Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  Parcells shared a mantra with his tailbacks: “We’re trying to run for first downs, not touchdowns. Let’s run for first downs first.” For the best chance at first downs, Parcells taught his tailbacks to engage a safety as soon as possible. Generally safeties, as the last line of defense, prowled the middle of the field. So Parcells instructed Martin to attack safeties rather than sprint to a perimeter filled with cornerbacks and linebackers.

  Martin improved on his fundamentals enough to be named a starter for New England’s preseason opener on August 4, versus Detroit at Foxboro Stadium. The reward was especially gratifying to a rookie with a thin football résumé. In the locker room a few hours before his first NFL game, Martin tucked his grandmother’s two-dollar bill in his left sock, and as the 7 p.m. start time neared, his five-eleven frame hummed with nervous energy.

  When New England took the opening kickoff on the humid night, Martin began to hyperventilate, and the rookie had no time to calm down. Parcells called a run to start the Patriots’ offense, then another and another. The kinetic runner responded with shifty moves, producing a couple of first downs. Parcells continued to avoid pass plays, giving Martin the ball seven consecutive times. During the series Martin’s jitters eased, but surprised by the flurry of run calls, Martin felt like he was in the dreaded 300-yard shuttle, made harder by the defense’s tackles.

  Trotting to the sideline after a change in possession, snot dripping from his nose, the runner had trouble staying upright as he gasped for air. Nonetheless, when he got to the bench, he declined to sit.

  Parcells walked over. “You all right, son?”

  The rookie responded with his breath rasping in his throat. “Yeah. I’m all right. I gotta go back in now, right?” Martin started wobbling toward the field.

  Parcells grabbed him. “No, no.” Parcells took a few minutes to explain that a starting runner would never know the frequency of run plays during a drive. “Do you have any idea what kind of stamina you will need to do this job?”

  Martin nodded.

  Parcells said, “Well, there are 56 minutes left in this game. Do you think you can play any more?”

  Martin nodded again.

  Although Detroit won 30–17, Martin played enough to finish with a game-high 54 yards, on 13 carries, and a boost to his confidence.

  Parcells’s overbearing approach occasionally caused a steep drop in a target player’s performance, sometimes even precipitating his departure from the club. Linebacker Willie McGinest had witnessed the pattern after Parcells drafted him from USC fourth overall in 1994. “When Curtis got there, they knew he could play,” McGinest recalls. “So if Bill knows you can play, he’s going to start pushing you. Then one of two things is going to happen. You’re either going to perform or hit the tank,” meaning quit from the pressure.

  During one preseason practice, Parcells seemed obsessed with Martin’s flaws. Every rush, regardless of yards gained, was deemed subpar. Parcells punctuated a flurry of expletive-laced taunts by screaming: “You’re running with your high heels on.” Teammates, cringing at the venom, looked to Martin for at least a meek defense. But, as usual, Martin responded to Parcells’s hectoring by saying, “Yes, sir.” The ex-runner now explains, “I feel like I’ve had to do a lot to survive while I was growing up. And if I’m able to deal with that, I can definitely deal with some man hollering at me.”

  Former cornerback Ty Law recalls, “Curtis was God-fearing, on his own path. He was a little different from the rest of us. He was saved, and reading his Bible all the time. There was nothing that Parcells could say that was going to rile him.”

  New Patriots players didn’t realize that Parcells’s harping often signaled the head coach’s awareness of talent in need of honing. Silence toward a player usually signified a lost cause, unworthy of attention. Although Martin didn’t yet see the dynamic, he intuited the coach’s mind-set. Why else, Martin wondered, would Parcells ignore conventional wisdom to draft him in the third round? Why start him in the preseason opener? Martin understood that Parcells required a sturdy, productive tailback, certainly not a dainty one. So the rookie concluded, “There has to be a positive in all this, even if it sounds negative.” He became intent on validating Parcells’s unspoken faith.

  Curtis Martin’s progress earned him the starting job for the regular-season opener at Foxboro Stadium. But as New England’s 1995 opener approached, the rookie runner questioned his own ability, reminding himself that the September 3 contest against Belichick’s Browns would be his first real NFL game.

