Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (25 page)

Fox was convinced Tebow would be the Broncos’ starting quarterback when they opened training camp in 2012, but with each event in the NFL, there is a domino effect. Peyton Manning had spinal fusion surgery on his neck a few days before the 2011 season, and although the Colts didn’t place him on injured reserve, his chances of returning during the season were minimal. The Colts cut Manning in March 2012 before he was due a $28 million option bonus, having made up their mind to gut the franchise and start over by drafting Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck with the first overall pick. Luck was considered the best quarterback prospect since Manning in 1998.

Manning might have been the most valuable player in the NFL in 2011 despite not playing one down. The Colts won only two games without him after making the playoffs nine years in a row with him. Shortly after the Colts released him, Elway and Fox acted immediately. They sent a private plane to Miami, where Manning has an off-season home in South Beach, to bring him to Denver. The plane stopped off in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to pick up Fox and Elway, who were attending workouts at Oklahoma State. It was Manning’s first free agent visit, and he was going to be thorough. He went from Denver to Arizona to meet with the Cardinals. He didn’t seem anxious to meet with the Dolphins but did so in Indianapolis after a personal request from Marino, the former Dolphins quarterback and one of Manning’s heroes. Manning had made his NFL debut in the first game of the ’98 season at home against Marino and the Dolphins. He then visited the Titans in Nashville. Manning had gone to school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and was still an icon in the state.

Manning held private workouts at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for the Broncos, 49ers, and Titans. He was working out with Duke coach David Cutcliffe, who had been an assistant coach when Manning was at Tennessee and later was his brother Eli’s head coach at Ole Miss. Manning eliminated the Cardinals and Dolphins before the workouts and never gave the Chiefs or Jets a chance to get into the race. The 49ers were the secret team pursuing Manning, and he was intrigued. San Francisco was coached by Jim Harbaugh, who had been the last quarterback to start a game for the Colts before Manning arrived in Indianapolis. Fox and Elway traveled from Denver to Durham to watch Manning throw and came away convinced that he would make it all the way back from his neck injury.

A few days later, as Elway and Fox were nervously anticipating Manning’s decision on an otherwise quiet Monday morning, the phone rang in Elway’s office. It was Manning. Fox and Elway froze.

“How are you doing?” Elway said.

“It has kind of been a rough morning because I have had to call these other teams and say I’m not going to go to work for them,” Manning said.

Elway wondered where the Broncos stood. Were they on the list of teams being rejected? Or had they won the Manning Derby?

“I just wanted to tell you that I want to come play for the Denver Broncos,” Manning said.

Elway made a thumbs-up motion to Fox. Elway continued the conversation as Fox started jumping around the office. Manning soon signed a five-year $96 million contract.

It’s easier for a coach to establish a relationship with his quarterback if he gets him right out of college than if he gets him in the middle of his career or, in Fox’s situation with Manning, the end of his career. That was why Walsh and Montana were so successful and why Belichick and Brady have always been on the same page. The young quarterbacks were slighted in the draft—Montana went in the third round, Brady in the sixth—and came in looking to soak up all the football knowledge they could from their head coaches. It was Walsh’s first year with the 49ers, but he already had developed a reputation as one of the best quarterback coaches in football. It was Belichick’s first draft with the Patriots, although he previously had been the head coach in Cleveland for five years. Brady came in with a chip on his shoulder, looking to prove he was much better than the 199th player in the draft and certainly better than the seventh quarterback selected.

Manning’s first coach with the Colts was Jim Mora, who had been the Saints’ coach in Manning’s hometown of New Orleans for many years. It was up to Fox to develop a good working relationship with Manning, who had played for Mora, Tony Dungy, and Jim Caldwell, in Indianapolis. Manning was set in his ways, and Fox knew that the best way to make it work was to defer to
Manning and let him have major input into the way the offensive playbook was written. “Welcomed input,” Fox said.

Fox is a smart, experienced coach. In his nine seasons with the Panthers, they reached two NFC championship games and one Super Bowl. Carolina owner Jerry Richardson let his contract run out after the 2010 season and then fired him. It’s unusual when owners let a coach enter the final year of his contract without either extending him or firing him. When Richardson didn’t offer Fox a new deal after the Panthers were 12–4 in 2008, Fox knew his time was just about up in Carolina. “It’s their team. I was hired to do a job,” Fox said. “I had a contract through the 2010 season, and I honored that contract. It’s the business. There are two parts of football. There is football, and then there’s the business. They are both part of the game.”

