Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (18 page)

Lurie called himself an “extreme dog lover” who was still mourning the death of his two dogs in the two years before signing Vick. He brought in two new dogs, one rescued from abuse. He spoke at the news conference announcing Vick’s signing after Vick left the room. He didn’t look like a happy man. He used some pretty strong descriptive language to illustrate his feelings about what Vick had done to dogs: cruelty, torture, horrific, complete disregard for any definition of common decency, despicable. He called signing Vick an “impossibly difficult decision to approve.”

Lurie believed in Reid. Reid believed in Dungy. Dungy believed in Vick. “He will never be able to recover from what he did criminally and murderously took part in, but he has an opportunity to create a legend where maybe he can be a force in stopping the horrendous cruelty to animals,” Lurie said.

After Vick’s first season in Philadelphia, in which he played sparingly and ended with a disappointing wild-card loss to the Cowboys on the road, Reid traded McNabb to the Redskins. Reid had been determined to trade one of his three quarterbacks, and he admitted he would have traded Vick if the right offer came along. He believed Vick deserved the right to start and that was not the plan in Philadelphia for 2010. Kolb was named the starter after McNabb was sent to the Redskins, but he suffered a concussion in the season opener against the Packers, creating a path for Vick to take the job. Vick helped the Eagles win the NFC East and get to the playoffs, but they lost to the Packers in their opening game in the divisional round. Kolb was then traded to the Cardinals following the season.

Reid and the Eagles had a lot invested in Vick. They had absorbed a tremendous amount of backlash after signing him, but if Reid could turn that investment into a trade that would benefit the Eagles, then he would have been traded instead of McNabb.

“If the opportunity came up where we could have been compensated and Michael could have had a good team to go to and it was right for him, then we do the deal,” Reid said. “That didn’t happen, but I would have looked at that. I would have looked at that to help him out, too.”

Vick failed to get the Eagles into the playoffs in 2011, but he and Reid developed a close relationship in their first three seasons together. Reid was there for Vick when he was looking for a compassionate soul to assist him in reviving his career. When Garrett Reid died, Vick expressed strong feelings for his coach. “This is a very difficult situation for us all to deal with,” Vick said. “Coach has always been a great supporter of us, as a team, as an organization. He’s been a rock for us and a big teddy bear for us, so we’re going to lean on him, and we’re going to be there for him, and we’re going to stay strong for him until he comes back and can lead us on.”

Dungy trusted that Reid would be the perfect coach for Vick. Reid trusted Dungy that Vick was rehabilitated and in stage three. They both had their hearts broken by their own children and in their own way were looking for the same second chance as Vick.

On a February night
in 1989, Jerry Jones made a ridiculous statement.

“What Jimmy Johnson will bring to us is worth more than if we had five first-round draft choices and five Heisman Trophy winners,” Jones said. “History will show that one of the finest things that ever happened to the Cowboys is Jimmy Johnson.”

It was hard to blame Jones for being a little giddy even though he had just flown back from Austin, where he had pulled Tom Landry off the golf course to let him know that the only coach the Cowboys had ever had was now the only coach the Cowboys had ever fired. Jones had purchased the Cowboys, America’s Team, and the lease to operate Texas Stadium, the stadium that had a hole in the roof so God could watch his team, from the financially beleaguered Bum Bright for $140 million. He and Johnson had been teammates at Arkansas, and Johnson was the hottest college coach in the country after winning a national championship in 1987 at the University of Miami.

They were not great friends, but they were a package deal. Johnson might not have been worth five first-round draft picks, but he knew how to maximize his assets and turn them into valuable draft picks. He didn’t have many assets with the roster he inherited from Landry, but he knew he had at least one: Herschel
Walker. History will show that Johnson’s trade of Walker not even two months into his first season was one of the finest things to ever happen to the Dallas Cowboys.

Jones was being vilified for firing Landry. How dare an out-of-towner from across the Red River in archrival Arkansas of all places come into Big D and fire the legend? The truth was that the Dallas fans and media were hypocrites. For years, the talk shows had been filled with Landry must go chatter, and even Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ president who had hired Landry in the 1960 expansion year, was looking for a graceful way to ease Landry into retirement. His number one candidate was Jimmy Johnson. There was even speculation that Schramm had asked Johnson to come to Dallas and serve as Landry’s defensive coordinator with the guarantee that he would be promoted when Landry retired.

“I don’t know if that even came up in the conversation, but that was never even a factor for me,” Johnson said. “In our conversation when he was talking about me becoming the head coach of the Cowboys, he might have brought up something like that. I immediately dismissed it. The only way I was going to leave Miami was to be the head coach.”