  Martin had a habit of silently praying in the backfield before each snap. On the Patriots’ first play from scrimmage, Martin shut his eyes, asking God for a good showing. He was finishing his prayer when Drew Bledsoe yelled hike. Martin hugged the handoff near the 25-yard line as instincts and training kicked in. He took a couple steps forward, not quite waiting for the last moment before sweeping left behind some blockers. Left tackle Bruce Armstrong and right guard Bob Kratch, a puller on the play, created a path that Martin slipped through. After sprinting left to the 35-yard line, he darted right, escaping a futile leg tackle. Martin continued diagonally across the field, leaving several more defenders behind. The rookie then scampered along the sideline to Cleveland’s 43-yard line, where he was finally shoved out of bounds. The 30-yard gain, New England’s best running play since late in the 1993 season, cleared away Martin’s pregame insecurities and jitters.

  Despite more such dazzling jaunts, Cleveland led 14–9 late in the fourth quarter. Bledsoe countered by orchestrating a frenetic drive to Cleveland’s 1-yard line with 19 seconds left. The Patriots called timeout to decide on the next play: a run up the middle. Parcells told Martin, “Get over the top, and get in!”

  Flashback: a goal-line drill in training camp. Parcells instructs Martin to go over the top, then informs the defense what’s coming. Unsurprisingly, Martin is halted on his first attempt. Parcells commands the rookie to repeat the play several times until Martin responds by finding different paths over the top.

  Back to the waning moments against Cleveland in the season opener: Martin took the handoff, hugging the ball with both arms. The rookie bulled forward, then leaped over burly bodies as if propelled by a pogo stick. Two defenders jumped up to meet him just short of the goal line, pushing him back into the scrum of linemen, but the cat-quick tailback landed on his feet, just as Parcells had taught him, and kept those legs churning. He sprang forward again, extending his arms—and the ball—into the end zone. Cleveland defenders knocked him down, but the damage had been done.

  Touchdown. Patriots 15, Browns 14.

  Patriot Nation roared as Foxboro Stadium became a sea of gray-and-blue towels.

  The game-winning burst brought Martin’s total rushing yards to 102, and a media armada to his locker after the game. Reporters jostled for proximity to the rookie hero who had averaged 5.3 yards rushing in his NFL debut. As Parcells headed through New England’s locker room, he glimpsed the commotion a few feet away. Parcells boomed, “I don’t know why you’re all crowding around him. This is just one game. He’s just a one-game wonder. Let’s see if his ass can keep this up all season, and then you all can come for that interview. You need to get away from him. One-game wonder!”

  In the coming days, Parcells used the description so frequently that teammates and reporters picked up on it. As if confirming Parcells’s assessment, Martin struggled during New England’s next five games, all losses, as the defense gave up at least 20 points each time. With the Patriots constantly trailing, the offense reverted to its dependence on Bledsoe’s arm. Getting a limited number of carries, Martin averaged only 37.2 yards, or 2.4 per rush.

  However, on October 23 against Buffalo, Martin gained 127 rushing yards, helping to snap New England’s skid, 27–14. With his club at 2-6, Parcells was not about to dispense kudos. “Ah, that’s just two games.” In other words Martin was now a two-game wonder. But on the Sundays that followed, the high-octane performance became a weekly p
henomenon. Over a ten-game stretch Martin averaged 108 yards for 4.3 per carry. Martin recalls, “Each time my goal was to get Parcells to say, ‘Two-game wonder,’ ‘Three-game wonder,’ ‘Four-game wonder,’ and so on.”

  Late in the season Parcells finally revamped the nickname. The Pats were preparing for an 11-on-11 drill and the offense began to huddle while Martin gulped water on the sideline. Parcells asked aloud, “Where’s the Boy Wonder?” The new moniker prompted laughter from teammates. It was one of the few superlatives Parcells could attach to a team unable to overcome its horrid start. Overall the defense sputtered and the offense wasn’t much better, as New England fell to 6-10, but Martin ended up with 1,487 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns, earning the award for Offensive Rookie of the Year. Having amassed the fourth-most running yards by a rookie in NFL history, he was named to the Pro Bowl. It was the new nickname, though, that gave Martin his biggest rush.

