Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  The penalties could only be appealed to Commissioner Roger Goodell, who was both judge and jury, by an April 2 deadline. Parcells advised Payton, who’d set the process in motion, to use the intervening time for contingency plans. Owner Tom Benson empowered his disgraced head coach to find a temporary replacement, and early the next morning, Payton dialed Parcells again, this time with an impassioned plea: fill in for him as head coach for the season. Payton emphasized his mentor’s leadership qualities and his unique skill set as a former GM, head coach, and linebackers guru.

  “Listen, you can help us out here. You can do all those jobs.”

  Parcells replied, “I’ll think about it.”

  The 49ers hadn’t been the only team in late 2011 to quietly try luring Parcells back to the sidelines. In November, Penn State contacted him after firing Joe Paterno over the child-molestation scandal involving Jerry Sandusky. Parcells responded to that inquiry by recommending Eric Mangini, whom he’d taken an increased role in mentoring since the young coach had become estranged from Bill Belichick. So Penn State interviewed Mangini before hiring Belichick’s offensive coordinator, Bill O’Brien.

  After having shown zero interest in the Nittany Lions and briefly contemplating the 49ers job, Parcells strongly considered accepting New Orleans’s short-term gig. Despite being only five months away from age seventy, Parcells wanted to help one of his favorite pupils, someone he considered to be like a son.

  Parcells’s NFL staffs, including the one in Dallas, had given small cash incentives for statistics such as special-team tackles inside the 20-yard line, blocked kicks, and defensive turnovers. While those inducements technically violated league rules against salary-cap circumvention, the practice remained widespread—it was the NFL’s version of jaywalking.

  So Parcells expressed dismay at Sean Payton’s involvement in Bountygate.

  “I didn’t teach him that stuff,” Parcells says in a disapproving tone.

  Although Payton lacked direct involvement in Gregg Williams’s bounties, he had failed to halt them before belatedly admitting their existence. But Parcells detected some hypocrisy from a league exploring an eighteen-game regular season that would inevitably lead to more injuries while espousing concern for player health.

  Parcells also noted that after leaving New Orleans following the 2011 season, Williams had been hired by Rams head coach Jeff Fisher, his mentor and close friend. Fisher happened to be co-chairman of the NFL’s Competition Committee, which oversaw rule changes with an increased emphasis on—ahem—player safety. So while Payton faced vilification outside of New Orleans, which revered him for capturing Super Bowl XLIV four years after Hurricane Katrina, Parcells embraced the fallen coach.

  Joining the Saints would mean only a six-month stint, and part of Payton’s rationale on his replacement stemmed from intimately knowing Parcells’s tendency to coach from year to year anyway. After Bill’s Dolphins tenure, the Saints also provided an opportunity for him to burnish his legacy late by guiding an NFL-record fifth team to the postseason and, in a best-case scenario, punctuating his career with a third Lombardi Trophy. Conversely, Parcells faced a quandary: returning to the sidelines would reset the clock on his Hall of Fame eligibility. Five years after the 2012 season would put Parcells at age seventy-seven before his next crack. After being snubbed in February, however, Parcells refused to base his decision solely on the whims of Hall voters.

  On March 27, Sean Payton made his first public comments since receiving his suspension. While taking questions from reporters at the NFL owners meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, he caused a tizzy in the sports world by broaching the possibility of Parcells as a temporary replacement. Parcells’s friends, his family, the media, and his former players inundated the retired coach with calls, texts, and e-mails to offer opinions or glean insight. Lawrence Taylor joined the camp urging Parcells to take the job, seeing it as ideal, but many warned Parcells about the pitfalls, including the consequences involving the Hall of Fame.

  Bill Parcells lived about twenty miles away from Palm Beach, so a few hours after Sean Payton’s media Q&A the sullied coach took Saints executive vice president and GM Mickey Loomis to a nearby golf course to meet Parcells for the first time. The threesome played eighteen holes, giving Loomis and Parcells an opportunity to get acquainted. In discussing the New Orleans gig with Payton, Parcells became increasingly intrigued. The Saints were an offensive juggernaut, led by one of the best passers of his generation. Parcells had reached three Super Bowls with different quarterbacks, but he’d never coached a signal caller of Drew Brees’s caliber.

