Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (32 page)

“Guys, we’ll win the game, don’t worry about it. Don’t let him bother you,” Shanahan said.

He knew Davis was trying to distract his players. Davis, though not a big man, had an imposing presence. He was a legend of the game and a mysterious man at that. The end of the 49ers’ pregame drill took them back to their own 5-yard line. Davis was standing 35 yards away. “We are running plays left and running plays to the right. All of a sudden everybody is chirping in my ear,” Shanahan said.

“Hey, get him out of there,” the players said to Shanahan.

“Guys, just concentrate on the game. We beat them, all that stuff will take care of itself,” he said.

But Shanahan was pissed at Davis for disrupting his pregame routine. And surely he was still pissed at him for not paying him the $250,000.

“Now I started thinking. Okay, so we got one more play left,” Shanahan said.

Shanahan is telling this story seated behind his desk at Redskins Park. It’s a quiet spring day, but suddenly he’s animated. On the sideline, Shanahan’s face gets red, and it looks like the veins are about to pop out of his neck when he gets mad. But off the field, you rarely see his emotional side. He’s mild-mannered. He doesn’t raise his voice. He tries to not to show too much of himself. But he was talking about Davis now. He had no use for Davis. Davis had embarrassed him by firing him almost without giving him a chance, and during that pregame Shanahan wanted to put a scare into his nemesis.

Shanahan came up with the idea of how to send Davis back to his side of the field and needed one of his quarterbacks to be his accomplice. Young said he was more than happy to oblige. “Al was in the way,” Young said. “It’s our field.”

Shanahan was reluctant to reveal the identity of the quarterback who threw the ball that sent Davis flying. First, he said it was Steve Bono, but by 1994, Bono was in Kansas City. Then he said it was Elvis Grbac, who was Young’s backup. Shanahan went out of his way to say it wasn’t Young. He didn’t want to distract him, he said. Young admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that it indeed was him. Young said Shanahan was just trying to protect him. They are close friends.

“Throw a go route,” Shanahan told Young. “If you happen to hit that guy in the white outfit with the ball, you won’t make me mad.”

The receiver was Rice. He ran the go route.

Shanahan didn’t really want to drill Davis. But if it happened, maybe he would never stand on the 49ers’ side of the field again. Of course, if he hit Davis, Shanahan would never get his $250,000.
Young dropped back to pass. He threw the ball in Davis’s direction. Rice, whom Shanahan did not bring into the loop on this little bit of mischief, was running downfield, looking up for the ball. He was not looking at Davis. He didn’t see Davis. Shanahan saw the ball. He saw the receiver. He saw Davis. All three were about to occupy the same spot. Shanahan thought Davis saw the ball coming. He did not. “He’s looking at our offensive and defensive linemen,” Shanahan said.

Young threw a perfect pass. Rice was going for it. Davis was oblivious.

“Oh, my God,” Shanahan said. “I wanted to scare him. I didn’t want to kill him.”

The ball and the receiver were closing in on Davis. “Al realizes that the ball and everybody is coming at him about five yards before there is going to be contact,” Shanahan said. “I think he’s going to be run over. And he dives; he actually dives out of the way. Well, half of our players see what happens, and they are all laughing.”

Young drilled Davis in the leg. It was not surprising that he found his target. Young completed 64.3 percent of his passes in his career and has the third highest passer rating in NFL history. “Ten years after this happened, I was walking out of a stadium on a Monday night, and Al came up to me,” Young said. “He told me that he knew it was me.”

Young told Davis that he was ashamed of himself, more so than with anything else he had ever done. He then sent him a letter of apology.

Shanahan is so fired up that he gets out of his seat to finish the story. He loves this story. It was revenge. He explains in great detail Davis diving on the grass at Candlestick Park, getting to his feet, his hair falling down in front of his face. Shanahan just can’t stop laughing. Davis stared him down from 35 yards away and gave him the middle finger.

Fuck you.

“Our team goes crazy,” Shanahan said. “Everybody is laughing. Al is looking right back at the huddle, knowing it’s intentional.”

Shanahan’s only concern once he realized Davis was indeed alive was not letting his personal feelings about Davis interfere with the game. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. The 49ers won 44–14. After beating the Chargers 49–26 in Super Bowl XXIX, Shanahan was on his way back to Denver as the head coach to work with Elway. This time, he would last a lot longer than he did with the Raiders before he was fired. He won two Super Bowls, which did not impress Davis.

