Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (28 page)

Rex Ryan lives in Summit, New Jersey, a mere twenty minutes from the Jets’ offices in Florham Park. He fell right into the trap in his first year as the Jets head coach in 2009 of sleeping in his office on Monday and Tuesday nights, the busiest nights of the week, when the coaches are preparing the game plan to present to the players on Wednesday. As Ryan became more familiar with the demands of the job after his rookie season, he scaled back the overnight stays in the office. He stays until he feels the work for the day is done. “I’ve never been a guy that has punched a clock,” he said. “And I don’t want our coaches doing that either.”

It’s not as if Ryan is staying over for the luxury accommodations. His office is on the ground floor of the Jets’ sprawling complex. When you exit the main door of the coaching suite, it empties right into the Jets’ indoor practice facility. There are no windows to the outside world where the coaches work. It’s dreary. No turndown service or chocolates on the pillow, either. But the team cafeteria is about forty yards away, so securing food is not a problem.

There are enough hours in the day to drive home, but there are times Ryan finds that it takes some of the pressure off when he is able to work at his own pace without then having to drive home. “That’s just me because I’m slow,” he said. He has come up with creative ways to help him deal with dyslexia. It may take him longer, but that has never stopped him. “There are other coaches who can leave at nine o’clock or ten o’clock. That’s fine. There’s other coaches who are here later than me on other days,” Ryan said. “Sometimes I will leave and come back. I hate that. My deal is I want our coaches out of here by midnight because I want them fresh for the next day. For the most part, that is the way it is.”

The wives become conditioned to not seeing their husbands much during the season. Joe Gibbs picked up a lifetime supply of Redskins Park points for all the times he slept in his office, especially in his first stint with the Redskins. He spent the early part
of the week staying over in his office and would make it home late in the week. As he walked out the door, his wife, Pat, would hand him a tape of all the latest news and updates on what was going on with their two young sons. He would play the tape in his car. When Pat started yelling at one of the boys, Gibbs would hit the eject button and put on some music instead.

“My wife one time got on me when I came home early. It was eleven at night,” Ryan said.

“What are you doing?” Michelle Ryan asked.

“I feel good. We’ve already played these guys. We are ready. We got them dialed in,” Ryan said.

There was no need to stay in the office any longer. Ryan was convinced that his preparation was complete. But his wife had become so used to the routine of his staying late, sleeping in his office Monday and Tuesday nights every week even though he lived so close to the Jets’ facility, that it surprised her when he came home at a reasonable hour.

John Fox, who coached nine years with the Panthers and made it to one Super Bowl and then was hired by the Broncos, says that he slept in his office maybe once or twice in his years in Carolina.

“With today’s technology, if you can’t get it done between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., you are doing something wrong,” Fox said. “Looking at cutups on film, you just have to touch a button. Back in the day, we were splicing 16-millimeter film. You can practice your team all hours of the night, too. At some point, there are diminishing returns. You are standing before the team, and you can hardly stay awake. You are not making good decisions. And with the players, you can work them until they are half dead.”

Fox has managed to keep his job in perspective. There is only so much you can do to prepare the players, and then they must go out and play. Not all coaches see it that way. “Everybody has got their own personality. Some have addictive personalities,” Fox said. “I don’t think any of us are finding a cure for cancer. It’s not
like we are doing something that is really hard. Coaches get upset if you leave too soon. I’m not one of those guys.”

Coaches know they make the job much tougher than it needs to be. But they also know that the margin for error has been reduced drastically in the free agent era. Owners are paying so much for players in a system designed to create parity that coaches have no more than three years to get a team into the playoffs or they are gone. In prior eras, a team would introduce its new coach, who would announce a five-year plan to turn things around. Early in the development period, he would draft a quarterback and then tutor him for two or three years before putting him on the field.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Elite college quarterbacks start right away. The owner expects the quarterback to be playing at a high level by his second year. He expects the coach to be in the playoffs by his third year or he will find another coach.

“No doubt, it’s a hard way to make a living,” Fox said.

There are thirty-two of these jobs, and the pressure to win and avoid getting fired leads to awfully long hours. But it’s also a glamorous life, and coaches are well compensated. Jeff Fisher made it to one Super Bowl and lost in his sixteen full seasons as the head coach of the Houston Oilers/Tennessee Titans. Including the playoffs, he was twenty-six games over .500. He is a very good coach. After the Titans fired him following the 2010 season, he sat out one season. He was the most accomplished candidate in a weak pool of available coaches after the 2011 season. The Dolphins wanted Fisher. So did the Rams, the team coached by Vermeil that beat his Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV after the 1999 season. Fisher had leverage and turned it into a five-year $35 million contract, making him one of the highest paid coaches in the league.

Mike Shanahan, who won two Super Bowls in Denver before moving to Washington, has never been a sleep-in-his-office coach. He does work fourteen hours a day during the off-season
to prepare for the season and believes coaches who work until 2 a.m. haven’t done a good job setting things up. “Now, does that mean we don’t get in early?” Shanahan said in his Redskins Park office in Ashburn, Virginia. “I’ve had the same hours since I’ve been in the NFL. I’ll go from six o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night,” he said. “I only live ten minutes from here, so the chances of me staying over are very slim.”

