Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

“Both my daughters, who were living at home at the time, were home,” he said. “I knew this was about my team. You don’t get a call that late when it’s not about one or the other. You knew it wasn’t going to be good.”

  Billick didn’t have a lot of information initially, but the Ravens organization placed its faith in Lewis. “The hard thing is there was no one to call for reference to say, ‘Okay, what happens when your best player is indicted on two counts of murder? How did you handle this?’ What was the case study? It had never happened before.”

  Four months later, Lewis reached an agreement to plead guilty to misdemeanor obstruction of justice and avoided jail time. The murder charges were dropped.

  There is nothing in the playbook, nothing one coach can learn from another, that Gibbs could reference to help him deal with the phone call he was about to receive. The Redskins returned from Tampa on the night of November 25, 2007, after losing to the Bucs. They were reeling at 5–6, the last two losses without their brilliant young safety Sean Taylor, who had become a team leader.

  Gibbs’s phone rang at six o’clock on the morning of November 26. It was Dan Snyder. It could not be good.

  “Sean has been shot,” Snyder said.

  “How bad is it? Where is he shot?” Gibbs said.

  “He’s shot in the leg,” Snyder said.

  Gibbs’s first thought was, okay, it’s only the leg; Sean is going to be fine. This was a strong twenty-four-year old athlete. He might need time to recover, but at least he hadn’t been shot in the head or the chest. Gibbs didn’t have enough information. “Not realizing exactly where he got shot and the fact that he bled so much,” Gibbs said.

  Taylor was in bed with his two Jackies in his house in the upscale area of Palmetto Bay when he heard intruders. He reached for a machete that he kept by the bed for emergency situations. This was an emergency. The house had been burglarized on November 17, but no one had been home. A kitchen knife had been left on the bed. The intruders clearly didn’t expect anybody to be home this time, either. Taylor played for the Redskins, and he was not supposed to be in Miami.

  Taylor tried to block the bedroom door. Two shots were fired. One hit the wall. The other hit Taylor in the leg in the upper thigh area near the femoral artery. Jackie called 911 on her cell phone at 1:40 a.m. Taylor was airlifted to the trauma unit of Jackson Memorial Hospital.

  He underwent seven hours of surgery beginning at 5:30 a.m. He lost a massive amount of blood and required seven transfusions. His heart stopped beating twice during surgery. He was unresponsive and unconscious when he came out of surgery. Back at Redskins Park, Gibbs and team chaplain Brett Fuller addressed the players at noon and told them Taylor was in critical condition. Snyder flew to Miami in his private plane and took running back Clinton Portis and others with him. Portis and Taylor were tight from their days together at the University of Miami. Portis played the first two years of his career with the Denver Broncos but was traded to the Redskins for cornerback Champ Bailey two months before the Redskins selected Taylor in the first round.

  Portis had seen the change in his friend. “It’s hard to expect a man to grow up overnight,” he was quoted in the Washington Post. “But ever since he had this child, it was like a new Sean. And everybody around here knew it. He was always smiling, always happy, always talking about his child.”

  There was a shred of optimism when it was reported the night of the surgery that Taylor squeezed the doctor’s hand and made facial expressions. It was false hope. He was dead at 3:30 the next morning.

  The coaches’ manual does not provide instructions for how to handle a locker room in mourning when a teammate is shot to death in the middle of the season. There was no crisis management team to call in. Football teams are like families. At least the good ones are.

  “We wind up losing Sean. You never plan for that,” Gibbs said. “Coaches go through a lot of things, but you don’t go through that. We certainly didn’t have a plan. You just kind of embark on something like that, and you just try to do the best you can to handle it from day to day.”

  Gibbs’s strength held the Redskins together during the week. He was the leader, the foundation of the organization. The players and staff looked to him for guidance.

  Gibbs didn’t second-guess the organization’s decision to allow Taylor to return to his Miami home instead of forcing him to remain in Virginia to keep rehabilitating his knee. “I never really did think a lot about that,” Gibbs said. “It was a decision where we felt it was best for him personally. He wanted to get the situation squared away with his house so he could come back and be more focused on football.”

