Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  “Bill Cowher didn’t go to the playoffs in year seven, eight, and nine, but his organization stuck with him,” Billick said. “Then he came out of it, as typically will happen, and ended up being rewarded with a Super Bowl. That’s very rare. Most organizations will bail on you at that point, and you recognize that.”

  Billick came to work at the Ravens’ beautiful complex in Owings Mills, Maryland, the Monday morning after the season ended. He was already making plans for the off-season. He knew he had to hire an offensive coordinator because Rick Neuheisel had accepted the head coaching job at UCLA. “I was ready to hit the road and hire a couple of staff members,” Billick said.

  Newsome, who’d had a great career as a tight end with the Browns and was inducted into Canton in 1999, accompanied Modell when he moved the team to Baltimore. He was the first African-American general manager in NFL history when he was promoted in 2002. He was very good at his job.

  Billick had his morning cup of coffee in his hand when he walked into Newsome’s office. He was about to detail his plans for the week and go over staff hirings.

  “Brian,” Newsome said. “Steve is going to come in. He’s decided to make a change.”

  Billick was shocked and actually mad at himself for being surprised. “I was emotionally floored because I wasn’t prepared for it,” he said. “It caught me totally broadside.”

  He knew what kind of business this was. He knew he was coming off a horrible season. Yet firing a coach one year into a four-year contract? Not many owners would be willing to eat that kind of money. He had won thirteen games the previous year. He had won a Super Bowl. That should have been enough collateral, but he had run out of the benefit of the doubt. In a way, he had lasted longer than perhaps he could have expected. Bisciotti was not the man who hired him. Modell was. Coaches like to handpick their quarterbacks. Owners like to handpick their coaches. Billick was Modell’s guy. Bisciotti inherited him.

  Billick wasn’t convinced that Newsome had endorsed Bisciotti’s decision. In their conversations the previous week, Bisciotti told Billick and Newsome that he had faith that among the three of them, two of them were always going to be right in any given situation. Billick thought of that exchange when Newsome told him he was about to be fired.

  “I was half joking with Ozzie that I know I don’t think I should be fired and you don’t think I should be fired and that our two-thirds majority doesn’t seem to be holding water,” he said.

  Bisciotti kept Billick waiting a couple of hours. He didn’t come into the office until early afternoon. Bisciotti’s office was at the other end of the building. When Billick was summoned, he made the long walk alone, but he had company. He was not the first coach to win the Super Bowl and be fired. George Seifert won two Super Bowls with the 49ers after he took over for Bill Walsh but was let go two seasons after winning the second one. Mike Ditka, a legend in Chicago, won a Super Bowl but later was fired. It would happen to Jon Gruden after the 2008 season, just six years after Tampa had given up two first-round picks and $8 million to the Raiders to get him out of his contract and he won the Super Bowl in his first season with the Bucs.

  The meeting between Billick and Bisciotti was over in five minutes. There was nothing to discuss. Bisciotti had made up his mind. It was time for a change.

  “Steve made it very clear he had made his decision and this was what he was going to do,” Billick said. “Here’s your $18 million and now go away.”

  He remained on the Ravens’ payroll for the next three years. “I just kept receiving my checks,” he said.

  Billick was in the process of building a house on the Chesapeake when he was fired. The house is now complete, and he’s living in it. There’s not a day that goes by that somebody in Baltimore doesn’t thank Billick for winning that Super Bowl. It wasn’t enough to give him lifetime immunity from the fate that brings down most coaches, but it allowed him to have the satisfaction of knowing he’d once reached the height of his profession.

  “I have huge respect for Steve Bisciotti. It was a business decision,” Billick said.

  They’ve had several conversations since that day in Owings Mills when Bisciotti fired him. “He said at some point we will sit down and have a glass of wine in that new house of yours,” Billick said.

  Billick had the perfect response. “It’s the least I can do, because you’re paying for it.”