  The Pro Bowl quarterback had heard a great deal about Parcells from his head coach, and before New Orleans played in the 2010 Super Bowl, Payton introduced Parcells to Brees. The retired coach enjoyed getting acquainted with the Purdue product, and Parcells sensed that the feeling was mutual. Brees was Parcells’s type of player, based on his football passion and ultracompetitiveness.

  On October 16, 2011, the Saints lost at Tampa Bay, 26–20, after Brees tossed three interceptions, his highest total of the season. The gaffes overshadowed Brees’s achievement as the first quarterback in NFL history to collect at least 350 passing yards in four consecutive games. After watching the contest on satellite TV that night, Parcells dialed Payton.

  “Sean, tell Brees that if he was down in the arcade throwing balls at milk bottles to win a teddy bear for his girlfriend, she would have gone home empty-handed.”

  Payton relayed the message the next day, but Brees found no humor in it. The Saints coach dialed his mentor to convey the quarterback’s reaction.

  “Drew’s mad at you.”

  “He is, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what the hell is three interceptions, two in the second half? You don’t think that’s worse than a line about teddy bears?”

  In his next game Brees produced five touchdowns and zero interceptions during a 62–7 rout of Indianapolis on Monday Night Football. Completing 31 of 35 passes, Brees led New Orleans to a franchise record for points scored. Parcells quickly phoned Payton to give the quarterback his due.

  “Sean, tell Brees that we ran out of teddy bears up here. They’re all gone. We were forced to order some more from the factory in South Korea.” This time, hearing about Parcells’s crack, Brees laughed hard.

  Now, with a chance to join forces, Parcells believed that New Orleans’s top player would provide the support essential for a substitute head coach. He relished his first chance to coach an all-time great at quarterback, an opportunity that had benefited historic rivals like Bill Belichick and Bill Walsh. Nevertheless, Parcells maintained reservations about the job. Sure, Bountygate had upended the franchise and created turmoil, a situation that he enjoyed addressing. But New Orleans needed a leader to keep things from cratering until Payton’s return, not someone to jump-start the franchise, which is what Parcells loved most.

  Perhaps the most significant drawback involved Payton’s staff. Parcells had no direct ties to anyone on it, a disadvantage compounded by the gig’s brevity. Parcells said to himself, “So if things don’t go well, people will say, ‘This guy tried to change everything we were doing.’ And if it does go well, people will say, ‘Well, shit, he had a built-in advantage.’ ”

  Still, Payton emphasized the pluses. For one thing, New Orleans’s off-season setup and practice structure were virtually identical to Parcells’s system.

  After about a week of vacillation, with the media reading the tea leaves daily, Parcells remained open to the job. But he wanted to ease his nagging concern about overseeing an unfamiliar staff, one likely to view him as a lame duck. So Parcells asked the Saints for permission to hire two disciples with head-coaching experience. The organization obliged, and Parcells took steps to lure Al Groh, Georgia Tech’s defensive coordinator, and Eric Mangini, an ESPN analyst two years removed from guiding the Cleveland Browns.

  While Tom Benson, the Saints’ owner, and Payton embraced the idea, Loomis seeme
d reluctant about it, perhaps sensitive to the effect on the incumbent coaching staff. Also, some reports speculated that Parcells would land an executive role in the organization after Payton’s return. “Who knows what Loomis really thought? I don’t have any idea,” Parcells says. “I don’t know Loomis; I only met him once. But guys like me threaten guys like him.” In early April, the appeals process for Payton gave Parcells an extra week to weigh matters, and he focused on his reservations.

  Absent from the sidelines for six years, Parcells enjoyed retirement, living in Jupiter during the late fall, winter, and spring before heading to Saratoga Springs until the weather turned cold. Parcells had a sweet deal with ESPN, too, working a few times each year on prime-time specials like Bill Parcells’ Draft Confidential.

