by Ian O'Connor
He had put together what turned out to be an all-star squad of future NFL and major-college head coaches and NFL executives. Saban, Ferentz, Scott O’Brien (special teams), and Pat Hill (tight ends, offensive line) were among the very best at what they did. Hill was tough enough to have challenged 250-pound linebacker Pepper Johnson to a fight. Eric Mangini, a graduate of Belichick’s Wesleyan, where Mangini set sacks records as an undersize noseguard, was a ball boy, and Thomas Dimitroff was a grounds-crew member who watched film with Scott Pioli, pro personnel assistant, while covered in grass clippings and paint. Schwartz was a personnel scout who worked on research projects. The young slappies made their football contributions when they weren’t running out for cigarettes for the secretaries and staffers, or taking the coaches’ cars for oil changes, or grabbing a few hours of sleep nearby at the no-frills Acadian apartment complex.
And of course there was Ernie Adams. Modell famously said he’d pay anyone $10,000 if he or she could explain what, exactly, Adams did for a living, but Belichick thought his friend was worth a whole lot more than that.
Adams wasn’t the only former Giant who was part of Belichick’s team. Though the likes of Joe Morris, running back Lee Rouson, Mark Bavaro, and Everson Walls had come and gone, Johnson and Carl Banks were together again in 1994, giving Belichick a combined 20 years of NFL experience at linebacker. The coach had a lot of talent on his front line, too, and a philosophy against substandard offensive lines—rush five defenders to force weak pass protectors to go one-on-one—that worked more often than not.
The ’94 Browns won eight of their first ten games, with the defense allowing ten or fewer points five times, and with serviceable quarterbacking from Vinny Testaverde and his new backup, Mark Rypien, who had been a Super Bowl MVP for Washington. They suffered two painful losses in one weekend—the loss of Saban to Michigan State, as head coach, on Saturday, and then a loss in Municipal Stadium to Belichick’s former employer, the Giants, the following day. Saban had overcome his boss’s media relations policy after all, but he did stay on for the rest of the season. Belichick appointed a secretary to help him with his Michigan State business while Saban remained committed to the Browns.
A week later, in the best showing of Belichick’s head coaching career, the Browns beat the two-time-defending-champion, Troy Aikman/Emmitt Smith/Michael Irvin–led Dallas Cowboys on the road in December when Dallas tight end Jay Novacek was stopped inches short of a game-winning touchdown on the final play. “Hopefully,” Belichick said afterward, “we’ll play these guys again.” He was talking about Super Bowl possibilities for his 10-4 Browns, who gave a game ball to Modell and clinched a wild-card playoff berth when Buffalo lost the next day. And yet this football town couldn’t fully embrace this football team. By all accounts, the 1994 Browns were the least loved playoff team in the history of Cleveland sports.
The animus centered around one man. Michael Dean Perry shot down the notion that players were growing more comfortable with Belichick’s style. “Deep down,” he said, “guys are no happier with him. It’s just a smokescreen because we’re winning . . . You just don’t feel comfortable with him.”
Belichick maintained that his fan mail was more supportive than the media coverage of him might suggest. Then again, he swore he didn’t much care. “I saw this city run Lenny Wilkens out of town,” he said of the former Cavaliers coach, “and, basically, Marty Schottenheimer. There was a lot of negativity about the Cavs when they lost to Michael Jordan—whose fault is that? I don’t mind not being the flavor of the month.”
Yet the fans did. Winning used to be enough in Cleveland, but no more. Tony Jones, left tackle, explained it this way:
“People just can’t forget the Bernie thing, and they hate the coach.”
The coach did what he could to overcome the hate. He established a simple method of defeating his opponents: identify their strengths and then scheme the best way to neutralize them.
“Bill is the most practical football coach I’ve ever worked with,” Venturi said. “He’s never going to ask his players to do something they can’t do. We’d spend hours before we ever put up an X and an O on Monday or Tuesday, studying matchups versus teams, and at the end of the day he’d say to us as a staff, ‘OK, these two guys don’t beat me . . . and I don’t want to have this discussion again on Sunday.’ And then he’d let you go at it.”
