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Parcells’ Wichita teammate and comanager at the Pizza Hut, Bob Long, was selected by Green Bay in the fourth round of the 1964 draft. He played seven seasons in the NFL, won two Super Bowl rings as a wide receiver for Vince Lombardi, and supplied Max McGee with a helmet at the beginning of Super Bowl I. A car accident during the 1968 season devastated his career—he remarkably overcame numerous broken bones to play two more years. He soon retired, then returned to the Pizza Hut family.

“He wound up taking Pizza Hut to the state of Wisconsin and built fifty-six of them up there,” Parcells said.

Three rounds after the Packers selected his Wichita teammate, the Detroit Lions selected Parcells in the 1964 NFL draft. By August, the six-foot, three-inch, 242-pound tackle began training camp at the team’s Bloomfield Hills practice facility.

“I didn’t think I was going to make the Packer team and I figured for sure—Bill was a pretty good player—he was going to make the Detroit Lion team. We both went to training camp in ‘64 and somehow I made the Packer team,” Bob Long said. “I kept asking people, coaches, and scouts, ‘How’s Bill Parcells doing at Detroit?’ They said, ‘He’s doing great over there, he’s going to make the team, for sure.’ And then about two weeks before training camp ended, someone came in and said, ‘You won’t believe it, but Bill Parcells walked out of the Detroit Lions camp.’ I said, ‘Really? Why’d he do that?’ They said, ‘He wants to go into coaching.’”

Within two days, he had a coaching job at Hastings College. Wife Judy and daughter Suzy moved with him to the Nebraska school. That fall, Parcells began a nomadic coaching odyssey that would last for more than a decade and a half.

From Hastings, he moved back to Wichita for a season, then spent four years at West Point, where he struck up a friendship with the academy’s assistant basketball coach, Bob Knight.

“We are the same age,” Parcells once said. “The other football coaches were older. We spent a lot of time together. I used to scout for him and go on trips with him.”

Stints at Florida State, Vanderbilt, and Texas Tech readied Parcells for his first head-coaching job. In December 1977, the Air Force Academy hired him to resurrect a program that won just ten games during the previous four seasons.

“If you understand the game, and respect the game, and don’t fear the game, then your players become the variables,” he said following athletic director Col. John Clune’s introduction to the press. “You have to strive to get 100 percent out of your players. You have to prepare them to play to their fullest potential and not settle for anything else.”

But Parcells disliked fawning over high-school seniors, a must to be a good recruiter. In 1979, he forever left college football to join the pro ranks. The “rah-rah” approach that filled the college game wasn’t Parcells’ style.

“He’s a typical guy from New Jersey,” Everson Walls later said. “Tough acting. Loud talking. Wants to be the boss all the time. Into this power thing.”

Well-paid, professional men received Parcells better than did still-maturing college kids. At the beginning of each year, he told his players: “If you’re sensitive you’re not going to last too long here.” Parcells demanded toughness, intelligence, and hard work from his players. And although he could be a brutal dictator, players respected him. Others loved him.

The 1980 NFL season was his first coaching professionals. In charge of the linebackers for New England Patriots head coach Ron Erhardt, Parcells’ players affectionately nicknamed him “Tuna.”

“His personality is that he’s going to rag on you when it’s time, he’s going to yell at you” said Lawrence McGrew, who started for Parcells’ 1980 linebacker unit in New England, and reunited with Parcells ten years later for his final season. “He can make jokes about you. He can be derogatory. But it’s to make a point, and I have no problem with it. This game takes a toll