  Finally, Parcells remained uncertain about whether he possessed the energy required to do things in his maniacal way.

  “It’s like an old hunting dog,” Parcells explains. “He gets that smell again.” Parcells sniffs a few times. “He thinks, ‘Oh yeah, I know what that is. I can hunt one more time.’ But he’s sitting on the porch. He hasn’t been out there hunting in five or six years. He’s forgotten what hunting really is. He figures, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ But when you get down there, it’s not the same. And your name is gonna be on it. You want to try to do a good job, and yet you really have no control over anything.”

  So on April 11, Bill Parcells informed Sean Payton that he would be staying retired, but he offered to be of assistance in any other way possible. When news broke about Parcells’s decision, his friends responded with a mixed reaction that encapsulated his own ambivalence. Lawrence Taylor, representing Parcells’s disappointed supporters, called. “Coach, I had never known you to bitch out on anything.” Parcells tried to explain that only months from becoming a septuagenarian, he was no longer eager to dive into stormy football waters. The former linebacker refused to buy into that reasoning, but in the apparent twilight of his life, with the Hall of Fame in the back of his mind, Bill Parcells felt at peace.

  “I’m at a different place in the world now.”

  39

  In his latest bid at football immortality, Bill Parcells was one of the fifteen modern-era candidates for the Class of 2013. As the voter charged with making the case for Parcells, New York Daily News sportswriter Gary Myers spent January trying to size up the forty-six-man board of selectors, speaking to roughly half of them. Sentiment about Parcells had improved from 2012, but some voters still questioned his candidacy. With 80 percent approval necessary for entry, Parcells’s fate remained uncertain. Leading up to the Hall’s annual meeting on February 2, Parcells had characteristically downplayed his chances, but unlike with previous bids, he conceded that enshrinement would mean the world to him.

  The panel of selectors met at a convention center in New Orleans for a winnowing process that began at 8 a.m. Myers, a football columnist who’d known Parcells for roughly three decades, highlighted one of Parcells’s most impressive statistics: 4-1 in the postseason versus Hall of Fame coaches Joe Gibbs, Marv Levy, and Bill Walsh. He also pointed out that Parcells was tenth on the list of winningest NFL coaches of all time. Perhaps the best evidence of Parcells’s impact lay in his towering coaching tree, which Parcells dubbed “those who followed.” From among those followers, Myers provided the glowing statements of two potential Hall of Famers: Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin. Finally, the sportswriter reminded the forty-five other voters that Parcells was among the best motivators in NFL history.

  Back in Jupiter, Bill Parcells spent the day trying to keep his mind occupied. He worked out in the morning before running several errands. Considering how much he had ached to be enshrined with Boy Wonder, Parcells found waiting out the eight-hour meeting to be less stressful this go-around.

  Once again his candidacy required the longest discussion, almost an hour. As usual, Parcells made the first cut from fifteen to ten. Former owners Ed DeBartolo and Art Modell were eliminated, which seemed to strengthen Parcells’s chances, given the difficulty of two non-players being elected in the same year. Making the final five, though, remained a challenge because competition was its strongest in recent memory.

  The pared-down list of ten went as follows: former running back Jerome Bettis, ex-wideout Cris Carter, former defensive end Charley Haley, ex–offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden, ex-wideout Andre Reed, former defensive lineman Warren Sapp, ex–defensive lineman Michael Strahan, ex-cornerback Aeneas Williams, and former offensive lineman Larry Allen, who had played for Parcells’s Cowboys from 2003 to 2005 before being released.

  The first person propelled to the final five was Larry Allen, followed by Cris Carter and then Jonathan Ogden. Based on alphabetical order, “Bill Parcells” would be called next if he made the cut. And he was, keeping him alive as an inductee. Lastly, Warren Sapp essentially beat out Michael Strahan. Now each candidate still needed 80 percent approval, or a thumbs-up from at least thirty-six selectors.

