Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  Finally, Holmgren got a response from Favre.

  “Mike, you ought to see your mustache,” he said.

  “What?” Holmgren said.

  It had frozen over, and Favre thought it was hilarious. “He broke me,” Holmgren said. “I’m just laughing. It’s a crucial part of the game. Ty Detmer and Brunell are on each side of me. They don’t know whether to laugh. They don’t know what I’m going to do. I just go, okay, all right, do I have your attention?”

  Favre smiled at Holmgren. They picked a play. It was third and goal from the Steelers’ 1. Favre ran back on the field and threw a touchdown pass to Mark Chmura. The Packers won the game. Holmgren’s mustache began to thaw out.

  THE KING OF BURNOUT

  Dick Vermeil is giving a tour of his log cabin house that sits on 180 acres in rural East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. It’s the dream house he and his wife, Carol, had built to their specifications and have been living in for over a quarter of a century.

  “One hundred percent pine log,” he says proudly.

  The deck overlooks a breathtakingly beautiful backyard with acres of countryside that go on forever. It is as peaceful a setting as you can find sandwiched between the tumult of New York City to the north and Philadelphia to the east. The driveway off a side street is so long that you need a GPS to find the house once you turn in. The first half leading from the street is an unpaved dirt road; the second half is blacktopped. When a winter storm hits, it takes days for the snowplow company to dig out the Vermeils. The basement is filled with enough keepsakes from his coaching days with UCLA and the Eagles, Rams, and Chiefs to fill a sports memorabilia museum. There are plenty of pictures on the wall of Vermeil with a who’s who of the NFL. He is tanned and relaxed and loving life. The only immediate appointments on his schedule are motivational speaking engagements, although the market is not what it used to be. His main business concern is the production of the next batch of wine with the Vermeil label from his California vineyard. The quality is excellent. The market is competitive.

  The wine business is a passion, but it does not keep Vermeil up nights.

  Is this the same man who at the age of forty-six was so completely burned out and “emotionally frozen,” as he puts it, that he could not summon the inner strength to get out of his car as he sat in front of Veterans Stadium to go to work on a Monday morning? Is this the same man who became the face of coaching burnout to the extent that all coaches who have had enough and walk away are compared to Vermeil?

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Vermeil said. “First, it’s the truth. I think if a person has a hard time dealing with the truth, then they are going to have a hard time dealing with themselves. It doesn’t bother me because I understand the kind of pressure you can put on yourself. The pressure I felt in coaching was not put on me by Leonard Tose or Georgia Frontiere or Lamar Hunt. It was put on by me, myself, my own pride. My own evaluation of myself and the kind of commitment I was making to do the job and do it right.”

  He believed he owed it to his players to work them hard and work them beyond the limits they had set for themselves. His two-a-day practices with the Eagles were legendary and often stretched out to three-a-days. “I really believe that sometimes you got to push people to do things they didn’t know they could do,” he said. “It’s so easy for a professional athlete to think, I’ve arrived. I’m making all this money. Sometimes, to make them as good as they can be, you got to push them beyond what they think they already are.”

  Vermeil could push his players. He could not push himself. He was collapsing under the burden of his own expectations. After seven years as head coach of the Eagles, he decided to take one season off and get refreshed.

  He took fourteen.

  So much of who he tried to be as a coach came from the great John Wooden. Vermeil was an assistant at UCLA in 1970 and then went to the Rams as an assistant for three seasons before returning as the UCLA head coach in 1974 and 1975. Wooden always told him that he didn’t coach basketball, he coached kids who play basketball. His office was right next door to Wooden’s, and he tried to absorb as much as he could from the Wizard of Westwood.

  “He used to come and sit and have breakfast with us every morning during football season at our training table. He’d then go walk the track in the morning,” Vermeil said. “John Wooden was a guy that never talked about winning. He felt your obligation as a coach was just to make the players you have the best they can be, each and every one of them. From the third-string guard to the starting guard. Make them the best they can be, and that will handle all the other things. He said to me, I remember this vividly, don’t worry about being better than those guys across town. That was USC. He said you’re never going to be as physically as good as they are. But just make sure your players are as good as they can be. He said if you work that way, eventually you will find a way to beat them. I have never forgotten that.”

  Wooden was a basketball coach. Vermeil was a football coach. But that didn’t mean their issues didn’t overlap. Wooden had so much talent on those basketball teams—he won ten NCAA championships in a twelve-year period, including seven in a row—that players who could be starting at just about any other program were sitting on his bench.

  “John, I got three running backs; it’s a problem. You can’t keep them all happy,” Vermeil said.

  “Pick out who you think is the best one and make him happy,” Wooden said.

  Vermeil felt that was good advice. It’s also a nice problem to have. “I have audiotapes in my desk downstairs of meetings with him,” he said. “He was a real plus for me. I leaned on him. In the off-season, he would talk to my whole staff. We had ten coaches, and we’d all sit there and ask him questions. I used to watch them practice and how important it was to practice fast tempo. You want practice to be game tempo. Maybe not in intensity but tempo. I bought into that and learned that. Practice fast, practice fast. And fundamentals. Nobody is so good that they can’t improve their fundamentals.

  “He had a great way of coaching value systems that carried over into your work ethic and carried over into how you lived your life. That didn’t mean he didn’t get on their ass, because I’ve seen him do it. But if they believe you, they will follow you even if they are mad at you. He was a leader of people.”

  Vermeil carried Wooden’s philosophies and concepts into his first NFL head coaching job when he was hired by the Eagles. He was just thirty-nine years old. “I wasn’t really qualified to be the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, but I was, so you learn,” he said.