Even though he was a believer in the height, weight, and speed measurables, Belichick pressed his assistants to think creatively, and independently, when evaluating talent to potentially add to the Cleveland roster. He once had VHS tapes distributed to every coach and scout that purported to highlight a pass-rushing prospect named Rodney Spinks, at Northern State. The staffers did their evaluations and met in the draft room with Belichick to go over their reports. Almost everyone in the room had serious concerns about Rodney Spinks. Terry McDonough was about the only evaluator at the table who liked Spinks, despite the substandard competition he was facing at Northern State. McDonough said the kid reminded him of Leon Lett, of the Dallas Cowboys, a seventh-round pick out of Emporia State, in Kansas, who would develop into a two-time Pro Bowler.
As it turned out, Rodney Spinks was Leon Lett: Belichick had come up with a phantom player from a phantom school to see if his evaluators could rise above their preconceived notions about no-name prospects from nowhere conferences.
The head coach also challenged himself to fortify his roster under the NFL’s brand-new salary-cap system. Out was Plan B free agency (the players fought against its restrictions in federal court), and in was a less confining form of free agency and a hard $34.6 million cap. Belichick figured it out, despite some uninspiring results (at best) with his grading system in the draft. True, the Browns had picked a few winners in 1991—Eric Turner in the first round, defensive tackle James Jones in the third, and receiver Michael Jackson in the sixth. They found a dependable center in Steve Everitt in the first round in ’93. Belichick and Lombardi also found a productive receiver, Derrick Alexander, with a compensatory pick at the end of the first round in ’94.
But they had missed badly throughout much of the ’92 draft and needed to compensate later with undrafted free agents such as Orlando Brown and Wally Williams (a pair of Rodney Spinkses), who grew into starters on the offensive line. (Brown had so wanted to impress the Browns during a workout at South Carolina State that he blasted Scott Pioli in a blocking drill and nearly knocked him over.) Belichick honored his commitment to finding players in the middle of the field by making his first three first-rounders a safety, a fullback, and a center, taken with the second, ninth, and 14th overall picks, which seemed high for those positions.
The Browns didn’t have a 1,000-yard rusher on the roster, nor did they have a 1,000-yard receiver. They overcame their deficiencies with a defense that beat the mighty Cowboys on the road and allowed 258 fewer points than the Cleveland defense Belichick and Saban had inherited in 1991.
At 11-5, they had earned an honest-to-God home playoff game. The New England Patriots were the opponent, and they were coached by someone who didn’t need a scouting report to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Bill Belichick.
When Bill Parcells was between NFL jobs and working a Browns game for NBC Sports, he had one question for Cleveland staffers. “Where’s Doom?” he would say.
Parcells found Doom on New Year’s Day 1995, in a rematch of a regular-season game between the Browns and the Patriots that was won by Belichick. (Parcells won their first meeting, in 1993.) Big Bill and Little Bill had talked once a week during the season, sharing information on common opponents and supporting each other on various issues, including the Kosar crisis. “Our relationship is certainly much different than when we were working together,” Parcells said. In other words, it was much better.
“He did a tremendous amount for me,” Big Bill said. “Many of the things he created defensively we’re still using, and we’ve expanded on them.”
For his part, Little Bill
called Parcells a good personal friend and raved about the experience of working under him. “I’m glad he feels I gave something back, because he certainly gave me a lot,” Belichick said. “Bill’s meant an awful lot to me and my career, not just on the football field but dealing with a lot of things off the field . . . I think we have a pretty full relationship all the way across the board, and I respect and cherish all the parts of it.”
Now Belichick had a better understanding of the pressures confronting an NFL head coach, and of how they could drive a man like Parcells to berate Little Bill and his fellow Giants assistants. But the improved relationship with Big Bill did nothing to temper Belichick’s desire to beat him. In fact, some ex-Giants always wondered if the connection between Parcells and Belichick was really all it was made out to be.
