Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [94]
On January 3, Jets head coach Bill Parcells announced his retirement and took on an advisory role with the team: “I’m not going to coach any more football games,” he said. “This is definitely the end of my career.” Belichick, the team’s defensive coordinator, was named the head coach. The next day, he resigned, and he eventually took the head-coaching gig with the Jets’ divisional rival, the New England Patriots.
“Most of the perceived conflict came when Bill left the Jets. He was doing what he thought was right, and I had a responsibility to run the business the way I thought was right, so there was a difference of opinion there,” Parcells said ten years later. “Bill and I have a fine relationship now. . . . We did spend a lot of good years together, and both of us realize that.”
Harmonious relationship or not, the Parcells-Belichick union flourished.
“We’re just two different people,” Belichick said in 2011. “Maybe our strengths played off one another. . . . Bill is very good at big picture things. . . . I’m more detail oriented, sometimes maybe I get caught up in some details and I might miss something that’s bigger picture. I think there’s definitely a good balance there.”
Throughout the 1980s, the Giants coaching staff remained uncommonly consistent, especially for a perennial playoff team. Parcells, Erhardt, and Beli-
chick each kept the same job from 1985 to 1990. No other NFL team could boast that type of continuity at the head coach and coordinator positions.
Some Giants assistants inevitably left to take promotions elsewhere, but Parcells’ fire and palpable hatred for losing attracted eager, talented replacements. By the later part of the decade, Parcells built a staff in his own image: young, hungry, no-nonsense. In 1988, he hired a passionate disciplinarian, Tom Coughlin, to coach his wide receivers. Al Groh, who served as defensive coordinator during Parcells’ lone season at the Air Force—he also helped recruit Lawrence Taylor to the University of North Carolina—joined the Giants as a defensive assistant in 1989.
And before the 1990 season, Parcells hired Charlie Weis, who, in just one year as head coach at Somerset Franklin High School, defeated Watchung Hills and Ocean Township to win New Jersey’s central group three sectional championship the previous November. Designated a “special assistant,” Weis worked as the Giants’ jack-of-all-trades, cutting film and completing other tasks for the rest of the staff.
“Charlie was the whipping boy,” Parcells remembered years later. “I was the whipping boy once. Belichick was the whipping boy once. Everybody gets to be the whipping boy.”
Parcells’ assistants didn’t remain whipping boys forever. As of 2010, that staff would, collectively, own thirty-one Super Bowl rings. Soon, several of them would be the ones giving the orders, rather than taking them. On that 1990 Giants staff, five of the assistants would go on to be NFL head coaches; Weis later became head coach at Notre Dame.
Parcells mentored his young staff and encouraged them to advance. And his “coaching tree” would ultimately become one of the most abundant in the modern era.
“I always laugh when people say ‘oh well, this coach couldn’t win without that coach.’ We had a lot of that with Belichick and myself. I’ve always felt it was the job of the head coach to hire good coaches; I think I was fortunate enough to be able to do that,” Parcells said years after his coaching career ended in 2007. “It was a unique group. I’m proud of them. I was very fortunate to have them. But I think collectively, we all learned from one another.”
9
Grinding Out a Championship
“The first drive of the third quarter is the most important