Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  After identifying thirteen areas on the Jets as needing substantial improvement, Parcells wasted no time getting ensconced in his new corner office on the second floor of Weeb Ewbank Hall. He placed a black elephant figurine with gold markings at the edge of his oversized desk, not far from a toy convertible plastered with Red Sox logos. To the right of his desk Parcells used a small whiteboard to organize roster maneuverings. When Mike Tannenbaum walked in on his first day, Parcells told him, “Mr. T, this board has to be updated every single day.”

  Then Parcells sat, drapes drawn, to begin watching film of Tennessee’s star quarterback, Peyton Manning. For hours Parcells scrutinized every throw made by the twenty-year-old in a season that had cemented his status as the best quarterback in college. Having set multiple NCAA, SEC, and school records, Manning was scheduled to graduate in the spring with a bachelor of arts in speech communication. However, finishing his studies early gave Manning another year of football eligibility, generating uncertainty about whether he would turn pro. Even though Parcells believed that the Volunteers quarterback would stay in school, the new Jets chief was preparing for the alternative.

  To make his decision Peyton Manning consulted several sports stars, including quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Drew Bledsoe, plus NBA icon Michael Jordan. Phil Simms, now an NFL analyst for NBC, tried playing matchmaker between Manning and his former Giants coach. Simms told college football’s premier quarterback and Parcells that they would make an ideal combination because they both saw the game of football the same way.

  With suspense building on the decision in late February, Peyton Manning’s father telephoned Parcells to gather intelligence on Gang Green’s plans for the top overall pick. Himself a former star quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, Archie Manning was friendly with Parcells, but during this conversation, the two men tiptoed around the elephant in the room: If Peyton Manning declared for the draft, would the Jets keep their top overall pick and choose him?

  Cognizant of Parcells’s responsibilities as a GM, which included keeping all options open going into the draft, Archie didn’t press for explicit assurances, and Parcells avoided asking for inside information. He indicated that the Jets saw Peyton Manning as a future Pro Bowl quarterback meriting the top overall selection, but the circumspect GM did not guarantee that Gang Green would keep its opening pick, especially given Peyton’s undecided status. The Jets already had quarterback Neil O’Donnell, who was only one year removed from guiding Bill Cowher’s Steelers to a Super Bowl appearance, playing under a franchise-record $25 million contract. So the don’t-ask-don’t-tell conversation ended with neither the Mannings nor Parcells getting a true sense of the other’s plans.

  About a week later, on March 5, Peyton Manning revealed his decision in a nationally televised press conference at the Volunteers’ field house. Poker-faced, he used the past tense in describing his happy experiences at Tennessee to the overflow crowd, which included teammates and family. After making it seem as if he would be joining the NFL, Manning smiled and revealed that he was remaining at Tennessee for a final year. When the thunderous roar subsided, Peyton Manning informed the gathering that the possibility of playing for Bill Parcells had been perhaps the most difficult aspect of his deliberations. “At one point,” Manning said, “I made up my mind to stay in school, but Parcells shook things up. I have a lot of respect for Coach Parcells. It made my decision a lot harder.”

  The Jets head coach was not surprised by the development, having been tipped off by a phone call from Archie Manning just before the press conference.

  Parcells told Peyton’s father, “Heck, we may have a chance at him next year.”

  But Archie Manning, alluding to Parcells’s reputation for turnarounds, replied, “I don’t think you’re going to have the first pick next year.”

  “You haven’t seen our defense.”

  Both men were laughing as they hung up.

  Parcells now concedes what he had refused to confirm to Archie Manning: Gang Green would likely have drafted Tennessee’s quarterback if he had come out in 1997. However, although Peyton Manning turned into one of the greatest quarterbacks in league history, Parcells expresses no regret for refusing to nudge him toward the draft. “You can’t make a decision like that for the player,” he says, adding that the league frowned on the influencing of underclassmen to enter the draft.

