Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  Kraft couldn’t run his business that way. He needed a commitment. It’s hard to plan for the future when the coach insists he’s year to year. How could he let Parcells influence him to sign players to multiyear contracts when Parcells was not ready to say he would stick around long enough to coach them? Kraft couldn’t afford to be caught in the trap that Parcells set for the Giants. He didn’t leave until nearly four months after the Super Bowl following the 1990 season, and general manager George Young had few options and was forced to promote little-known running back coach Ray Handley, who turned out to be a disaster and was fired after two seasons.

  The relationship between Kraft and Parcells began to disintegrate even before Kraft gave the final say in the draft to personnel director Bobby Grier in 1996. That led to Kraft granting Parcells’s wish before the ’96 season that the fifth and final year of his contract for the 1997 season, a deal he signed when Orthwein owned the team, be eliminated. The $1.2 million penalty clause for leaving early was also taken out. If Parcells didn’t want to be in New England, Kraft didn’t want him there. Kraft agreed to cut off the final year, but as Parcells found out after the season, that didn’t mean he could just get in his car, head south on I-95, and take a job with the rival New York Jets without the Patriots being compensated. The revised contract prohibited Parcells from coaching any team other than the Patriots in 1997 unless, of course, Kraft gave his blessing.

  It was clear that Parcells lost his power when the personnel department overruled him and selected Ohio State wide receiver Terry Glenn with New England’s first-round pick in 1996, seventh overall. Parcells wanted to trade down and select Texas defensive end Tony Brackens, who went in the second round to Jacksonville. Parcells didn’t even attend the scouting combine that year, a sure sign he was on his way out of New England.

  But the problems with Kraft really started much earlier. Parcells had his run of the place the year before Kraft bought the team. Kraft had just invested a fortune and incurred a tremendous amount of debt, and he wasn’t going to be an absentee owner. He wasn’t looking for Parcells to kiss up to him because he was some rich guy who was now his boss, but he expected to be treated with respect.

  “Look, he did great things for the franchise. He brought us instant credibility. He’s an engaging personality, and he is fun to be around when he wants to turn on the charm,” Kraft said. “I’m not sure he was always respectful to me.”

  Then, looking over at Myra, he said, “He never would talk to her, not even be polite. That’s my wife. I get on the team plane with my banker, the guy that loaned me $172 million on short notice. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m never going to get hurt?’ And I said, ‘No, you won’t.’ The guy takes a big risk as a banker, so he comes to an away game, and Parcells wouldn’t talk to him or say hello to him. It was not pleasant. He wouldn’t shake hands or say hello to the CEO of one of the major banks in America. The Bank of Boston. He gets on the plane and looks the other way and won’t talk to him. And we’re in first class.”

  Then the Christian Peter fiasco created a firestorm in New England. The Pats selected Peter, a talented defensive tackle from Nebraska, in the fifth round of the ’96 draft. Parcells called to welcome him to the team. Peter had a history of violence against women, and the details were chronicled in the days after the draft, causing a tremendous backlash. Myra Kraft was outraged. Within one week, the Patriots relinquished their draft rights to Peter, making him a free agent. The story goes that Myra Kraft demanded that the Patriots disassociate themselves from Peter, but that was not completely true. She did question whether her husband was aware of Peter’s background. He was not. He told his coaches that if he needed “thugs or hoodlums” to win, he would get out of the business. It was the first time a drafted player was released before training camp.

  Days before the draft, Kraft said the Patriots would never select troubled running back Lawrence Phillips, who was Peter’s teammate at Nebraska, because he couldn’t explain it to his wife. Phillips had assaulted his girlfriend.

  The Patriots had a first-round grade on Peter, and when he started to slip, Kraft was told that the Patriots were going to take him in the fourth or fifth round. “What’s the deal?” Kraft asked a member of the Patriots’ college scouting department.

  “Well, he was a frat boy,” he was told. “And he grabbed some girl’s tush or crotch.”