  Billick’s résumé is impressive enough that he deserves another chance to be a head coach. Coaches who have accomplished a lot less have been given an opportunity to try to learn from their mistakes and get better the second time. Norv Turner is on his third job in San Diego after failing in Washington and Oakland. He is the most ridiculed head coach in the last fifteen years. But each year as coaches were getting fired and coaches were getting hired, Billick was not getting a serious nibble. He’s had a couple of teams call, but it didn’t go very far. He didn’t like what he was hearing. He was never brought in for an interview.

  “I guess having the ring gave me more latitude to more objectively size it up,” he said. “When you are a coordinator and you desperately want to become a head coach, you say, well, if the right people and the right situation, and then Charles Manson could offer you a job and you’d take it. You convince yourself of that. Fortunately, because of my circumstance, because of the ring, because of the contract, I didn’t need to convince myself of that. I could look at it with a much more objective set of eyes.”

  But not even Daniel Snyder or Al Davis offered him a head coaching job, and they changed coaches the way most people change their socks. Eric Mangini was fired by the Jets the day after the 2008 season, and by the end of the week he was hired by the Cleveland Browns. Chan Gailey got a second chance with the Bills. Romeo Crennel is on his second job in Kansas City. Jeff Fisher was given a new opportunity in St. Louis. Billick hasn’t come close to a second head coaching job.

  Billick is not for everyone. He’s strong-willed and opinionated. He felt coaches who were on the bubble were threatened by his presence when he visited their facilities to prepare to do their games on network television. “I’ve been told that,” he said. “Besides the fact that I am an arrogant asshole.”

  He might have been better off staying away from the game for a year like Fisher and Mike Shanahan, who each sat out one season and then had no trouble being hired. Billick believes his time to be an NFL head coach has passed. “I can’t imagine the circumstances at this point,” he said. “It’s a general manager’s league now. What they are looking for in the head coach is not what I represent, at least in their minds, in terms of that partnership. They are looking for the guru, the genius, go craft up the game plan, don’t talk to me about personnel, don’t ask about the cap.”

  Billick has his ring; he has his house. He was paid $18 million not to coach. He did well for himself.

  Mike Shanahan had not been given much of a chance by Al Davis, which didn’t necessarily make him unique, although it did make him bitter.

  Davis, who always considered himself the smartest football man on the planet, reached outside the Raiders organization in 1988 to hire Shanahan, who was the most desirable coaching assistant in the NFL. He had made a name for himself for his work with John Elway, and the Broncos were coming off consecutive Super Bowl appearances. Okay, so the Broncos were outscored 39–20 by the Giants and 42–10 by the Redskins in those Super Bowls, but Shanahan, as Elway’s mentor and offensive coordinator, had helped develop the immensely talented quarterback into the most dangerous offensive player in the league.

  Davis had a reputation for interviewing candidates with the intention of picking their brains and no intention of hiring them. Davis, even as he lost his touch with personnel, which turned his “Commitment to Excellence” from a team motto into utter nonsense, still realized there was a lot to gain in the interview process with each candidate. Just about every coach worth a damn has at one time interviewed with Davis—Bill Belichick was nearly fitted for a silver and black hoo
die before Davis hired Jon Gruden in 1998—or turned down the opportunity to interview with him or simply turned down a job offer from him, as Sean Payton did in 2004 before going to Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans two years later.

  Davis had transformed the Raiders into such a mess that Payton decided to go to a team with no tradition and a city under water and undergoing a massive rebuilding job rather than become another statistic—coaches who have had their careers sidetracked or even destroyed working for Davis.

  Shanahan was a rising star in the late ’80s, and stealing him away from the Broncos, a hated rival in the AFC West, made him a perfect hire for Davis. It was also a rarity for Davis because Shanahan had no connection to the Raiders’ once-proud legacy. “I was the first that hadn’t been with the organization,” Shanahan said. “So that was unique at that time. When I came in there, everybody had been a disciple of the Raiders. So that was quite a step for me.”