  Because he’d been selected in the third round, Boy Wonder earned significantly less money than most starting runners. So he approached management, through his agent, about upgrading his contract. Parcells rebuffed the request.

  “Son, if you do it next year, then we’ll get back to the table, but anyone can have one good year.”

  17

  In 1977 paper magnate and Patriots season-ticket holder Robert Kraft had struck up a friendship with Boston Globe sportswriter Will McDonough, who covered the team. Over the years the men grew so close that their families got together from time to time. McDonough emceed Kraft’s fiftieth birthday party on June 5, 1991. By the time Kraft purchased the Patriots in 1994, he considered McDonough among his best friends.

  Parcells had first met McDonough in 1980 as New England’s linebackers coach. The two bright, brash Northeasterners took to one another through interview sessions and off-the-record conversations. Like Charles Parcells, McDonough, who grew up in the same South Boston neighborhood as his mobster friend Whitey Bulger, was an Irishman. Although Bill Parcells left for the Giants after only one season, he stayed in touch with McDonough, who was establishing himself as a powerful sports journalist. Their relationship deepened as both men rose to legendary status in their professions. When Parcells was named Patriots head coach in 1993, McDonough, who used his unparalleled connections to dispense NFL scoops on NBC-TV, was already part of his inner circle. Parcells and McDonough even shared an agent in Robert Fraley.

  While the Patriots were stumbling in 1995, McDonough detected a chasm deepening between two of his best friends. Parcells resented his authority being diminished as Kraft spent more time hatching football ideas with less qualified front-office employees; the dictatorial head coach, fifty-three, bristled at the new way of doing things. Kraft felt that his top employee showed little respect to an ownership family that catered to him. In the increasingly acrimonious atmosphere, Parcells wanted to cut the remaining two years on his contract to one season; however, bolting before it expired on January 1998 would trigger a $1.3 million penalty.

  New England’s 1995 playoff hopes were long dead when Parcells’s team traveled to Indianapolis for its season finale. On December 22, 1995, the night before the game, Parcells gathered his coaches at the team hotel to share important information pertaining to his future and, by extension, theirs. Within a few days Parcells intended to essentially offer Kraft $300,000 to void his contract’s final year of 1997.

  At 8-7, Indianapolis needed a victory for a chance at the postseason. Although New England played hard, the Colts won, 10–7, landing them a wild-card berth. A few days later Parcells approached New England’s owner with the proposal. Kraft agreed to it, eliminating the final season of Parcells’s contract in exchange for having to pay only half of the remaining $600,000 due for his marketing rights.

  On January 12, 1996, Parcells signed an amended employment contract without running it by Robert Fraley, viewing it as a simple buyout of his final season. The bilateral option meant Kraft and Parcells would have to jointly agree on the head coach’s return for the 1997 season, which seemed as likely as a peace accord between North Korea and South Korea. However, the contract language, written by the Patriots general counsel, included boilerplate wording that prohibited Parcells from coaching for another team in 1997. The amended marketing agreement also failed to specify a new payout date for the $300,000 that Kraft still owed.

  In a staff meeting the next day, Parcells provided the upshot of his situation: 1996 would almost certainly be his final season in New England. The momentous development was kept from the public and media, including Will McDonough, so Patriots players and fans remained oblivious to it.

  Parcells considered the $300,000 discount on his marketing rights extra money in the team’s coffers, so around mid-January of 1996 he urged the Patriots to put it toward hiring Bill Belichick, who expected to be dismissed by the 5-11 Browns. On November 6, 1995, Art Modell had announced plans to relocate the franchise to Baltimore. Cleveland was 4-5 when the stunning news surfaced, and Belichick received assurances that he would be retained to lead the future Ravens. But by the end of the tumultuous season, his overall record had dropped to 36-44 with one playoff appearance in five seasons. And during a tenure spent frequently sparring with the media, Belichick had generated an image that he was miscast as a head coach. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1996, Modell dismissed the former defensive coordinator.