“Shanahan has an asterisk next to those two Super Bowls, because they were caught cheating,” Davis said.

The Broncos indeed were fined in 2001 for reported infractions concerning deferred payments to Elway and Terrell Davis for circumventing the salary cap between 1996 and 1998, during which time the Broncos won their Super Bowls.

“I don’t think I have to go down that road anymore,” Shanahan said in response to Davis’s comments.

The strength of the relationship between the millionaire and billionaire owners and their head coaches is often a direct reflection of wins and losses. When Shanahan was winning Super Bowls and getting the Broncos to the playoffs just about every year, you heard about his tight bond with Denver owner Pat Bowlen. But when things went bad in 2008 and Denver fell apart down the stretch, turning an 8–5 first-place record into an 8–8 nonplayoff year, Bowlen decided to fire his friend.

Shanahan’s shelf life eventually expired in Denver. And his next stop was working for the mercurial Daniel Snyder.

On the opposite side of the table where the coach sits when he’s told to pack his bags and take his playbook with him is the rich owner doing the firing. It’s never a pleasant experience, but Daniel Snyder of the Redskins is really good at it. After buying the
team in 1999, he fired Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, and Jim Zorn; didn’t bring back interim coach Terry Robiskie; and had Steve Spurrier quit after two years and Joe Gibbs go back into retirement after four years. By the time he hired Shanahan in 2010, it was his seventh head coach in twelve years. During exactly the same period, Andy Reid was the only coach of the division rival Eagles. The Giants had two. The Cowboys had five, but then again, Jerry Jones is Snyder’s role model.

Finding common ground with his coaches has not been an easy thing for Snyder. He tortured Turner; ran off Schottenheimer; made a bad decision on Spurrier; revered Gibbs as a kid growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland; had no respect for Zorn; and allowed Shanahan to try to re-create the magic he had in Denver with Elway. Shanahan made a mistake trading for Donovan McNabb his first year, made a bigger mistake trying to get through the 2011 season with Rex Grossman and John Beck, and then traded three first-round picks and a second-round pick to move up four spots in the 2012 draft to position the Redskins to take Baylor’s Robert Griffin III, the Heisman Trophy winner. Elway won two Super Bowls playing for Shanahan. Jay Cutler was starting to develop in Denver when Shanahan was fired. Griffin gives Snyder hope that the future is secure at the most important position.

Snyder has developed a reputation as a meddling owner to be avoided if longevity and continuity are high on the list of a coach’s goals. Snyder pays well but has a reputation of being impossible to work with for any length of time before he sends his coach running for the exits.

He was just a baby when he bought the Redskins and Jack Kent Cooke Stadium in May 1999 for $800 million. Snyder is a college dropout and a self-made American success story. He was thirty-three years old when he joined the exclusive NFL ownership fraternity. He got his financial empire started by leasing jets to fly college students to spring break. He initially was to be the
minority partner in the purchase of the Redskins after his group had won a bidding war. But majority owner Howard Milstein withdrew the bid, knowing NFL owners were going to turn him down on the basis of the debt structure. Snyder then put together his own group in which he had controlling interest, which was approved by the NFL. He never would have been satisfied as Milstein’s minority partner. That’s not his personality.

Snyder had a lot to learn when he bought the Redskins. He was a football fan but had no football background. But early on he was so involved in every aspect of the franchise that it seemed only a matter of time before he was coaching the team himself. He has learned how important it is for the owner to be supportive of his head coach rather than undermine him. “You trust him, he trusts you, you can accomplish a lot,” he said.

It was too late in the off-season and too close to training camp when Snyder’s bid to buy the Redskins was approved for him to do anything about Turner. At his first home game after he bought the team, Snyder said there were signs imploring him to fire Turner. “I was overwhelmed,” he said in his office in Redskins Park. “I was a pure fan, and I was a little young.”