By the time Manning joined the Broncos, Fox had ten years of head coaching experience in the NFL. He knew he just needed to let Manning do what he’d always done and pretty much just get out of the way. “He raises all boats,” Fox said.

Fox made his name in the NFL as a defensive coach. He was the defensive coordinator with the Giants when they went to the Super Bowl in 2000. The offensive coordinator was Sean Payton. Jim Fassel, the head coach, was an offensive coach. Fox had the run of the defense, and the success of the Giants helped him get his first head coaching job with the Panthers. Carolina had elite offensive players in wide receiver Steve Smith and running backs DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart, and Fox squeezed some excellent seasons out of the journeyman quarterback Jake Delhomme. But those Panthers teams were not known for their creativity on offense. Fox didn’t want his offense to put his defense in a vulnerable position.

When Tony Dungy was hired by the Colts in 2002, Manning
already had played four years in the NFL. In Dungy’s six seasons in Tampa, the Bucs were known as a defensive team with an anemic and antiquated offense. Their scheme was more suited for the leather helmet days. Dungy made the playoffs four times and had a 1–4 record. In the five games, the Bucs scored a total of 39 points on six field goals and three touchdowns. They didn’t score a touchdown in any of the last three losses. Scoring 39 points was considered a good single game for Manning.

“He was kind of apprehensive because of how we played in Tampa and my reputation as a defensive coach,” Dungy said.

“Probably similar to my reputation,” Fox said.

Dungy took the job with the Colts knowing he was going to have to sell himself to Manning to win his confidence. Although Manning had yet to win a playoff game, he was one of the most prolific quarterbacks in the NFL. He didn’t want to play conservative, which was the mandate for Dungy’s quarterbacks in Tampa. Dungy had Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, and John Lynch, and so the goal was for his offense not to put his defense in bad spots by turning the ball over and creating a short field. He wasn’t looking for his quarterback to win the game, just not to lose it. That was not the way Manning played. It was not the way he wanted to play. Dungy had no intention of putting handcuffs on Manning. After going through too many years of Trent Dilfer and Shaun King with the Bucs, he finally had a quarterback who could win games.

“I think he felt early on that we might pull back and change the way we were going to do things,” Dungy said. “So I had to make that clear to him that I ran this offense in college. I understand how it works. We’ve got a lot of money spent on offense. This is an offensive team. We’re not going to change what we do. We just want to change how we do it a little bit. We’re still going to attack, but we want to get to the point where we got enough confidence we don’t have to take unnecessary chances, we can
still be explosive, but some things that I believe in, protecting the football and winning the turnover battle, that is how we are going to win.”

Dungy retained Tom Moore as the offensive coordinator. When Dungy was a quarterback at the University of Minnesota, Moore was on the staff. “It was really convincing Peyton that our offense has enough weapons if we get eighty plays in a game, we’re going to score forty points,” Dungy said. “But if we only get sixty plays or forty plays because we are turning the ball over or taking chances or our defense is not playing well enough to get us the ball back, that’s going to be difficult. So that’s how we are going to try to improve the team and not change what we do. I think having that conversation with him was good and that was the beginning of it. Then he had to kind of grow to trust me that we’d put the team together that way, and as we went on, I think he really started believing it.”

Dungy and Manning had no history together. They had met only once before Dungy was hired by the Colts. It was after the 1997 season at the Maxwell Club Awards in Philadelphia. Manning, who had just finished his career at Tennessee, was being honored as the college player of the year. Dungy had just guided the Bucs to the playoffs in his second year as head coach. It was Tampa’s first trip to the postseason since 1982, the strike year when the season was reduced to nine games and eight teams from each conference qualified for the playoffs.