  Gibbs knew his players and knew this was going to be the toughest challenge he ever faced as a head coach. “Our players were distraught,” he said. “Looking them in the eye, you see it had a huge impact on them.”

  If the season had not slipped away already, it was surely hanging by its fingertips on the edge of a cliff with a three-hundred-foot drop. Gibbs was always adept at finding ways to motivate his team. He was such a good coach that he often could impose his will on the other team by the sheer brilliance of his game plans. Defenses knew that Gibbs loved the counter trey, a misdirection running play, and that he loved it even more when he had John Riggins. Nobody could stop it.

  This was different. It had nothing to do with X’s and O’s. This took Gibbs out of his comfort zone. Less than a week after Taylor died, the Redskins were playing a home game against the Buffalo Bills. If they had any desire to remain in the race for a wild-card spot, it was imperative that they beat the Bills. But they had to play with broken hearts, the most debilitating injury of all. Gibbs says Taylor is one of the top five athletes he’s ever coached, but it was more than that now. There was a death in the family. A young lady lost her fiancé. A little girl lost her father. Parents lost their son. And Redskins Nation lost one of its best players. How could the Redskins summon the strength to play a football game? During the week, Gibbs had Portis and Santana Moss, another player from Miami, speak to the team about Taylor. Gibbs was dealing with fifty-two personalities who would all attempt to process the loss in their own way.

  The Redskins distributed white towels with Taylor’s number 21 to the fans at FedEx Field. Taylor’s locker was encased in Plexiglas. There was a four-minute video tribute to Taylor prior to the game and the Redskins’ marching band wore black hats. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams elected to open the game with only ten defensive players for the first play. The eleventh spot belonged to Taylor; his replacement, Reed Doughty, stood on the sidelines. Williams made the decision without first consulting with Gibbs. He had described Taylor as being like a son to him, and this was his way of honoring him. “He was going to ride with us one more time,” Williams said.

  Buffalo’s Fred Jackson ran for 22 yards against the ten-man defense.

  It was a strange game. There were ten scores: eight field goals, a safety, and a touchdown. The only touchdown, a 3-yard run by Portis, had given the Redskins a 16–5 lead with 5:42 left in the third quarter. Buffalo moved to within 16–14 on three field goals by Rian Lindell. But now the Bills were on the Redskins’ 33 with eight seconds to go after Buffalo quarterback Trent Edwards spiked the ball to stop the clock.

  As Lindell was about to attempt a 51-yard field goal, Gibbs called time-out. Freezing the kicker at the last possible moment had become the trendy thing to do in the NFL. There was a new rule in the NFL allowing coaches to call time-outs from the sidelines. Denver’s Mike Shanahan began the freezing the kicker movement earlier in the season. Lindell went through with the kick anyway, and it was good. Good move by Gibbs. The points came off the board. There is also a rule in the NFL that you are prohibited from calling consecutive time-outs. Gibbs didn’t know the rule and called time-out again to ice Lindell just before Lindell would have attempted the kick a second time. Gibbs thought the official on the sideline had given him the okay. The flag went up, and Gibbs’s heart sunk. He had blown it. The unsportsmanlik
e conduct penalty cost 15 crucial yards, moving the ball to the 18-yard line. Lindell then drilled a 36-yard field goal to win the game.

  “I will never forget it,” Gibbs said.

  He was sixty-seven years old. His age had nothing to do with him blanking out on the rule. Less than one week earlier, one of his best players had been murdered. He won’t use that as the reason. He says he wasn’t distracted. “I just think it was a terrible mistake,” he said. “There was no excuse for it. I did it. I don’t think you make an excuse for something like that.”

  It had been the worst week in Redskins history. It wasn’t supposed to end with the iconic coach, the glue of the Redskins, losing the game. “When I first saw the commotion, I was hoping it had been a procedural penalty on Buffalo,” left guard Pete Kendall said after the game. “After that, after it was explained, my first thought was I felt for whoever called that. To find out that it was Coach Gibbs, after the week that he’s been through, my heart just breaks for him.”