  Gang Green still retained an exciting opportunity to select the top college prospect after Manning: left tackle Orlando Pace had been so dominant at Ohio State that he hadn’t allowed a sack in two seasons. However, millions of dollars in Jets cap space was tied to offensive tackles David Williams and Jumbo Elliott. More important, Gang Green had recently sent its third- and fourth-round choices in April’s draft to New England as part of the compensation for Parcells. With two more picks owed to the Patriots in future years, the Jets decided to stockpile selections in the 1997 draft, so Parcells traded the first overall choice to the St. Louis Rams, parlaying it into a total of seven selections by moving down multiple times through other exchanges.

  Leon Hess granted Bill Parcells permission to construct a state-of-the-art, all-weather practice bubble, as part of a $3.5 million makeover of the team’s facilities. The Jets upgraded their gym while adding substantially more free weights and aerobics-based equipment. The team also tore apart its three playing fields, replacing them with new gridirons in line with Parcells’s specifications: artificial turf was installed next to two grass fields.

  During a conversation among Jets officials about the resodded fields, Parcells awed them with his knowledge of grass. It came partly from grilling groundskeepers, particularly “grass guru” George Toma, who worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and baseball’s Kansas City Royals. The NFL had assigned Toma to every Super Bowl since the first one. His résumé included stints supervising ground crews for the 1984 Olympics, 1994 World Cup, and 1996 Olympics. So Parcells picked Toma’s brain at every opportunity. “That’s part of the game, the surface you play on,” Parcells explains. “There are different kinds of grass: bluegrass, Bermuda grass, blank grass. Some are weak and dislodge easily. Some have a good base. Others are more slippery when they get wet. You have to know all that.” Parcells also knew about the different types of synthetics used for Astroturf, and occasionally compelled his players to wear certain shoes depending on the stadium.

  Several weeks before conducting his first spring practice, Parcells called a mandatory team meeting at Jets headquarters. Addressing his players in a packed auditorium, Parcells informed them that he was sharply increasing the length of the voluntary off-season program, which emphasized weight lifting and conditioning. By stressing the importance of the program, Parcells essentially made attendance involuntary.

  He later met in his office with the team’s top receiver, Keyshawn Johnson, drafted first overall in 1996 out of Southern California. Despite being one of Gang Green’s few beacons during its dreary previous season, Johnson had a reputation as a loudmouth and prima donna. Shortly after Parcells was hired, Johnson released a book, Just Give Me the Damn Ball!: The Fast Times and Hard Knocks of an NFL Rookie. In the autobiography he described Rich Kotite as incompetent while calling offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt, sixty-five, “an old fool” and Neil O’Donnell “a stiff puppet.” Johnson also complained that too many passes went to teammate Wayne Chrebet, an undrafted wideout from Hofstra once cut by a Canadian Football League team. In just two NFL seasons Chrebet had caught 150 balls for 1,635 yards while becoming the Jets’ most popular player. But Just Give Me the Damn Ball! described the five-ten, 188-pounder as “a short, little white guy” and “team mascot.” The book was co-written by ESPN’s Shelley Smith, who had helped Johnson during his troubled youth in Los Angeles’s notorious neighborhood of South Central.

  One of six children of a single mother, Keyshawn Johnson grew up poor in the shadow of Memorial Coliseum. A skinny seven-year-old in 1979, he began to attend USC’s football practices by entering the premises throug
h an unlocked gate. Keyshawn was so omnipresent that he became an unofficial member of the powerhouse program, whose players included All-American safety Ronnie Lott and tailback Marcus Allen. Keyshawn helped stuff envelopes in the sports information office and lug the bags of Coach John Robinson’s assistants to their cars. Occasionally he slept at their homes while dreaming about one day playing for the Trojans.

  But Keyshawn couldn’t escape the realities of South Central, infamous for its poverty and gang violence between the Bloods and Crips. After he turned eleven in 1983, Keyshawn’s family became homeless, and slept in a car. By 1985 he had stopped spending time at USC, succumbing to his environment while trying to support his mother and his siblings. For the next three years, Keyshawn sold marijuana and cocaine. As an eighth-grader he was arrested for possession of a handgun and drugs, charges that led to a nine-month sentence at a juvenile facility. But Keyshawn began to turn his life around after joining Dorsey High’s football team, where he blossomed into one of the nation’s best wideouts.

