Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

“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.”

  Finally, Vermeil was back. “I promised my wife I would never sleep in my office,” he said. On the nights he was sleeping in his office in Philadelphia, he wouldn’t get to bed until four or five in the morning and then be up for a staff meeting at 7:50 a.m. “Sometimes I was so driven that I drove myself into a hole,” he said. “It’s my personality type. It’s predictable.”

  He lived twenty minutes away when he coached in St. Louis and left the office no later than 1 a.m. At least he was sleeping in his own bed. He and Carol were married when they were nineteen, so by now nothing came as a surprise. Vermeil had been away from coaching a long time. He was the little general in Philad
elphia. In St. Louis, he was a tyrant. “I was forty-six when I walked away, and I just felt I wasn’t as good a football coach as I should be with the responsibilities I had in the frame of mind that I was in,” he said. “You become blind. You are so driven that you don’t see some of the obvious things.”

  Now he was doing it again. He was working the players so hard that he was losing the locker room. The mind-set of players had changed in all the years Vermeil was gone. They were making so much money now that they didn’t live in fear of the head coach. If the team didn’t win, the coach would be gone, but the big-money players would remain. The balance of power had shifted. Vermeil was 5–11 in his first year in St. Louis. The Rams regressed to 4–12 in his second year. He had a built-in excuse if he wanted it: Tony Banks was his quarterback. Vermeil faced a team mutiny early in his second season when the players called him into a meeting and complained about the long meetings and practices. After the season, Vermeil admitted that he had drained the enthusiasm out of his team.

  Vermeil said it was not a revolt, just a serious discussion. “I’m old-fashioned,” he said. “The only way you can make somebody better is to work them. The only way to work them is to keep them on the field. Then, in the third year, we said we are going to move the program in a little different direction. We backed off them a little bit, not a lot.”

  He was trying to change the culture of a franchise that last had had a winning season in 1989 back in Los Angeles. The time away from the game didn’t appear to have given him a new perspective. Maybe he’d been right all those years when he kept turning down opportunities to coach.

  There was speculation that he would be fired after the 1998 season. This just wasn’t working. Vermeil went into the ’99 season coaching for his job. At least he didn’t have to deal with Banks anymore. At Vermeil’s first training camp, Banks showed up with his Rottweiler puppy, Felony. Vermeil was not happy. Felony was sent home. The Rams signed free agent quarterback Trent Green for the 1999 season. Vermeil told team officials he thought he had a playoff team. Then San Diego safety Rodney Harrison ran into Green’s left knee in the third preseason game. Torn ACL. Out for the year. Vermeil had reached the point in his life where he was not afraid to display his emotions in public, and two days later, in announcing that the team was going with Kurt Warner at quarterback, Vermeil lost it. He started crying.

  “That’s just my makeup,” he said. “It used to embarrass me. I would be at a team banquet talking about one of my players, then all of a sudden I’d get emotional. My wife said, Hell, you don’t get that emotional about me. That’s just me. I’ve embarrassed myself many times, but I learned to just piss on it. They don’t like it. I could give a damn. A lot of people don’t get that close to their players. They don’t really care. They don’t give a shit.”

  As it turned out, Green’s misfortune gave birth to one of the great stories in NFL history. After the 1998 season Warner was included among the five Rams exposed on the expansion list for the new Cleveland Browns. The Browns passed on Warner, an unknown with virtually no playing experience outside of the Arena Football League and NFL Europe. They selected Kentucky quarterback Tim Couch with the first overall pick in the 1999 college draft. It was hard to fault the Browns. Who was Kurt Warner?

  Warner, of course, came out of nowhere in 1999 to be named the season MVP and the Super Bowl MVP. Rams linebacker Mike Jones prevented the Titans from sending the Super Bowl into overtime when he stopped Tennessee receiver Kevin Dyson on the 1-yard line on the final play of the game. In his third year back in the game after taking off for fourteen years, Vermeil was a Super Bowl champion.

  He then made the biggest mistake of his career. He had put everything he had into building the Rams. He had a shooting star in Warner. He had a dynamic back in Marshall Faulk. And he quit. Two days after the Super Bowl, he was gone. Frontiere had asked him to take two weeks before deciding. The ability to leave on his own terms and on top was too appealing. He saw Tom Landry get fired in Dallas. He watched as Don Shula was pushed aside for Jimmy Johnson. He had his ring and was at peace. He knew if he waited two weeks and then elected to leave, it would set the Rams back in their planning for the 2000 season.

  His three children were on the East Coast and wanted him to come home. “I was really exhausted,” he said. “In three years, we put six years of work into that program because it was a mess. I had a son tell me, Dad, you’ve gotten what you’ve always wanted to get done, now come on home. He was right.”