  When Kraft conducted his own investigation of Peter’s past after the draft, he discovered that the rap sheet was much more involved. “So I went down to Bill,” he said. “I said, ‘Look, we are cutting this guy.’ I had to show him we couldn’t do things with a wink and a nod.”

  Kraft believes every player on his team “has my family name attached to it,” he said. “I don’t want thugs and hoodlums here.”

  Peter was gone. Former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne, a congressman, called Kraft the day Peter was cut. “He begged me and told me how great he was,” Kraft said. “I said no. I got about two hundred letters from high school coaches saying thank you. That really helped us.”

  Parcells’s reaction to losing a valuable fifth-round pick? “He was not pleased,” Kraft said.

  “I can’t tell you anything,” Parcells said by phone days after Peter was released. “Talk to someone else about it.”

  In training camp that summer, Parcells rode Glenn hard. When Parcells was asked when the rookie would be returning from a hamstring injury, he said, “She isn’t ready yet.” Nobody ever said Parcells was politically correct. “That’s not the standard we want to set,” Kraft said at the time. “That’s not the way we do things.”

  Myra Kraft called Parcells’s comment “disgraceful … I hope he’s chastised for that. It was the wrong thing for anyone to say.”

  Despite the turmoil, the Patriots finished 11–5 and won the AFC East. By late in the season, rumors were circulating that Parcells was being romanced by the Jets and their owner, Leon Hess. The Jets had been 3–13 in Rich Kotite’s first season in 1995 and were on their way to a 1–15 year in 1996. Two days before the final game of the season, Kotite announced that he was stepping down. Hess allowed him to go out with a little dignity by not saying he fired him and letting him coach the final game, which the Jets lost.

  Hess knew he needed to restore credibility to the franchise. He knew Parcells was not happy in New England. He knew Parcells was a Jersey guy.

  Parcells’s final regular season game coaching the Patriots was also the first time he coached against the Giants at Giants Stadium. New England, which already had clinched the AFC East, fell behind 22–0 at the half but came back and won the game 23–22 with Drew Bledsoe throwing a 13-yard touchdown pass to tight end Ben Coates with 1:23 remaining. That clinched the number two seed for the Patriots and gave them a first-round bye going into the playoffs. After the game, in the visitors’ locker room, Parcells sat on a bench with Kraft and explained to him the routine he would follow to get the Patriots ready for their first playoff game. They clenched hands. Parcells was glowing, and Kraft had the great Parcells taking the time to educate him. Parcells was no longer complaining about Glenn. Nobody was talking about Peter anymore. The Pats were in the playoffs, and at the time, that was all that mattered.

  New England beat Pittsburgh in the divisional round and earned home field advantage for the AFC championship game when the Broncos, the number one seed, lost to the Jaguars and Tom Coughlin, a former Parcells assistant. The Patriots beat Jacksonville 20–6 and had outscored the Steelers and Jaguars 48–9 in the playoffs. They were rolling. In the fourth year owning his hometown team, Kraft was going to the Super Bowl and the Patriots were going to play Brett Favre and the Packers.

  As soon as the Patriots arrived in New Orleans, the future of Parcells overshadowed the game. It was virtually a foregone conclusion by now that he was going to the Jets. Kraft and Parcells did a silly press conference together that failed to lighten the mood. “His heart was somewhere else,” Kraft said. “I’m trying to protect our team.
To be honest, the NFL didn’t rush to our support.”

  There were rumors that Parcells was on the phone negotiating with the Jets while he was in New Orleans preparing the Patriots to play in the Super Bowl. “That’s bullshit,” Parcells said. “All that stuff about people saying I was making phone calls. That’s all bullshit. That’s all fucking bullshit. If they checked the fucking phone records, they know there was nothing. Not one thing on there. Nothing. Zero.”

  The Patriots lost to the Packers in the Super Bowl. In the locker room after the game, Parcells hugged Belichick, who had been added to his staff in 1996 after he was fired by the Browns. He didn’t say anything to his players about the future. “I told them I appreciated what they had done for me this year and the effort they have given,” Parcells said.