  Finally, on his fourth bid for enshrinement, Parcells entered the most exclusive organization in the sport to which he had devoted his life. His selection into the Hall highlighted the sterling class of seven, which included two senior candidates: defensive tackle Curley Culp and linebacker Dave Robinson, the eleventh player from Vince Lombardi’s Packers. The final results remained secret until they were aired on the NFL Network at 5:30 p.m. the same day. Receiving the word, Parcells was overcome with emotion. His mind raced with memories from his long, storied career. Bill Parcells thought about Mickey Corcoran more than anyone else, thrilled that his ninety-one-year-old mentor was alive to share in the honor.

  As the twenty-second head coach elected to the Hall, Parcells now found himself in the company of icons like Al Davis, Tom Landry, and Chuck Noll, who had helped mold him, rivals like Joe Gibbs and Bill Walsh, and football legends he revered, including Paul Brown, Don Shula, and Vince Lombardi. Head coaches made up less than 10 percent of the Hall’s membership, and increasingly faced stiff competition from top players; as a football historian, Parcells relished membership in the special group of his peers.

  “It’s beyond comprehension,” he says. “I was among my heroes.”

  Moments after learning he’d been selected, Bill Parcells received a congratulatory phone call from a fellow Hall of Fame coach: John Madden. In early 2006, when the broadcaster and ex–Raiders coach had learned of his selection, Parcells dialed him before anyone else. After speaking to Madden briefly, Parcells received a cavalcade of calls from family, friends, disciples, and former players. Mickey Corcoran’s voice-mail message had been left just moments after the big news went public. Parcells’s election also generated congratulatory statements from his five former NFL employers, including Robert Kraft, who offered praise and expressed enthusiasm about watching his former head coach’s enshrinement.

  In recent years, the two men had exchanged conciliatory words whenever they crossed paths at league events like the Super Bowl. They had also both conveyed regret about the behavior that led to their acrimonious divorce, and since late 2011, the Patriots owner had even advocated for Parcells’s Hall of Fame candidacy. Considering the deep wounds from their battles during the 1990s, they could never quite be friends, but the old adversaries had seemed to put their animosity behind them.

  A couple hours after learning of his selection, Parcells telephoned George Martin. “I need you to do me a favor.”

  Parcells asked his former Giants co-captain to present him in the early-August induction. Martin responded with elation and surprise. He deemed it the best post-NFL honor short of enshrinement, and had figured that Parcells would seek one of his Hall of Fame players or top disciples.

  While the choice seemed surprising to many, it made sense to those with insight into Parcells’s early years as an NFL head coach. During Parcells’s pivotal 1984 season, Martin, then a player representative, provided indispensable support, particularly in countering Big Blue’s drug problems before the NFL had established a policy. Parc
ells considered Martin’s assistance to be career-saving. As a player, George Martin had related more to Bill Parcells, twelve years his elder, than to many of his younger teammates. The two grew so close that they once hatched an idea to buy each of their wives a baby grand piano for Christmas from the same New Jersey store. Judy cried in happiness when she discovered hers.

  Parcells would be joining three Hall of Famers from his Big Blue teams: Harry Carson, Lawrence Taylor, and Wellington Mara. Unlike the Baseball Hall of Fame, which featured team caps on its plaques, the football shrine lacked club affiliations. Nonetheless, more as a gesture than anything, Parcells telephoned Giants president and CEO John Mara with a request befitting the baseball honor.

  “John, I’d like to go in as a Giant, if you’ll have me.”

  Mara replied, “We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  The summer ceremonies, starting on Thursday, August 1, also marked the Hall of Fame’s fiftieth anniversary. To celebrate the occasion and welcome the new class, 121 of the 163 living members of the Hall gathered in Canton, football’s birthplace. The largest such assembly in sports history, it featured icons from Jim Brown to Joe Namath to Deion Sanders. On the first day, Bill Parcells attended a dinner function with his ex-wife, Judy, and their daughters. Former wideout Cris Carter approached Parcells’s table and handed his fellow inductee a small box containing a tie clip inscribed “278,” in honor of Parcells’s becoming Canton’s 278th inductee.