Mark Bavaro pointed out that Steve Belichick was really the one who had taught Bill how to coach. “So I don’t think Bill was really a Parcells guy,” Bavaro said. “Bill was always his own man, and knowing that while looking back on some clips of them arguing and butting heads, it’s much more understandable. Probably Bill at the time, when Parcells was yelling at him, he was thinking to himself, ‘I could probably do a better job than you if you give me those headsets.’”
Parcells was the two-time Super Bowl champ and newly named Associated Press coach of the year when he entered Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium on New Year’s Day, so Belichick had more to lose. Little Bill was still trying to survive. He was still trying to prove that he could have a long and prosperous future as an NFL head coach, and that the post-Kosar culture he’d established in ’94 was sustainable. A playoff victory over a Parcells team riding a seven-game winning streak would do a ton for his cause.
“He didn’t make it personal with Parcells,” said Rick Venturi, secondary coach. “But I know it was. We all felt it was.”
Belichick made that clear on the third-quarter drive that decided the game. With the score 10–10, Leroy Hoard ran ten yards for a touchdown. “I got to the sideline,” Hoard said, “and [Belichick] was going crazy. And, like, whoa. That was the most excited I ever saw him.”
Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe threw his third interception of the day in the fourth quarter—the tenth pick of the year for Eric Turner—which set up the Matt Stover field goal that effectively sealed it. Afterward, Parcells hugged Pepper Johnson, Carl Banks, and, of course, Belichick, who told the losing coach, “That’s a hell of a job this year, Bill.” Belichick would say Parcells was the reason he had gotten the chance to be a head coach.
“In some respects,” Big Bill said, “I thought I was playing myself defensively.”
“I didn’t want to play him,” Little Bill said, “and he didn’t want to play me. Because one of us had to lose.”
Belichick was basking in the victory for obvious reasons. Testaverde, the quarterback he had picked over Kosar, had delivered a terrific, interception-free performance in his postseason debut. Turner, his first draft choice in Cleveland and the No. 2 overall pick in ’91, had just made the biggest play of his Pro Bowl year.
“When Bill beat Parcells,” Rob Burnett said, “I just saw a glow I’d never seen in that guy. He looked like his first child was born.”
That glow would last for only a week. The Steelers had beaten Cleveland twice during the regular season, and they were just too strong for the Browns in their divisional playoff game at Three Rivers Stadium, winning by a 29–9 count. The Browns had lost six games all year, three of them to Pittsburgh and one to Denver. They still hadn’t figured out a way to overcome the opponents who forever haunted them.
Burnett, who credited Belichick for easing up on the players before the New England game, criticized him for going too hard before the Pittsburgh game. The defensive end said that the players were sent out for practice “in full pads like animals that week,” and that Belichick needed to realize that his players were going to break down if they were constantly asked to go live in drills.
Yet in the immediate wake of the Pittsburgh loss, Belichick wasn’t concerning himself with what might hold Cleveland back. In his wrap-up press conference, the coach cited examples of Super Bowl champions who had rebounded from crushing playoff defeats the prior year.
“I’ve been involved in two of those,” Belichick said.
He planned on being involved in a third. Of course, there were plenty of examples of contenders who never recovered from postseason defeat, and the Browns would try to avoid that fate without the help of two of their biggest defensive stars—Saban and Perry, who would be cut for salary-cap savings and later signed by Denver.
By the middle of the 1995 season, those losses would be completely irrelevant. Bill Belichick’s Browns were about to discover the meaning of true adversity, the kind that would make even the firings of Bernie Kosar and Paul Brown seem like relatively good days at the office.
On October 27, 1995, when Art Modell secretly boarded a private jet at Baltimore/Washington International and signed a 30-year lease to play in Johnny U’s abandoned football town, he rendered himself dead to hundreds of thousands of Browns fans who believed his pledge to never move their team. Modell also destroyed any chance the Browns had of salvaging their season and honoring the Super Bowl predictions made by Sports Illustrated and others.