  Kraft didn’t share Parcells’s view that the marketing-rights agreement gave the franchise more spending money for, say, coaches. However, the owner approved Parcells’s idea of immediately placing Belichick on New England’s staff. Since Al Groh served as defensive coordinator, Belichick was named coach of the secondary, but Parcells added the title of assistant head coach, reflecting Belichick’s true place in the pecking order. “If you’re loyal to Bill, he’s loyal to you,” says Chris Palmer, Parcells’s quarterbacks coach at the time. “And if you’re one of his guys, you’re one of his guys until you go to the grave. There’s good and bad in every situation.”

  With Parcells likely to depart after the season, Kraft now had a qualified potential replacement on staff. The moves involving Belichick and the marketing rights had reduced the animosity between New England’s owner and its head coach, but their partnership remained tenuous enough that any perceived slight would risk derailing it. With Kraft bent on removing Parcells’s unofficial powers, bitter feelings were bound to resurface. After the 1994 draft had delivered several duds, notwithstanding a burgeoning star in linebacker Willie McGinest, Kraft considered Parcells’s abilities as a talent evaluator to be well below his brilliance as a coach. Kraft also expressed a desire that the GM role be held by someone with a long-term stake in the team, instead of a person who essentially coached year to year. So in February 1995 Kraft elevated pro scout Bobby Grier to director of player personnel, reducing Parcells’s draft clout. Kraft made himself the tiebreaker if Grier and Parcells disagreed on a player turned up by the team’s multimillion-dollar scouting system, but since Kraft had promoted Grier, the move essentially gave draft authority to Parcells’s former employee with only five years on his scouting résumé.

  Parcells believes that Kraft’s decision stemmed from personal reasons rather than personnel ones. “He didn’t want me to be the show. Simple,” Parcells says. “A couple of owners told him, ‘Some of these coaches get too big for their britches. You’ve got to put them in their place.’ So that’s what he was doing. He didn’t know that putting the wrong guy in his place screws up your football team. But he learned it.”

  On draft eve, Friday, April 19, Will McDonough telephoned Robert Kraft in his Boston office to gather information for a Globe article about possible Patriots choices with their seventh overall pick. Kraft informed him that Parcells and Grier planned to select a defensive lineman—Tony Brackens of Texas, Duane Clemons of California, or Cedric Jones of Oklahoma. McDonough then telephoned Parcells to corroborate the intel. “That’s right, one of those three defensive linemen,” Parcells confirmed to McDonough. “T
hat’s where we need the help. We stink on defense.”

  A few other league sources, though, told McDonough that Kraft was targeting wideout Terry Glenn, an All-American at Ohio State. Since the owner hadn’t brought up the possibility, McDonough ran it past Parcells. “We’re not taking a receiver with that pick,” Parcells replied. “We’re going to get the defensive lineman first, then get the receiver at the top of the second round. There still will be some good ones left.” Parcells wanted Muhsin Muhammad, a six-two, 217-pound wideout coming off a breakout season for Nick Saban’s Michigan State Spartans.

  On draft day at Foxboro Stadium, Bill Parcells and Bobby Grier sat among several Patriots scouts in a bustling war room while the first six selections took place. The developments left New England in a position to draft the player Bill Parcells coveted, defensive end Tony Brackens, with Muhsin Muhammad likely to be available for New England’s follow-up pick. But several minutes before the Patriots’ turn, Kraft entered the draft room to ask Parcells and Grier to step into another office for a private discussion. Since every scenario involving the selection had already been discussed, Parcells was flummoxed by the last-minute caucus. Once the threesome gathered, Kraft informed Parcells that the Patriots would be using their top pick on Terry Glenn.

  Incredulous, Parcells bristled. “We had agreed it was going to be a defensive player.” Taking Glenn would violate Parcells’s draft principle against selecting a smallish wideout early in the first round. Glenn stood five-ten and weighed 185 pounds, ostensibly making him more injury-prone than a bigger athlete. But Kraft sided with Grier, who wanted the speedy, shifty wideout in order to give New England’s offense a deep threat.

  Kraft said firmly, “We’re going with Glenn.”

  Realizing he was in a no-win situation, Parcells replied in a snippy tone, “Okay, if that’s the way you want it, you got it.”