  He then added, “I only lasted a year and four games.”

  Shanahan was a few months short of his thirty-sixth birthday when he got the job and a few months past his thirty-seventh when he lost it. In between, he was 7–9 in his first season and had a 1–3 start in his second year. Hell, even Rich Kotite lasted longer with the Jets; he was 3–13 in his first year in 1995 and gone after going 1–15 in his second. Was it all Kotite’s fault? Bill Parcells came in the next year and put together a 9–7 season with mostly the same personnel, losing out to the Dolphins on a tiebreaker for the final wild-card spot on the last day of the season.

  If getting fired from his first NFL head coaching job wasn’t bad enough for Shanahan, he contended that Davis never paid him $250,000 he was owed on his contract or even donated the money to Oakland’s public schools as Shanahan requested when Davis refused to write the check directly to him. Their parting was contentious.

  That was not unusual when it came to Davis and his coaches. When he fired Lane Kiffin in 2008, it also came after just twenty games. It ended with Davis holding a bizarre press conference in which he blamed Kiffin for just about everything but the national debt. Kiffin was 5–15 in his short stay in Oakland. Shanahan was 8–12. At the time Kiffin was dumped, Shanahan couldn’t help getting in a dig at Davis.

  “I was a little disappointed, to be honest with you,” he said. “When you take a look at it, I was there 582 days. Lane Kiffin was there 616 days. So what it really means is that Al Davis liked Lane more than he liked me. I really don’t think it’s fair. I won three more games, yet he got thirty-four more days of work. That just doesn’t seem right.”

  After Davis decided that Shanahan was not for him early in the 1989 season, Shanahan went back to Denver right away to work for Dan Reeves and with Elway again for a few years. But he had a falling out with Reeves, who fired him after the 1991 season because he felt he was scheming behind his back with Elway. Shanahan was hired by the 49ers to be their offensive coordinator. Not a bad job. Steve Young, who was in his second season after taking over for Joe Montana, was on his way to a Hall of Fame career.

  The 49ers won the Super Bowl in 1994, and contributing to the championship in San Francisco was sweet for Shanahan after those lopsided Broncos losses to the Giants and Redskins.

  Still, the Vince Lombardi Trophy might not have been as satisfying to Shanahan as the mythical Al Davis Trophy he won on the opening Monday night of the 1994 season in San Francisco when the 49ers hosted the Raiders. That was the game in which Jerry Rice scored three touchdowns and broke the immortal Jim Brown’s record for career touchdowns.

  The 49ers were coming off back-to-back NFC championship game losses to the Cowboys and were considered a strong Super Bowl contender once again. The Raiders were playoff contenders but not in the 49ers’ class. The 49ers-Raiders games always had added intensity, even in 1994, the Raiders’ last year in Los Angeles before they moved back to Oakland.

  Shanahan had been gone from the Raiders for five years by then, but he was still burned by how Davis had treated him. And for one brief terrifying moment before the kickoff, he actually thought he had ordered Davis’s execution. “So, before the game, we are warming up. Al has got a way of coming out to about the 30-, 35-yard line, out on the numbers,” he said.

  Davis was on the 49ers’ side of the 50 in his trademark white sweat suit and black patent leather shoes. Sometimes you wondered if the man owned any clothes other than the business suits he wore in the courtroom and Raiders sweat suits he wore for every other occasion. Davis was looking over the 49ers’ players during the warm-ups, trying to find an edge of any kind he could relay to his coaches. It might have been forty years since he was a coach, and a pretty good one, but he knew more football than any owner in the league. His presence was felt by the Niners’ players during the warm-ups. They came up to Shanahan and said Davis shouldn’t be allowed to stand so close to them. Young, in particular, was aggravated by Davis’s presence.

  “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 wa
nted 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.