  Vermeil ran a brutal training camp in the summer of 1976, his rookie year in Philadelphia. He had the players sucking air. The Eagles had been just 4–10 the season before he arrived, and he was trying to find out which players would still be part of his team when he got the program turned around. It was a relief when the season arrived: Vermeil could no longer run two-a-days. Or three-a-days.

  Philly lost its season opener and was 2–2 after the first month. Maybe this college guy knew what he was doing. But then the Eagles lost three in a row, beat the Giants for the second time, and lost five in a row. The record was now 3–10.

  It was 9 a.m. on the Monday after the latest loss. It was 6 a.m. in Los Angeles.

  Suzette Cox, who was his administrative assistant, knocked on Vermeil’s door.

  “Coach wants to talk to you,” she said.

  “Coach who?” Vermeil said.

  “Coach Wooden,” she said.

  Vermeil picked up the phone.

  “I’ve been following, and I know it’s tough. You know what you are doing. You’ve done it before. Stick with your principles. You will get it done.”

  The conversation lasted two minutes. “The most meaningful well-timed conversation I’ve ever had on the phone,” Vermeil said.

  The Eagles won their final game of the season to finish 4–10. There was no quick fix in the NFL back then. Free agency was nearly twenty years away. Teams had to build through the draft or make
trades. The previous regime left Vermeil without a full complement of draft picks. He didn’t have a first-round or second-round pick until his fourth draft in 1979. But the Eagles were getting better. They won five games in Vermeil’s second season.

  The next year, 1978, the NFL expanded the regular season to sixteen games and added a second wild-card team for each conference. Philadelphia finished 9–7 and made the playoffs but lost to the Falcons in the opening round. Incredibly, it was the first time the Eagles had been in the playoffs since 1960, when they’d won the NFL championship. The Eagles were 11–5 in 1979 but had to settle for a wild-card spot after losing the NFC East tiebreaker to the Cowboys. They beat the Bears in the wild-card round before losing to the Bucs. By 1980, Vermeil really had it going. The Eagles finished 12–4, once again tying the Cowboys for the NFC East’s best record. But this time the Eagles won the tiebreaker, received the first-round bye, and then wound up beating Dallas in the NFC championship game to get to their first Super Bowl.

  They lost to the Raiders 27–10 in Super Bowl XV in New Orleans, and the story of that game was not what happened on the field but what happened off the field. While the Raiders were tearing up Bourbon Street night after night, Vermeil had the Eagles tucked in bed with a strict curfew before the Raiders were downing their first hurricane of the evening. The Raiders’ victory was a victory for all those players who believed the Animal House approach wins. All they had to do was show up on Sunday ready to play. It didn’t matter how late they staggered in from Pat O’Brien’s in the middle of the week. Vermeil was tight during Super Bowl week, and his players were tight in the Super Bowl.

  Still, Vermeil had become one of the NFL’s best coaches. He had transformed the Eagles into perennial playoff contenders. That was an impressive accomplishment considering that the Eagles had not once finished over .500 in the nine seasons before he arrived.

  Everybody seemed happy in Philadelphia except Vermeil. He was driving himself crazy. He was miserable. He didn’t have an off switch. Tom Landry was making sure he was home for dinner every night with his wife, Alicia. He might bring some film home to watch in the evening, but he never slept in his office. Vermeil didn’t know when enough was enough, couldn’t figure out when he had reached the point of diminishing returns or understand that a relaxing night with his wife and three kids would benefit the Eagles more in the long run than watching one more tape of the Giants’ kickoff coverage team.

  He was setting the standard for the next generation of coaches who would put more into their jobs than they were getting out. It was a form of paranoia: How can I go home and watch television when Joe Gibbs is in his office grinding away? He didn’t believe in reaching a point of diminishing returns.

  “I didn’t feel comfortable unless I was in the office working,” Vermeil said. “I can remember after a game I would come home and get back in the car and turn around and go back to the stadium. If we lost, I would blame myself. What could I have done to prevent it? That’s what beats you up from the inside. These are all things that are not good if you are a head football coach.”

  Vermeil tried to help himself when he was with the Eagles. He traveled from Philadelphia to New York to meet with Dr. Herbert Freudenberger, a psychologist who was the author of the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement, published in 1974. Freudenberger is credited with coming up with the term “burnout,” which he defined as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.”

  The ends were not justifying the means for Vermeil. He was working hard but was not pleased with the results. He said meeting with Freudenberger was “really helpful,” as he was clearly on a path toward burnout.

  At the time, it was thought of as a badge of honor that Vermeil slept in his office more than he slept in his own bed. Look at how hard this guy works. Marvel at the commitment he has made to turning the Eagles into Super Bowl contenders. In reality, he was forcing himself into retirement. He lived in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, just eighteen miles from the Eagles’ offices at Veterans Stadium. That was close enough for Vermeil to sleep in his own bed every night, but he chose the hideaway bed in the head coach’s office on the first floor of the stadium.

  “You are driving to work on the Schuylkill Expressway,” he said. “It gets backed up. It’s like a parking lot. The hour I wasted—sometimes longer—to drive to work, I could be in my office already working or I could get one or two more hours of sleep.”

  And in that extra time, he might find a new wrinkle in the Redskins’ punt protection. Of course, he might have found it during normal working hours. He just didn’t see it that way. At the end of the strike-shortened 1982 season, when the Eagles were 3–6, Vermeil quit. He was fine physically. He was running five miles a day in the off-season. Mentally, he was spent. He burned himself out. “I was my own worst enemy, that’s all,” he said. “I was a mess.”

  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 i
n 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.