Modell had his reasons for leaving Cleveland. He was in debt, and he had no interest in following his father’s path into bankruptcy. He’d watched as taxpayer money helped build new downtown venues for the Indians and the Cavaliers, franchises that didn’t have the same hold on the city that the Browns did. He’d been engaged in fruitless negotiations with the city for years in an attempt to refurbish the team’s leaky, creaky stadium, which had been built in 1931 and still looked the way the Browns’ owner described it—like an “old barn.” Modell suffered what he called enormous losses on the ballpark, the Indians had cost him money by moving out (Modell had taken control of Municipal from the city in the mid-1970s), and the advent of NFL free agency had left him in dire need of luxury boxes and club suites to compete. The owner said he needed $175 million in tax dollars to renovate the stadium and give him a Lake Erie home worthy of the area’s revitalization. The city wouldn’t or couldn’t meet his demands. At the time, the Browns were a disappointing 4-4 but still in the mix for a possible playoff berth. On Friday night, November 3, after WBAL-TV, in Baltimore, broke the story that Modell was scheduled to announce the franchise’s move that Monday, the owner effectively confessed in a conference call with the Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal. He declared his promise that he’d never abandon Cleveland “null and void” and said he’d “blow my stack” if he heard one more complaint that he hadn’t given the city a chance to keep the team. “I’ve been waiting six years for something to happen,” Modell said, “and if there’s something in the 11th hour where a rabbit can be pulled out of a hat, then I’ll know and I’ll change my tune.”
The people of Cleveland didn’t see a rabbit, just a rat. The joy of watching the Indians play in a World Series for the first time in more than four decades was replaced by overwhelming sadness and rage. Mike Snyder, of WTAM, called Modell at home in the early morning—Art always answered before the second ring—and got him out of bed and on the air. Modell wouldn’t deny that the move was happening, and Snyder got angrier as the interview unfolded, just like his listeners.
The Browns were routed by the Houston Oilers (who, ironically, were leaving Texas for Tennessee) that Sunday before only 57,881 fans, many of whom spent the day filling Municipal with obscene chants about Modell, who missed his first home game since buying the club for $3.925 million in 1961. The owner had received death threats and was advised not to attend, so he traveled outside the 75-mile radius of the TV blackout to watch with his son David. Modell wasn’t there in person to see the fans hold up signs mocking him, to see the Dawg Pound loyalists pointing up at his empty loge and screaming for justice, or to see his football players play as if they’d already packed their bags.
The following day, Modell attended a news conference with Maryland governor Parris Glendening and Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke and made official a deal that included a rent-free $200 million stadium to be completed next door to the Orioles’ park at Camden Yards after his yet-to-be-named franchise played two seasons in Memorial Stadium, old home of the Colts. The team name, the Browns, was about the only thing that Modell wouldn’t be allowed to take with him. Baltimore had lost its beloved Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, when owner Bob Irsay had 15 Mayflower trucks load up the operation and flee town in the dead of a snowy March night, and 11 years later Baltimore was striking back, at Cleveland’s expense.
“I leave my heart and part of my soul in Cleveland,” Modell said. “But frankly, it came down to a simple proposition: I had no choice.”
Modell and his family would never again be seen in public in Cleveland. The owner left Belichick, his assistants, and his players to cover the tab. With Modell already in Baltimore for the announcement, Jim Bailey, who had grown up watching the Browns on his grandfather’s little black-and-white TV, had called a meeting of the entire organization in the team auditorium to officially deliver the news. Bailey turned toward Belichick as he spoke. “Bill looked like Bill always looked,” he would remember. “You’ve seen that face: the same look he always has. He doesn’t show his emotion much. He was in the front. I saw shock on everyone else’s face.”
Modell did sneak into the Browns’ Berea facility for one quick pep talk, though he didn’t meet with the Cleveland media afterward. This would be the last time Modell set foot in the Cleveland area. His PR man, Kevin Byrne, relayed the speech his boss gave to the players, which included a vote of confidence in Belichick. “Bill will be your coach in Baltimore,” Modell said, via Byrne, “and hopefully, for many years after that.”