“We rode in a limo together from the hotel to the affair: he and his mom and dad and my wife and I,” Dungy said. “So we’re riding in the limo and talking about the draft upcoming, his career, and everything. I said, ‘I’d love to have you, but you’re going to be the first or second pick in the draft.’ So, four years later, it’s January of ’02 and I get the job, and he comes to the press conference and he approaches me. He comes into my office and we’re talking, and I say you may not remember this conversation, and
he repeated everything to me verbatim: the hotel we stayed at, the limo ride over, my wife’s name, different guys who got awards, and what a nice evening it was.”

Dungy was blown away by Manning’s memory. They had not seen each other since that night in Philadelphia. “I just said, ‘Wow, I felt like I have a good memory. I remember the night and the conversation, but I certainly didn’t remember the hotel and all of that,’ ” he said. “I said, I see why this guy is special, just his ability to process information and remember things.”

Then came the money line from Manning. “I’m looking forward to being coached; we want to win, whatever it takes,” he said.

The Colts made the playoffs in 2002 but were embarrassed in the wild-card round by the Jets 41–0. It was the fourth straight playoff game in which Dungy’s team failed to score a touchdown. That was not a shutdown Jets defense, either. It was a tough time for Dungy. Jon Gruden had been hired to replace him in Tampa, and just a few weeks after the Colts’ season ended, the Bucs won the Super Bowl. It was the team Dungy helped build, but it was Gruden’s system. The change helped the Bucs. But the change for the Colts and Manning was not paying off yet.

Manning’s numbers improved only slightly in Dungy’s first season. His touchdowns went from twenty-six to twenty-seven, and he cut his interceptions from twenty-three to nineteen. That was not what Dungy had in mind. Manning was still giving the ball away too much. By their second year together, the message started to get through. In the opening game of the 2003 season, the Colts beat the Browns 9–6 in Cleveland. “We didn’t play lights out, but we won,” Dungy said.

He thought that was the game when Manning bought into his philosophy. He did not have a great game, throwing two interceptions, but the Colts’ defense kept the Browns out of the end zone. It was 6–6 when the Colts got the ball at their own 24 with 2:39 remaining. The Colts called ten consecutive pass plays as Dungy put the game in Manning’s hands. He completed eight
for 65 yards, setting up Mike Vanderjagt’s game-winning 45-yard field goal with one second remaining. The Colts went on to win twelve games and finish first in the AFC South. Manning finally won his first two playoff games but then lost to the Patriots in the conference championship game. The Colts lost again to the Patriots, this time in the divisional round, in 2004.

The Colts had a huge disappointment in 2005. They were the AFC’s number one seed, finishing with a 14–2 record after they opened the season with thirteen consecutive victories. But they lost to the number six seed Steelers at home in a heartbreaker in the AFC championship game. It was a very difficult time for Dungy. Just a few weeks earlier, his son James had committed suicide in Florida. There was a feeling that Dungy might walk away after that season, but he elected to return in 2006.

That turned out to be a very good decision for the Colts. Dungy didn’t have his best team, but he had a resilient team. They finished 12–4 and were the AFC’s number three seed. Dungy, who had lost his first playoff game as the Colts coach to his good friend Herm Edwards when he was the Jets’ coach in 2002, beat Edwards in the wild-card round in his first season coaching the Chiefs. In the next round, the Colts beat the Ravens in Baltimore 15–6. Neither team was able to score a touchdown, but Dungy had built Manning a defense. Even though he had a bad game, throwing for only 170 yards with two interceptions, the Colts’ defense shut down the Baltimore offense. Maybe this was going to be the Colts’ year.

They caught a big break when the Patriots beat the Chargers in San Diego in the divisional round. The Chargers had been the number one seed. But with New England beating them and the Colts beating the number two seed Ravens, Indianapolis would host the AFC championship game against the Patriots.

Dungy and Manning had lost to Belichick and Brady twice in the playoffs. They beat them this time, 38–34. Two weeks later, the Colts beat the Bears to capture Super Bowl XLI.

“I just have to say how sweet this is,” Dungy said.

He had the obligatory Gatorade bucket dumped on his head by his players. They carried him off the field on their shoulders. On the podium Dungy had passed the Vince Lombardi Trophy to Manning. Their relationship began in a limo ride and picked up four years later with the coach feeling the need to win the trust of his quarterback, whereas it’s usually the quarterback who needs to win the trust of his coach. Now they had achieved the ultimate together, which forges a lifelong bond.