  It didn’t take long for Vermeil to realize he had made the wrong decision. His job was handed to offensive coordinator Mike Martz, who had distinguished himself with the work he had done with Warner in his first year coaching with the Rams. He had come to the Rams from the Redskins, where he had worked with Trent Green. He was a natural fit for Vermeil. But now Martz was a hot commodity, and St. Louis could have lost him to another team if Vermeil had waited weeks to decide his own future and then left. Maybe he should have done that because if Martz had left, it might have compelled Vermeil to stay.

  Vermeil was handing out the Super Bowl rings in May when he knew he should still be coaching this team. His team. Sure, he had won the Super Bowl ring he’d always wanted, but this team was good enough to get him another. And another. It was a feeling of emptiness. He had turned over his team and all his hard work to benefit someone else.

  “When I started handing those rings out, God, I’ve got tears in my eyes and hugging these guys as I’m giving them their world championships rings, and I say, ‘I spent three years of my life and my whole career getting to a point where I can do this. What a stupid thing to do,’ ” he said. “I have taught myself never to regret or look back. I don’t allow myself to do that. You move on.”

  Vermeil’s emotional ride as a head coach took a strange turn. He knew he should still be coaching in St. Louis, but Martz had that job. He sat out the 2000 season, and then Peterson finally persuaded him to coach the Chiefs. “I realized I missed it,” he said.

  Of course, he first told Peterson he wouldn’t do it, so Peterson hopped on a plane to Philadelphia and wouldn’t leave until Vermeil accepted the job at $4 million per year.

  He stayed five years in Kansas City, and just as in St. Louis, his team peaked in the third year. Kansas City started 9–0, finished the season as the number two seed with a 13–3 record, but lost its first playoff game to Peyton Manning and the Colts. It was the only time Vermeil’s Chiefs made the playoffs, although they did finish 10–6 in his final season.

  The time in Kansas City was rewarding. The Chiefs traded for Green after Vermeil arrived. He’d never played a regular season game for Vermeil in St. Louis after he was Vermeil’s big off-season free agent signing in 1999. But in Vermeil’s five seasons, Green started every game for the Chiefs. Vermeil and Green became close friends. In the spring of 2010, Vermeil and his sons Rick and David, both in their fifties, and Green went on a dove hunting trip to South America. Vermeil once had confided in Green that he felt that he had cheated Rick and David and his daughter Nancy. “I see you with your kids and I see my sons with their kids, and I cheated my own by not always being there for them like you guys are,” he told him.

  On the hunting trip, Green discussed with Rick and David what their father had said. Vermeil had never discussed this with his boys. “They told Trent they really understood it and a lot of their friends had dads who were working and traveling all over the country all the time,” Vermeil said. “So I wasn’t that unique to them. So they didn’t feel like they were being deprived. Plus, they enjoyed the involvement. They enjoyed being on the sidelines of games. I did feel good about that. I never felt real guilt because the kids have turned out well and Carol has done a good job with them.”

  Vermeil has eleven grandchildren. He is a very attentive grandpa. “I think I’m pretty good,” he said.

  This time, when he left Kansas City, he walked away from coaching for good. He wasn’t burned out. He wasn’t emotionally frozen. It was
time to go back to the log cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania and wait for the next shipment of Vermeil wine to arrive.

  THANKS FOR EVERYTHING. YOU’RE FIRED.

  Brian Billick was enjoying himself at the Ravens’ all-night victory party in Tampa after they crushed the Giants in Super Bowl XXXV. It doesn’t get better than the euphoria in the hours after winning the Super Bowl. It doesn’t last long, but when everybody is giddy and the champagne is flowing, the perils of the job seem distant; you can forget that even the great ones get fired.

  “When you get into coaching, you acknowledge it from the get-go. That’s the nature of the life that you have,” Billick said. “It very rarely ends well for coaches under any circumstances.”

  Bill Parcells put the thrill of winning in perspective for coaches at every level in every sport. After his second Super Bowl victory, he said, “Winning is better than anything. Better than sex. Better than Christmas morning.”

  Billick and the Ravens had been through a lot in the previous twelve months, and he finally had a chance to take a deep breath and enjoy what his team had accomplished even if the ride caused him to navigate potholes deeper than the ones in which cars have disappeared on the FDR Drive in Manhattan.

  There had been the life-changing situation of Ray Lewis, his best player. Lewis had been indicted on murder charges the previous year after a fight outside an Atlanta nightclub in the early morning hours after the thrilling Rams-Titans Super Bowl game at the Georgia Dome. He was jailed for fifteen days before posting $1 million bond. Lewis eventually made a guilty plea to obstruction of justice. The murder charges were dropped. He avoided further jail time, and that was good news for the Ravens. Now Lewis was the Super Bowl MVP. Billick had managed him brilliantly during the season, trying to deflect attention and keep the focus on the team. He did the same thing at the Super Bowl, lecturing the media, which only fostered his arrogant image, but he was running interference for Lewis and doing what was best for his team.