Snyder couldn’t wait to get the first notch on his belt. His trigger finger was antsy, but Turner ruined his plan. He won the NFC East in Snyder’s first year with a 10–6 record, the first time the Redskins had been in the playoffs since 1992, Gibbs’s final year. Then the Redskins beat the Lions in a wild-card game but lost in the next round in Tampa 14–13. The Redskins had a chance to win, but a botched snap on a field goal attempt from 51 yards with just over one minute remaining prevented the ball from getting into the air. Even so, the Redskins had something to build on.

Snyder then went out and tried to buy the Super Bowl. He signed Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith, two Hall of Famers whose best football had already been played. He signed safety Mark Carrier. Then he created a quarterback controversy by
bringing in Jeff George to compete with Brad Johnson, who had just taken the ’Skins to the second round of the playoffs. Snyder wrote checks for over $40 million in signing bonuses. The Redskins also had the second and third overall picks in the 2000 draft. After the Browns selected Penn State defensive end Courtney Brown, the Redskins picked linebacker LaVar Arrington from Penn State and offensive tackle Chris Samuels from Alabama. Snyder and the Redskins had created a tremendous buzz around Washington and throughout the NFL.

That put the pressure on Turner to work all those new players into the team, not let a quarterback controversy split the locker room, and, of course, win games, get the Redskins into the playoffs again, and this time take them further than the second round. Snyder made it even more difficult for Turner by transforming training camp into an easy opportunity for opponents to scout the Redskins. The Redskins became the first team to charge admission to watch training camp practice. The price: $10 for anybody fourteen or older. The NFL has a rule that teams can’t scout camp practices or scrimmages unless there is an admission fee. Then anybody can attend. There have been stories over the years about how teams spy on one another’s training camp practices, but spying was not necessary with the Redskins in 2000. For $10, everybody was welcome, including opposing scouts, and teams did take advantage of the opportunity of seeing Washington up close.

Predictably, the Redskins were a disaster in 2000. Snyder couldn’t wait until the season was over and allow Turner to leave in a dignified way. He fired him with three games remaining in an 8–8 season. Turner was 7–6 when he received his parting gifts. “I didn’t hire him,” Snyder said.

That led Snyder to hire Schottenheimer, an old-school coach with old-school values. Hard work. Discipline. Marty Ball. Snyder gave him total control, and Schottenheimer went 8–8. After the season, Snyder decided that giving all the power to one person
was not in his best interests. Schottenheimer had the power and didn’t want to give it up. There was only one thing for Snyder to do. He fired Schottenheimer.

“I like Marty and still do to this day. We are good friends,” Snyder said nearly ten years later. “He’d still be here if he didn’t want to do it all. He was insistent on doing it all. That was something that I don’t think works. One guy can’t do everything. He was a machine on that front. He wouldn’t drop the personnel side and give us a chance at more of a team energy.”

Snyder was going back on the deal. When he hired Schottenheimer, he gave him the control. Now he was taking it back. “I saw it for a year and said that is not going to work,” he said.

Snyder had to pay for his decision. Schottenheimer was just one year into a four-year $10 million deal. Snyder was responsible for the $7.5 million left on the contract. It didn’t take Schottenheimer long to bounce back from any scars he might have incurred from getting fired by a man a generation younger. He was hired immediately by the Chargers, and that reduced Snyder’s financial obligations.

Snyder now had some work to do. That was two coaches fired—three if you want to count interim coach Terry Robiskie, who was not given the job permanently after Turner was dismissed. Who would be the next to make lots of money and be miserable?

Steve Spurrier, come on down. The University of Florida coach, a former NFL quarterback, was considered an offensive genius, so creative that not even the best defensive minds in the league would be able to stop him. Spurrier loved to be courted and had turned down the Tampa Bay Bucs’ overtures in 1996 after Jimmy Johnson elected to go to the Dolphins and before the Bucs hired Tony Dungy. He had turned down Snyder the year before when Snyder hired Schottenheimer. Snyder was offering a five-year $25 million contract, and Spurrier signed on with full confidence that his Fun ’n’ Gun offense could work in the NFL. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said.

Besides, he needed a job. He had unexpectedly resigned from Florida a couple of weeks earlier. Now he was Snyder’s fourth coach in thirteen months. Spurrier ridiculed NFL coaches who felt they had to see the sun come up in the morning out their office window or they were not doing their job. “I like to believe I can spend two hours and get as much done maybe as some coaches do in four or five hours,” he said.