Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [129]
Around New York and New Jersey, Belichick’s departure was met with apprehension.
“Belichick is probably the best informed and most imaginative defensive coach I’ve ever had,” retired Giants linebacking great Harry Carson said the week Belichick left for Cleveland. “I honestly don’t know how the Giants are going to recover from losing him.”
The loss of Belichick was inevitable. For several years, he had been dubbed a “defensive genius.” Given his two Super Bowl rings, a tremendous passion for the game, and the pedigree (a lifelong football coach as a father), NFL teams strongly pursued him.
The sports world was just as eager to know about the head coach’s future as well. Within an hour of walking off the field at Tampa Stadium, Bill Parcells was answering questions that had nothing to do with the team’s 20-19 victory over Buffalo.
“The last time we won one of these there was a little controversy about me and it didn’t allow my owners and general manager to enjoy this very much,” Parcells said at the podium. “They’re going to enjoy this one, I promise you. There’s not going to be any controversy.”
Nevertheless, controversy arose.
As early as the 1989 season, Parcells contemplated leaving the Giants.
“The way I feel is if I win another Super Bowl, I’m gone. No chance of coming back. No chance,” Parcells said prior to the Giants’ critical Week Thirteen game against Philadelphia. “If it wasn’t for games like this, I wouldn’t be here. You know what I’d want if I quit? I’d take a year off.”
The forty-nine-year-old coach allegedly repeated that sentiment prior to the next season.
Health concerns—apart from the kidney stones in late December—contributed to the chatter. Following Chicago head coach Mike Ditka’s mid-season heart attack in 1988, Parcells told the press: “Any of us in this business can identify with it. I drink coffee, I smoke regularly. I’m 30 pounds overweight. Real smart.”
A perceived burnout potential clouded Parcells’ future.
“It’s tough to be a head coach in this league for 10 years,” he said prior to the 1990 season, his eighth as Giants head coach. “I don’t know if I can make it for 10 years in this league.”
Nearing the end of another long season, his outlook hadn’t changed: “It’s becoming more difficult to do. There doesn’t seem to be any respite in this game,” he said during Super Bowl week. “If you’re in the playoffs, or in this game, you don’t get any break until the end of May. It’s just go, go, go, go, go.”
A reportedly unhealthy relationship with George Young contributed as well: they often disagreed on personnel choices. Furthermore, only one year remained on Parcells’ contract with the team. History—which Parcells hinted at during his postgame press conference in Tampa—also suggested the coach might not return to spearhead the Giants title defense. Days after winning Super Bowl XXI, newspapers across the country reported that Parcells was trying to break his contract with the Giants so that he could coach the Atlanta Falcons for a substantial raise in salary. An angry Parcells openly dismissed the claim.
Four years later, Parcells was answering the same questions. Prior to Richard Williamson’s hire, some media outlets stated that Parcells would take the job in Tampa Bay.
Rumors spread that he might retire, then return—with another franchise that would let him be head coach and general manager—the following season. An analyst job, at ESPN, the Madison Square Garden network, or one of the major networks, was also mentioned. By March, his agent, Robert Fraley, began preliminary talks with NBC, and later that month, the network’s play-by-play announcer, Don Criqui, made an audition tape with Parcells.
“Everything that’s been written about me is a fabrication,” he said at Monday’s post–Super Bowl press conference in Tampa. “There’s no basis for any of those rumors, I can assure you. I’ve talked to no one in connection with any other possibilities in any other field.