  The next morning, Parcells skipped the flight home and took a private plane. Other than players headed to the Pro Bowl, everybody rides the team charter home from the Super Bowl. Outside the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans the morning after the game, as he was getting into a sedan with his family, Kraft was asked about Parcells. “He’s going to the Jets,” he said with a combination of humor and disgust. Parcells met with Kraft in the days after the Super Bowl, and the divorce was official.

  “Here’s what I was told,” Kraft said. “He took the job with the Jets in that December after Rich Kotite got fired. He didn’t think we were going to the Super Bowl. What I was told is he wouldn’t take the job with the Jets while there was another coach there. So they fired Kotite. That was mid-December. To be honest, that is when I learned a lot about the NFL. I figured they would enforce a contract. I think the league office wanted him in New York. I was a naive kid. The whole Parcells experience was horrible in many ways. He didn’t fly back with us from the Super Bowl. He tortured me. So it got me ready for the business. His record with us was 32–32. He was a .500 coach in his years with the Patriots.”

  On his way out of New England, Parcells said, “It’s just like a friend of mine told me: ‘If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.’ ”

  If Kraft wanted him to coach, he needed to let him pick the players. “I knew I had to leave,” Parcells said.

  Parcells was soon in his car driving back to New Jersey but was prohibited from coaching or being the general manager of any team in 1997 without Kraft’s permission. The translation: he couldn’t do it without the Patriots being compensated.

  Although twenty-four coaches applied for the Jets’ head coaching job after Kotite made his announcement on December 20, the Jets didn’t interview any of them. They had a plan devised by the team president, Steve Gutman: they would hire Belichick as their head coach and Parcells as a consultant for 1997, and then Parcells would be the coach in 1998. That would pressure Kraft into making a deal to free up Parcells immediately, the Jets hoped. “A transparent farce,” Kraft said.

  When they put that plan in place one week after the Super Bowl, all hell broke loose. Jets fans didn’t want Belichick, who had been just 37–45 in five years as the Browns coach before joining Parcells in New England. They wanted Parcells. Kraft wanted to be made whole. He wasn’t about to let Parcells pull off this charade without a fight.

  The Jets offered two second-round picks and $1 million. The Patriots wanted the Jets’ first-round pick, which was number one overall in the 1997 draft. Kraft mentioned that he would take Keyshawn Johnson, Aaron Glenn, or Hugh Douglas as part of the package. The Jets considered that tampering. Eventually, it was for Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to decide.

  Kraft, still relatively new to the NFL’s political games, felt he was at a disadvantage. “Leon Hess was one of the fair-haired boys at the league office,” he said.

  Tagliabue brought the parties together in a conference room at the New York law firm Skadden, Arps—they represented the league on major issues, including the United States Football League antitrust lawsuit—then sent the sides off to resolve the matter on their own. Four hours later, unable to agree to compensation, Kraft and Hess shook hands on a deal to make Tagliabue the binding arbitrator. Tagliabue knew it might come to this and was prepared to make a ruling. He awarded the Patriots a nice package: the Jets’ third- and fourth-round picks in 1997, their second-round pick in 1998, and their first-round pick in 1999. The more valuable picks were saved for the later years when Parcells presumably would have made the Jets a better team. Tagliabue didn’t want to strip the Jets of high first- or second-round picks that would help Parcells rebuild in his first two years. The alternative for the Jets was waiting one year and getting Parcells for free. They had promised Parcells to their fans and had to deliver. The alternative for Kraft was making Parcells sit one year and then getting nothing for him. “If we simplify it, Bill Parcells would not have coached for one year and we got four draft choices for allowing him to coach one year,” Kraft said.

  Not only was Parcells leaving the Patriots, he was going to a division rival. That made it much worse for Patriots fans. The way New York football fans looked at it, New England had just borrowed Parcells for the four years, and now he was coming home. The way New England fans looked at it, it was the coaching equivalent of the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Hess signed Parcells to a six-year $14.4 million contract as coach and general manager.

