparano (Dolphins), Todd Haley (Chiefs), and Ray Handley (Giants). Charlie Weis, another Parcells assistant, has been the head coach at Notre Dame and Kansas, and Mike MacIntyre was hired as the San Jose State head coach in 2010. He worked for Parcells in Dallas.

There were four general managers in the NFL in 2012 who also worked in the front office for Parcells: Mike Tannenbaum (Jets), Scott Pioli (Chiefs), Jeff Ireland (Dolphins), and Trent Baalke (49ers).

Belichick has won three Super Bowls with New England. Coughlin, who joined the Giants in 1988 and was the receivers coach for their second title, won two Super Bowls with New York in his first eight years as the head coach. Payton, who worked
three years for Parcells in Dallas, won the Super Bowl for the Saints.

“Obviously, Bill made some pretty good choices along the way of the people that would work for him,” Coughlin said. “So you have to add that ability to his long list of things that he has done extremely well in his career.”

Coughlin learned Giants football from Parcells, which means being a physical team that plays great defense and doesn’t turn the ball over. “That was driven home very easily for me,” Coughlin said. “We played a certain way, we practiced a certain way. We had an element of toughness about our teams. Our guys were very proud of that.”

Payton was a coaching star after the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2009—and before Bountygate brought him down in 2012—and he counted on Parcells for direction as the game against Peyton Manning and the Colts approached. By then, Parcells was running the Dolphins and the Super Bowl was being played in Miami. Over a four-day stretch between the Saturday eight days before the game and the Tuesday leading up to the game, Parcells’s phone kept ringing and Payton kept calling for advice. He also saw him once when the Saints worked out at the Dolphins’ facility that Monday.

“I bet you the son of a bitch called me ten times. Ten. Not one. Ten. Saturday he’s still in New Orleans. How about Monday? What do you think about Monday? What do you think about Friday at the end of the week? What happens if one of my guys gets in trouble? How would you handle that? Every fucking question,” Parcells said. “I said I told my team that if any of you get drunk, any of you get arrested, you’re going home. You’re not playing in the game. You’re going fucking home. So I said write it down, right now, look them all in the face, I don’t care who you are. Just do it and you are going home.”

Parcells also let him in on a big-game secret that obviously stuck.

“I told him you got to have balls to win this game,” Parcells said. “He was asking me about all these things. You ran these fakes in these biggest games. Why did you do it? You got to have balls. But I said you got to calculate this shit. You can’t just indiscriminately decide to run it. I’m sure that was in his head with the onside kick.”

Payton called for Ambush, an onside kick to start the second half. The Saints recovered, and it gave them an extra possession, which they converted into a key touchdown in their victory over the Colts. Parcells pulled off a fake punt—Arapahoe in the Giants’ playbook—on fourth and one from his own 46 on the Giants’ first possession of the second half of his first Super Bowl against Denver. They trailed 10–9, picked up the first down and scored a touchdown, and never trailed again. It was a risky call. If the Giants had failed, they would have given John Elway a short field.

Payton never tipped Parcells off to the onside kick, but Parcells was proud of him. “I don’t want any credit for any of this,” he said. “This kid is his own guy. He really is. You can influence people because you do have to have balls. And your team has got to know you have them.”

Parcells was not happy when Payton called a reverse in the second quarter to wide receiver Devery Henderson that lost 7 yards. He told him the day after the game, “Sean, what the fuck are you doing? You bringing out the jugglers and the clowns? Why fucking do that?”

He had warned Payton not to “start bringing extra furniture into your house now because it’s not going to look good once you get it in there,” meaning don’t clutter up the playbook this late in the season. “You better give them a song they know by heart, but if they don’t know it, the pressure of the game is going to get them,” he said.

Payton said that working for Parcells “for three years, it was like law school.”

Haley was hired in Kansas City by Pioli, Parcells’ son-in-law, but he was fired with three games remaining in his third season, in 2011. He was then hired by the Steelers, the team his father Dick helped stock with wise personnel decisions during Pittsburgh’s tremendous Super Bowl runs in the ’70s, as the offensive coordinator. Parcells had given Todd Haley his first coaching job with the Jets in 1997 and later hired him in Dallas. Dick Haley worked for Parcells with the Jets as well.

“In my mind, Bill is the best there is at what he does,” Todd Haley said. “I know any business he was in he would have been at the top also. He just knows how to handle people and how to push the right button, on top of knowing football as well as anyone. There isn’t a day that goes by that something doesn’t come up that I don’t think, ‘What would Bill do in this situation?’ ”

Parcells was just passing down wisdom he picked up along the way from Al Davis and Tom Landry, Chuck Knox, Mike Holovak, and Bucko Kilroy. He never forgot how they helped him out when he was a young head coach, and he’s been committed to helping the next generation of coaches. He was touched when Payton called him the morning after the game and starting crying, telling Parcells he was a father figure to him. “I told him I was honored,” Parcells said.

Parcells doesn’t want to take any credit for the success of his assistants. “We all work from our experiences. Organizationally and how to approach things, they all took a lot,” he said. “But they are their own guys. They have their own identity.”

In the end, they are all Parcells guys.

The rain was
slamming down on Tony Dungy as NFL officials hurried to assemble the podium for the Super Bowl XLI trophy presentation. The Indianapolis Colts had just defeated the Chicago Bears in a driving rainstorm in Miami. It was the tenth Super Bowl in southern Florida and the forty-first overall and the first played when the NFL would have been better off indoors.

There were a lot of thoughts spinning around in Dungy’s mind. He and Bears coach Lovie Smith, one of his former assistants with the Bucs, were the first African-American head coaches to take their teams to the Super Bowl. That made the game historic even before it was played. Dungy then carved a deeper and unforgettable place in history as the first African-American coach to win the Super Bowl. It could have happened earlier for Dungy, but he could never get the Bucs to the next level in the six years he coached in Tampa. He turned around a moribund and ridiculed program and even brought the Bucs all the way to the NFC championship game in just his fourth year after the 1999 season, where they lost to the Rams.