Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (22 page)

Broncos quarterback John Elway and coach Mike Shanahan celebrate the Broncos’ victory over the Packers in Super Bowl XXIII. The next year, they would beat the Falcons and their nemesis, Dan Reeves, in the Super Bowl in the final game of Elway’s career.
Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos

When Jimmy Johnson was hired to coach the Cowboys in 1989, his only assets were Herschel Walker and the first pick in the draft. He selected Troy Aikman in the draft, but a little over one month into the season he traded Walker to the Vikings in a cleverly constructed one-sided deal that helped turn the Cowboys into Super Bowl champs. Johnson used one of the picks to move up in the 1990 draft to take Emmitt Smith, who finished his career as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher.
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Broncos coach John Fox was thrilled to ride the wave of Tebowmania into the 2011 playoffs with a series of incredible last-minute victories. But John Elway and Fox acted quickly to trade Tebow to the Jets after they signed Peyton Manning, who had been released by the Colts.
Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos

Fox jumped around Elway’s office as Manning was telling Elway he had decided to sign with the Broncos after the Colts released him. Fox knew the pressure was now on him to make it work with one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, but it was a challenge he was eager to accept.
Copyright © Eric Lars Bakke/Denver Broncos

Dick Vermeil turned around a moribund program in Philadelphia, but burned himself out doing it. He quit the Eagles after the 1982 season to regroup, which took much longer than anticipated. After turning down several opportunities, he accepted the Rams job in 1997 and won the Super Bowl in his third season.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles

Jets coach Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez have enjoyed a father-son relationship, but Pops wasn’t too happy when his quarterback was caught eating a hot dog on the bench during a 2009 game in Oakland, which Ryan considered a sign of disrespect to the Raiders. Sanchez had to be a little confused when Ryan traded for Tim Tebow in 2012, less than two weeks after Sanchez signed a contract extension.
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Giants coach Tom Coughlin puckers up and plants a kiss on the Vince Lombardi Trophy after New York defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, the second time in five seasons Coughlin defeated Bill Belichick in the Super Bowl. After the game, Coughlin was hugging Flava Flav, a hip-hop star he had never heard of before wrapping his arms around him.
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Mike Shanahan
had nowhere to turn. He was stuck right in the middle of one of the most bitter coach-quarterback feuds in NFL history: Dan Reeves versus John Elway.

It’s virtually impossible to succeed if the coach and the quarterback have little use for each other. You can have the creative tension that existed between Bill Walsh and Joe Montana and still win because of the respect they had for each other. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady don’t have to spend their summer weekends sailing on the waters off picturesque Cape Cod to win three Super Bowls, but no coach and quarterback think more alike. Jimmy Johnson and Troy Aikman were sparring partners until Johnson, who has an affinity for fish tanks, realized that Aikman was becoming interested in having his own aquarium. “I have a saltwater fish tank Jimmy helped me put together,” Aikman said. They bonded over goldfish and guppies and won two Super Bowls together.

It’s not necessary for the coach and the quarterback to find a hobby that each enjoys so that they have something to discuss while dissecting the game plan, but they can’t be stabbing each other in the back. Few situations have been as contentious as Reeves and Elway. One of the great achievements in the 1980s was Denver getting to three Super Bowls with Elway and Reeves
barely being able to stand the sight of each other. Of course, they lost all three of those Super Bowls over a four-year period to the Giants, Redskins, and 49ers by the combined score of 136–40. That was humiliating and an unsightly blotch on Elway’s record that was not erased until the final two years of his career.

Elway once described his relationship with Reeves as “the worst.” He didn’t like his offense. He didn’t like him. Reeves’s conservative style would keep Elway handcuffed until the fourth quarter, when he would let him loose and tell him to go win the game. Elway invariably responded to the pressure by bailing out Reeves and rallying Denver to a victory. A story in
Sports Illustrated
during training camp in the summer of 1993, the Broncos’ first after Reeves was fired, said Elway had rallied the Broncos to thirty-one game-saving drives in the fourth quarter in the ten years he played for Reeves. “That was our philosophy,” Elway said.

Elway, who had the greatest arm the NFL has ever seen, was naturally frustrated. His statistics were dwarfed by those of Miami’s Dan Marino and Buffalo’s Jim Kelly, the other two future Hall of Fame quarterbacks from the quarterback class of 1983, and that bugged him. If Reeves had let Elway be Elway, he could have been setting all those passing records instead of Marino. Then again, Marino made it to the Super Bowl in his second season and lost, and that was his only appearance during his sensational seventeen-year career. And he played for Don Shula, the all-time winningest coach in NFL history.

“The last three years have been hell,” Elway told
Sports Illustrated
that summer. “I know that I would not have been back here if Dan Reeves had been here. It wasn’t worth it to me. I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t any fun, and I got tired of working with him.”

When Reeves was informed at the Giants’ training camp of Elway’s remarks, he responded, “Just tell him it wasn’t exactly heaven for me, either. One of these days, I hope he grows up. Maybe he’ll mature sometime.”

Shanahan was the offensive coordinator at the University of Florida when Reeves hired him to be his quarterback coach in 1984, Elway’s second year in the league. The Broncos had pulled off a spectacular trade one week after the 1983 draft to acquire Elway, considered the greatest quarterback prospect of all time. The Colts had the first overall pick, but Elway was adamant that he wouldn’t play in Baltimore. It had nothing to do with the city or the team. He didn’t want to play for volatile coach Frank Kush.

Elway’s father, Jack, the head coach at San Jose State at the time, steered his son away from Kush. Colts general manager Ernie Accorsi knew his team needed an elite quarterback to have any chance of winning a championship and didn’t want to trade Elway, whose only viable recourse would be to sit out the year and wait for the 1984 draft. Elway became an outfielder in the New York Yankees system—he spent six weeks playing minor league ball for the Yankees after his junior year at Stanford—and threatened to play baseball that summer and take the year off from football. That was not what Elway wanted—he knew his future was not in baseball—but he had no desire to play for the Colts. Accorsi was prepared to call his bluff.

“I had made up my mind unless I got the greatest compensation in the history of the league—three number ones, with two in one year, and two number twos—I wasn’t going to make the trade,” Accorsi said.