  Hess was a hero to the long-suffering Jets fans. He was going to let Parcells do the shopping and cook the groceries and hopefully pick the menu for the Super Bowl party. “I just want to be the little boy that goes along with him and pushes the cart in the supermarket and let him fill it up,” Hess said. “He’s going to run the show, and it’s not going to be two or three cooks in the kitchen. It will be just him.”

  Kraft, who was looking to protect the Patriots’ interests during every step of the Parcells process, felt bloodied at the end. “I got roughed up pretty bad, and all I was doing was looking out for my team,” he said. “I got the crap beat out of me because I wasn’t just doing whatever Bill wanted.”

  Kraft eventually established a cordial relationship with Parcells in the years after he left the team. “All that being said and done, we were lucky to have him,” Kraft said. “The only objection I had to him is that he was not always respectful to me or my family or people close to me.”

  If they had to do it over again, Kraft and Parcells admit they would have been a dynamic team. Kraft gave his coach what he needed to be successful. Parcells knew he had built a potential powerhouse in New England, and he bailed out.

  “That was one of my greatest regrets,” Parcells said. “I had young players, a good team. I had Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy, Shawn Jefferson, Ben Coates, Curtis Martin, Bledsoe was young. Willie McGinest. Chris Slade. Sam Gash. That was hard to give up.”

  When he was a candidate for the Patriots’ Hall of Fame in 2011, Parcells conceded that he really didn’t want to leave New England. He was insulted by having his power diminished and had not realized Kraft was going to be one of the best owners in the NFL. In the first eighteen seasons Kraft owned the Patriots, his accomplishments were outstanding: New England went to six Super Bowls, winning three, and the Patriots led the league in victories. Kraft was instrumental in ending the 136-day lockout in 2011 during a time when his wife was dying. He was also influential in the blockbuster network television contract signed after the lockout that guarantees the NFL immense profitability and popularity for years to come.

  If Parcells remained in New England, it could have been he, not Belichick, winning all those Super Bowls. Who knows if he would have had the same conviction about Tom Brady to take him in the sixth round in 2000, but Parcells had put so many pieces in place to ensure success. He felt Kraft, because he was new, was letting himself be influenced by other people.

  “Let’s say we had a couple of domestic misunderstandings with the ownership,” Parcells said. “I do regret that. Those things have since been resolved. I think retrospectively, I would have handled things substantially differently than I did. And I wa
s always saddened by the fact that I had to leave there, and in all honesty didn’t really want to. And I’m sure Bob would say something along those lines himself because we have talked about that.”

  Bill Walsh always regretted leaving the 49ers after they won the Super Bowl in 1988. He handed George Seifert a championship team that went on to win two more titles. Dick Vermeil never has forgiven himself for leaving the Rams two days after they won the Super Bowl following the 1999 season. Walsh and Vermeil were best friends, and they made the same mistake. Parcells was always fond of Walsh and was close to Vermeil. Coaches make emotional decisions, often involving their egos, and when they realize they should have been more flexible or given it more thought, it’s too late.

  “I thought I left a pretty good team there,” Parcells said. “We had just been to the Super Bowl, and it was a very young team. Now we needed some more help. It wasn’t a finished product by any stretch of the imagination, but we were on the way up. I don’t think there was any question about that. And we needed a little help defensively and maybe another offensive lineman or two. But we had the skill people and some of the defensive pressure players in place. So I did regret that.”

  Parcells was never fired in the NFL. He left the Giants, Patriots, Jets, Cowboys, and Dolphins, where he ran the front office but didn’t coach. All but the Dolphins were in significantly better shape when he left than when he arrived. New England is the only place he’s admitted that he should have stayed.

  “Hey, that’s life, and you learn from things as you go on,” he said. “I probably retrospectively would have approached it a little differently than what I did.”

  There is still a bit of sadness and regret in Kraft that it didn’t work out with Parcells. “I think it would have been a great partnership,” he said. “I forgot to tell you, today I love Parcells. I really believe that he knows he had something good. He was his own demon.”