  In the end, it did come down to Gibbs making a mistake. But it would have been tough for the Redskins to beat any team that day, even a team as poor as the Bills, who finished 7–9 that season. The Redskins were still in pain. Gibbs knew by looking at his players before the game that “they were wanting to, but just couldn’t. It just wound up being a huge disappointment for all of us.”

  And the players knew by looking at his face that he was tired and worn out. Gibbs had been through a lot in the last week. The team had been through a lot. Now there were whispers that his blunder against the Bills was proof that he never should have returned to the sidelines. Had the game passed him by? It was the same criticism Tom Landry faced at the end of his twenty-nine-year run as the Cowboys’ coach. This is a results-oriented business, and when the team is not having success, it’s the coach who gets the blame. This was new for Gibbs. In his first life with the Redskins, he was considered an innovative coach. When he walked away two months after the 1992 season, he left at the top of his game. He wanted more time with his family—that’s what they all say—and had driven himself so hard that leaving when he did was the right thing to do. He had taken the Redskins to the playoffs eight times and won three Super Bowls in twelve years. He said his decision had nothing to do with his health, his racing team, or the Redskins. It was simply family-related. His son Coy was playing at Stanford, and Gibbs had seen him play only twice. He felt guilty.

  Gibbs did reveal that late in the 1992 season he had been unable to sleep and had developed a nervous twitch, which ultimately was blamed on exhaustion. His decision to leave shocked the Redskins simply because so much time had passed since the end of the season. But after a family vacation in Vail, Colorado, his mind was made up. It was time to go.

  “Every year, we get away and talk about it,” Gibbs said at the farewell news conference in 1993. “We always reach the same conclusion. This year, it was different. The boys didn’t encourage me one way or another, but they understood when I told them what I was thinking. I think Pat’s happier than anyone. This isn’t an easy lifestyle for a coach’s wife. The coach is the guy who stands up and hears everyone tell him how great he is. The wife is the one waiting at home alone while the coach is spending every night at the office.”

  When he returned to the Redskins, Gibbs promised his wife he would stop sleeping in the office. It was a promise he could not keep. Gibbs knew only one way to do it and was not making any concessions to his age. Besides, Pat was spending a lot of her time surrounded by family back home in Charlotte, so Gibbs knew he wasn’t leaving her alone in Virginia.

  After the loss to the Bills, the record was 5–7 and the Redskins players had every reason to pack their bags and wait for the end of the season. And now they were facing another challenging week—emotionally and physically. The day after the loss, Snyder flew the entire team and members of the organization on a 747 to Miami for Taylor’s funeral. “I wanted everybody to pay respect to a fallen hero of the Redskins,” Snyder said. “We hopefully did a respectable job of paying respect to Sean’s family. I think I was very responsible for making sure we did everything first class with dignity and pride.”

  He is sitting in his large office at Redskins Park talking about Taylor and how he still thinks about him all the time. He points to his desk. “It’s a picture of me and Sean Taylor,” he says.

  In addition to the Redskins family, more than twenty players from around the NFL attended the three-hour service. And on Thursday that week, the Redskins were playing at home against the Bears. Two games in five days with a funeral in between for a fallen teammate. How much can be asked of one team, of one group of young men dealing with the death of a friend?

  “It was a big challenge for the whole coaching staff and the players,” Gibbs said. “By that Thursday night, they really wanted to honor Sean. It drove them. I can remember the guys were jacked.”

  Just as Gibbs knew by looking in the eyes of his players before the Buffalo game that they were not ready to play, he knew before the Chicago game that they were ready to do everything they could to win one for Taylor and end the four-game losing streak. If the season seemed lost at the time, it didn’t mean they had to lose this game.

  “It was probably one of the greatest games I’ve ever had a team play for me,” Gibbs said.

  The Redskins refused to lose. Gibbs remembers cornerback Fred Smoot coming off the field but refusing to stay in the locker room. “He’s throwing up blood on the sideline,” he said. Smoot had a severe stomach illness, but he returned to the game. Quarterback Jason Campbell went out with a dislocated kneecap late in the second quarter that cost him the rest of the season. But journeyman Todd Collins came into the game against the Bears “and plays one of the best games I’ve ever seen somebody play coming off the bench,” Gibbs said.