Vermeil was an extreme case. But it takes all kinds. One prominent player once complained that his head coach was not a hard worker. He said the coach used to park one of his cars in the front of the team’s offices in the spot that had his name tag on it. He parked another car in the back of the building in a spot with no name tag. The coach had a routine of leaving early in the car that was parked in the back but giving the impression that he was in the building because the car out front was still there. He was the anti-Vermeil, and he survived longer than he deserved to as a head coach.

Dick Vermeil’s sabbatical from football lasted quite a few more years than he first intended. The plan was to sit out one year, get reenergized, maybe reevaluate the way he did things, and get right back into the grind. He had job offers every year he was out except for one year. Many years he had more than one offer. The Falcons wanted him. The Bucs wanted him. The Chiefs wanted him. The Rams wanted him. It’s nice to feel wanted.

Once when Vermeil’s father was dying of pancreatic cancer, he was sitting by his side when Tampa Bay owner Hugh Culverhouse called.

“You can write your own check,” Culverhouse said.

“Give me a day to think about it,” Vermeil said.

He turned to his dying father.

“Dad, that was Hugh Culverhouse.”

“Who’s that?”

“He owns the Tampa Bay Bucs. He’s a nice man. He just offered me an unbelievable situation.”

“Do you need the aggravation?”

“No.”

“Then don’t do it.”

Vermeil called Culverhouse back and turned down the job.

“I never went into coaching because of money,” Vermeil said. “I coached in this league for a long time and made nothing. I’m not going to go back into coaching because of money, but I’m not going to go into coaching without good money.”

The Rams kept calling every time they had an opening. Vermeil kept saying no.

Vermeil regretted not taking his good friend Carl Peterson up on his offer in 1989 to be the Chiefs’ coach. They had worked together at UCLA and in Philadelphia and had remained close. When Vermeil turned him down, Peterson hired Marty Schottenheimer.

“I just didn’t trust myself,” he said. “They are going to pay a lot of money; they deserve the best they can get.”

He was tempted when new Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie wanted him in 1995. Lurie had inherited Rich Kotite and fired him after one season. Vermeil came close but got cold feet.

“When I spoke to Jeffrey, it was the thing that really convinced me that I wanted to do it again,” Vermeil said. “It was not anybody’s fault but my own because he offered me a job. I can remember saying, Jeffrey, I’m not your guy. I’d been away from coaching at that time for twelve years. And here’s an entirely new management staff. None of them had been in pro football. When I went to New York and met with them and the lawyers and I looked at it, and none of these guys have been in football and I haven’t for twelve years, I don’t think I’m the right guy for the job.”

That would have been an incredible story. Vermeil had remained popular with Eagles fans, and they would have embraced
his return. Gibbs left the Redskins after the 1992 season and returned in 2004. Gibbs had said he would never coach again and then changed his mind. Vermeil never said that. Clearly, he wanted to coach again. But he found a reason every time to stay away.

After Vermeil decided not to return to the Eagles, Lurie was at the East-West Shrine Game in Palo Alto, California, where he ran into Bill Walsh, one of Vermeil’s closest friends.

“Why in the hell didn’t you hire him? Get it done,” Walsh said.

That prompted Vermeil and Lurie to start talking again. But Lurie elected to hire Ray Rhodes. He would have been better off with Vermeil. Even so, with so little experience in the Eagles’ front office and so much time away from the game, Vermeil said, “I didn’t feel confident enough that I could do it.”

He was becoming a big tease to NFL owners. That could not continue forever, of course. By the time the Rams called again in 1997, Vermeil was sixty-one years old. He was still fighting the inner turmoil. Could he coach again in the NFL and not star in the sequel to
The Burnout
? He couldn’t pledge to the Rams that he would stay long enough to guide them through a rebuilding period. What happens if he wants to leave after one year? That wouldn’t be fair. He had been away so long, and the game had changed so much and the attitude of the players had changed so much. Was it too late? Vermeil had kept up with the game in his media work because that’s who he is. He knew personnel. He knew how to structure an organization. The scary part was that he also knew himself.

“I wasn’t sure within myself that I was capable of going back and keeping the game in proper perspective,” he said. “I met with a psychologist, probably ten times, and really studied myself. I just wanted to correct some faults within my own personality. It was good for me. It was really good for me. I just never was sure I could control my own drive.”

Vermeil worked for the Los Angeles Rams for three years before
UCLA hired him as its head coach. The Rams played in St. Louis now. Vermeil was reluctant when the Rams called after the 1996 season, and so they started to interview other candidates. They came back to Vermeil, and he finally said yes. “I just figured if I didn’t do it now, I would be too old,” he said. “No one is going to offer me the president of football operations and head football coach when I had been out of it fourteen years.”

He signed a five-year $9 million contract. The money had changed since he’d last coached. In Philadelphia, he made $50,000 per year when he was hired. It was important to get paid market value, but Vermeil returned because his passion had returned. “Fourteen years ago, I left coaching. I left coaching because I had to. And I’m not embarrassed to say it,” Vermeil said when he was introduced by the Rams. “Today I’m back, because I have to. I’m excited about being able to say it.”