Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [90]
After a season with the Patriots, Parcells returned home to join the New York Giants, where both he and head coach Ray Perkins hoped his second stint with the club would be longer and more fruitful than his first. In March 1979, Parcells resigned as head coach of Air Force to take the linebackers coach job with New York. Prior to training camp, he quit: reportedly, his wife and children did not want to uproot from their home in Colorado Springs. Parcells went back to Colorado to take a job outside of football, but returned to the NFL the following season, joining the Patriots staff under Ron Erhardt.
Good fortune would be with him during his next go-round with the team he grew up worshipping.
The 1981 NFL draft brought Lawrence Taylor to the Giants. Under Parcells’ tutelage, he became the first-ever rookie to win NFL Defensive Player of the Year, an honor awarded him the next season as well.
Taylor’s athleticism and instincts redefined his position. Before the advent of the nimble, six-foot, two-inch, 245-pound Virginia native, outside linebackers rarely attacked the line of scrimmage in passing situations.
“He really wasn’t a linebacker in college; he was more like a defensive end, and so we made him a linebacker,” said Bill Parcells. “But it was simple. He responded to competition very well. You just had to show him where the competition was. . . . He was one of the first of his kind: a combination linebacker–pass rusher. He really altered the game in a lot of ways.”
Taylor possessed many athletic gifts, but it was Parcells’ coaching style that transformed the raw linebacker into a first-team all-pro every season from 1981 to 1989.
“A lot of people over the last forty-two years, a lot of people have asked me, “Hey, Long, you played for Vince Lombardi, you knew Bill Parcells, how do you compare them?” Bob Long said.
Well, Lombardi probably was one of the greatest motivators of all time as coaches go; he could really motivate. He’d yell and scream. You could do that as a coach in the ‘60s because there wasn’t free agency, you had to take it or leave, or he would get rid of you. But Bill Parcells, in my opinion, one of his greatest attributes as a coach—he has many, he’s a great judge of talent, etc.—he is the greatest coaching psychologist I ever met. He is like a doctor of psychology out there.
I went back in the ‘80s to see [the Giants] play the Detroit Lions. He was walking around during pregame warm-ups; everybody’s warming up and so forth on the field. He was walking around; I was following him. He came up to Lawrence Taylor—he tried to get in these guys’ heads. Phil Simms—he would always be on him about something. Lawrence Taylor was warming up, and he walks around him and says, “L. T., you’re not near as good as Dick Butkus or Ray Nitschke.” And Lawrence Taylor is real emotional, and you could see him swelling up, getting upset. Finally, he spouted off and L. T. said, “I am too better than Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke. I’m better than they are. . . . Watch, I’m gonna show you today.” That’s exactly what Parcells wanted to do; he got him all riled up. And that game was one of the greatest games I ever saw an outside linebacker play. He was all over the field, sacking the quarterback, making tackles. That is exactly what Parcells wanted to do, he got in his head, which he did with a lot of players.
Near the end of Taylor’s second year (the strike-shortened season), the 3-3 Giants still had a shot at the postseason. But head coach Ray Perkins stunned the team and the New York media with an announcement. Iconic University of Alabama head coach Bear Bryant retired on December 15, 1982, and the next day, Perkins—the leading receiver on Bryant’s national championship teams of 1964 and 1965—took his place.
Giants General Manager George Young tapped Parcells as the replacement.
“Very few people in the world get to do what they hoped to do,” Parcells