  Collins was fifteen of twenty for 224 yards and two touchdowns in the 24–16 victory. Even with the win, the Redskins were only 6–7 with no indication they were ready to go on a winning streak that could qualify them for the playoffs.

  That changed the next week when they went up to the Meadowlands to play the New York Giants, who also were fighting to make the playoffs. The Giants’ coach, Tom Coughlin, had barely escaped being fired after the 2006 season. New York was 9–4 after victories over the Bears and the Eagles the previous two weeks. This was not going to be an easy game for the Redskins. The best thing about playing Thursday games, as the Redskins had against the Bears, is that if you win, you have ten days to catch your breath and get reenergized coming off a victory. It’s a very long ten days if you lose.

  The Sunday night game against the Giants was when the Redskins started to believe again. They beat New York 22–10 on one of those nights when Giants Stadium was a wind tunnel. Eli Manning was able to complete just eighteen of fifty-three passes. Collins managed to complete only eight of twenty-five. It was an ugly game, but it enabled the Redskins to get back to .500. They no longer were an emotionally beaten-down team. Instead, they were inspired by the memory of Sean Taylor.

  “The whole organization handled it exactly the right way,” said Kendall, who was in his first year with the Redskins. “Guys were really torn up on a personal level with what happened to Sean. I remember Joe and Dan had their finger on the pulse of the team. There was a time to work and a time to do the right thing in terms of honoring Sean’s memory and family. The team was able to respond right after the Buffalo game.”

  The Redskins then beat the Vikings, a contender for one of the two wild-card spots. That put the Skins at 8–7. The final game of the year was at home against the hated Cowboys. One of the most popular items for sale outside old RFK Stadium for those intense Dallas-Washington games was a button that simply stated: “Fuck Dallas.” The same sentiment, in a more civilized tone, was printed on T-shirts: “I Root for Two Teams: The Redskins and Anybody Playing Dallas.”

  Nothing else really needed to be said about how the Redskins and their fans felt about America’s Team. Before this crucial
game against the Cowboys that would determine whether the Redskins made the playoffs, former Washington defensive end Dexter Manley, who had knocked Cowboys quarterback Danny White out of the 1982 NFC championship game, which led to the Redskins’ first Super Bowl victory, took the microphone at midfield at FedEx Field and led the fans in a chant of “We Want Dallas.” The Redskins were fired up and outgained the Cowboys 105–14 in the first quarter.

  The Redskins caught a break because Dallas already had clinched the NFC’s number one seed. That allowed Wade Phillips to rest four banged-up starters, including wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had an ankle injury. T.O. had caught the four touchdown passes against the Redskins earlier in the season. Phillips played quarterback Tony Romo through the first series of the third quarter. He left with Dallas trailing 13–3. The Redskins scored on their next possession to make it 20–3. Former Redskins quarterback Brad Johnson relieved Romo, and Washington went on to win 27–6. Dallas was held to 1 yard rushing. Collins played well again, and since taking over for Campbell, he had completed 67 of 105 passes for 888 yards with five touchdowns and no interceptions. If you take away that windy night at Giants Stadium, he was fifty-nine for eighty, an impressive 74 percent.

  In the four games since Taylor’s funeral, the Redskins were 4–0, and they went into the playoffs as the hottest team in the NFC. “To come back and win four games; if Joe and Dan hadn’t handled that situation the way they did, it was unlikely we would have been able to do that,” Kendall said. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen and keep a stiff upper lip. They were able to get the team to strike the right balance between mourning Sean’s loss and honoring Sean’s memory.”

  The Redskins were in the process of writing an incredible story in the wild-card game in Seattle. They trailed 13–0 before Collins threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Antwaan Randle El on the first play of the fourth quarter. The Redskins intercepted Matt Hasselbeck on the next possession, setting up Collins’s 30-yard touchdown pass to Moss to give Washington a 14–13 lead less than three minutes into the fourth quarter.