  Writer Shelley Smith met Keyshawn Johnson in the summer of 1992, working for Sports Illustrated on a profile of the team and the surrounding gang culture. Despite having recently graduated, Johnson was hanging around the sportswriter daily to offer stories about his exploits, and to try getting mentioned in SI. The white suburban mom and black inner-city kid bonded.

  To improve his college-entrance scores and qualify for a top football program, Johnson attended West Los Angeles College. Meanwhile, Smith took on a supportive role in Johnson’s life. She hired him to babysit her five-year-old daughter, Dylann, and found him other odd jobs. After a stint at the junior college, Johnson accepted an athletic scholarship from USC in 1994. The six-four wideout flourished, earning All-American honors. The following year, 1995, Shelley Smith wrote an SI article about Johnson for the magazine’s college football preview, which splashed him on the cover. The Trojans went on to reach the 1996 Rose Bowl, where he led them to a 41–32 victory over Northwestern. Johnson finished with 12 receptions, including a touchdown, for a game-record 216 yards. However, when Parcells joined the Jets, pundits predicted that he wouldn’t be able to stomach the brash wideout.

  Instead of relying on perception, Parcells telephoned USC head coach John Robinson for insight. Despite Johnson’s NFL reputation for rebelliousness, Robinson told Parcells, the young second-year wideout ached for guidance that would help make him a star on a winning team. So in their first time meeting, Parcells skipped the introductory pleasantries. “What’s the best game you ever played, Keyshawn? The Rose Bowl?”

  Johnson responded, “Yeah.”

  “Well, how much did you weigh in the Rose Bowl?”

  “212.”

  “What the hell do you weigh now?”

  “220.”

  “Well, get down to 212. That’s the guy I want. I don’t want this fat guy I see in front of me. You look like you’ve got the mumps.” Continuing his offensive, Parcells told Johnson that he would be required to weigh in every Friday during the season, and face consequences if he ever went over the 212 pounds. The high-strung receiver remained unruffled, agreeing to drop almost ten pounds in time for training camp. Parcells was pleased that his insults hadn’t fazed Johnson, seeing his reaction as a sign of competitiveness. Conversely, the cocksure wideout welcomed Parcells’s no-nonsense approach.

  “I liked the dude right away,” recalls Johnson. “I didn’t need to hear a guy tell me that I was good and I’m the man—I already knew all that stuff. I needed to hear what was going to make me a better person and football player. He realized that I wanted to be great and to be challenged, so I embraced his attitude. I was like, ‘Man, we’re going to win a championship. We’ve got the right cat.’ The previous regime was a joke. It was like Pop Warner football. I had gone from playing in a major college football program right back to Pop Warner.”

  Once the off-season program commenced in the spring, Parcells began scrutinizing the work habits of his players. Now starting linebacker Mo Lewis no longer dared ask a teammate to sign in for him at weight-lifting sessions. Parcells substantially lowered the the air conditioner’s temperature in the training room to prevent players from congregating there without legitimate injuries. He ignored their complaints, joking to his predominantly black athletes that “the brothers don’t like it too cold in there.”

  Parcells emphasized attention to detail. During full-uniform stretching drills he required every player to place his helmet to his right. Step by step, with small changes and large, the new head coach started to revamp the culture of a team coming off 33 losses in 37 games. The biggest jolt took place during Parcells’s first few practices, just as it had with the Patriots, where he established his standards for conditioning, preparation, and execution. During one such session Parcells had been going over to each unit performing its drills, screaming about flaws in technique and fundamentals, when he suddenly blew his whistle to halt the practice. After commanding his coaches to gather around him, he unleashed an expletive-laced tirade about the session’s sluggishness. Longtime staff members like Bill Belichick and Romeo Crennel, who were among six Jets coaches formerly with Parcells, were used to being rebuked for lackluster performances by their groups, but Jets players were dumbfounded to see Parcells berate his staff for their actions. When practice resumed, the energy increased and the execution sharpened, but the new head coach never let up.

  During 11-on-11 sessions, he sometimes fired questions at players about precise situations they might face on game day. Parcells yelled, “Okay, we’re up three points with four seconds left to play. We’ve got the ball on our 20. It’s fourth-and-10. What’s the call?”

  Punting seemed the obvious response, but some players aware of Parcells’s approach in that situation shouted, “Pass out of bounds!” Parcells nodded approvingly. He ruled out punting in that situation. Instead, Jets quarterbacks were instructed to throw the ball high and toward the stands. Parcells explains, “The pass takes four seconds. Game’s over. So even though you don’t have another down, you can burn all the time on the clock.”

  In revamping the roster, Bill Parcells kept only 29 of the 61 Jets players from the previous season. He acquired a handful of his former players, so-called Bill Parcells Guys, including Pepper Johnson, to start at linebacker. Offensive lineman William Roberts, who had reached three Super Bowls with Parcells, signed as a key reserve. Parcells saw the thirty-five-year-old as a “hold-the-fort guy,” providing competence for the time being.

  To jump-start Gang Green, Parcells focused on its special teams, which contained mostly inexperienced players. The ex–Army coach had never forgotten what he’d learned in 1967 under Tom Cahill—that special teams marks the quickest way to revitalize a struggling program. Assembling a special-teams unit was one of his favorite aspects of football. And as a coach who often repeated Red Blaik’s exhortation “Let’s put the ‘foot’ back in football,” Parcells found it deplorable that Gang Green’s punt- and kick-returning units were collectively the NFL’s worst.

  Perhaps the most talented member of the revamped special teams was rookie tailback Leon “The Natural” Johnson, drafted in the fourth round via North Carolina after setting the ACC mark for all-purpose yards. Slippery at six feet and 220 pounds, Johnson aimed for the lead role as punt and kick returner. Kicking and kick defense seemed like the best parts of Gang Green’s special teams: Rookie John Hall, undrafted out of Wisconsin, possessed a powerful leg, and delighted teammates by occasionally punishing returners with a haymaker. Reserve defensive back Corwin Brown, a kamikaze tackler during Parcells’s tenure in New England, also brought his act to the Jets.

  The unit’s most intriguing member, however, was an ex–college quarterback with only two games on his NFL résumé as a Patriots rookie in 1996 on special teams. Undrafted out of Rutgers, Ray Lucas had practiced at wideout, defensive back, and quarterback, but failed to excel in any of those positions, prompting Pete Carroll’s Patriots to release him. Parcells, howev
er, loved his multidimensionality and determination.

  “I don’t know what to do with you yet, Lucas, but I want you.”

  To enhance his knowledge of so many new personalities, Parcells mined the team psychologist, Charles Maher, whose duties included compiling profiles on every player. Maher was astonished by how thoroughly Parcells digested his assessments. During their meetings to discuss the reports, Parcells showed his relish for personal details. “He wanted to know the psychological DNA of each individual,” Dr. Maher recalls, “what makes the player tick.”

  Parcells still contacted past coaches to flesh out information, but his favorite way to assess personalities remained having conversations with players and studying their mannerisms, especially during downtime. He noted whether they were introverted or extroverted, assertive or diffident, self-assured or self-doubting, meticulous or sloppy, cerebral or impetuous. In time, Parcells customized his methods to get the most out of each player.

  “Even in a steel door, there are hinges, and there are cracks,” says Ray Lucas. “Maybe on the bottom, maybe on the side. Maybe there’s one on top. That sonofabitch finds it somehow, and gets into your head. And then he can either break you or he can build you up.”

  When Joe O’Donnell visited Parcells at Jets headquarters during summer minicamp, the stadium-food CEO marveled at the way his friend used both management tools of motivation on players—sometimes only moments apart.

  “In business, you call it ‘Theory X’ and ‘Theory Y,’ ” explains the former dean of Harvard Business School. “Theory Y is, ‘We’re in this together. Great job. Love the way you’re thinking.’ Theory X is, ‘Do better or else. You’re not cutting it.’ Now, you can’t say one is better than the other. Certain people respond to the stick; certain people respond to the carrot. Bill was so smart, he understood which guys needed him to snap a towel off their asses.”