Johnson was a guest in the Cowboys’ suite at Super Bowl XXIII in Miami between the 49ers and Bengals and sat with Schramm, Landry, and team vice president Gil Brandt. In another month, Johnson would have Landry’s job and Brandt’s, too, because he would be in control of the Cowboys’ personnel decisions: the draft, trades, and free agency. A few months after that, Schramm would also be gone. In Schramm’s perfect world, he would have found another absentee owner like Bright and Clint Murchison before him, Landry would have exited to spend time on his charitable and religious endeavors, and then Schramm would have set the Cowboys up for the foreseeable future by hiring Johnson. Schramm and Johnson would have been great together. They liked to take chances. They were not afraid of failing.

After the 49ers beat the Bengals, Bill Walsh retired as San Francisco’s coach. Johnson was rumored to be a candidate to replace him, but the 49ers ultimately went for continuity and promoted defensive coordinator George Seifert, which had been the direction Walsh steered the organization. That meant Johnson was still available for the Cowboys, although at the time it seemed that if he went to Dallas, he would be working for Schramm.

“Tex approached me,” Johnson said. “At one time there were rumors about me going to the Philadelphia Eagles. Tex said just keep it in mind, whenever Tom retires, we’ve got thoughts about you coming to the Dallas Cowboys. He said keep that in mind as you are talking to these other teams. And that was the first time that he talked to me. Then he had me as his guest, with Tom Landry, at the Super Bowl when San Francisco played Cincinnati in Miami. That was the next encounter. And then the third encounter was at the Davey O’Brien Award in Fort Worth. Tex was there. Jerry wanted me to talk to Tex, make sure Tex knew that he was a legitimate buyer because Tex was brokering the deal. Then Jerry figured out that he wanted to bypass Tex and go straight to Bum Bright. That’s when Jerry and I went and met with Bum Bright.”

Schramm had come to realize that if Jones or any other hands-on candidate emerged as the new owner, he would be out. Bright realized that Schramm was interfering to protect himself and decided that the only way to finish off a deal was to keep Schramm out of the loop. Two days before Jones closed the deal, a Dallas television station broke the news that Jones was going to be the new owner and Johnson would be the new coach. The reporter was on camera from the campus of the University of Miami. Schramm knew nothing about it and warned the reporter that he would be committing career suicide by going with a story that had no basis in fact. The next day Schramm found out the report was true, and the day after that—a Saturday—he
accompanied Jones on the new owner’s private plane to Austin to break the news to Landry that he was out.

Jones and Schramm flew back to Dallas for the blockbuster press conference. It was not so much that Jones was buying the team as that he was going to be running the team and Landry was out. Murchison, the original owner, had given Schramm complete autonomy. Bright didn’t get involved either except for an occasional dig at Landry as the team’s fortunes slipped worse than his finances. But Schramm was still in charge. At the news conference that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, a teary-eyed Schramm stood off to the side as Jones announced that he would control everything right down to the “jocks and socks.”

Johnson was not at the news conference. Jones had sent him back to Miami to avoid the uprising that was going on in Dallas. He would be back that Tuesday for a news conference that was even more contentious than the grilling Jones had been put through three days earlier. Johnson had done nothing wrong other than dining in Mia’s with Jones the night before the sale was official. Unfortunately for Johnson and Jones, a reporter from the
Dallas Morning News
was also at the Mexican restaurant, which was Landry’s favorite. The picture of Jones and Johnson made the front cover of the
Morning News
the next day. The image was cruel: Jones and Johnson celebrating their hostile takeover of the Cowboys before the ink was dry on the sale agreement and before Landry was even told. And at the favorite spot of Tom and his wife, Alicia, no less.

Johnson was not intimidated by taking over for a legend. Jones gave him the security of a ten-year contract and total control of personnel even if Jones had the empty title of general manager. He was too busy trying to make money to worry about third-round draft choices. This was not the same pressure that George Seifert faced in taking over for Bill Walsh with the 49ers. Seifert inherited a team in 1989 that had just won the Super Bowl, a game Johnson viewed from the Cowboys’ private box. Seifert had to
maintain excellence. And he did: the 49ers won the Super Bowl again in his first season. Johnson’s job was to rebuild the NFL’s most visible and important franchise. The Cowboys had fallen apart. How much of it was due to the game passing Landry by? How much of it was a result of Brandt’s drafts? How much was a result of Schramm not caring enough about the bottom line on the business side and letting Brandt have carte blanche on the personnel side?

Once Landry got over the indignity of having his team taken away from him, getting fired was the best thing for him. Instead of the fans picketing Texas Stadium or buying billboards demanding that he be fired, Landry turned into a martyr. They even threw a parade for him in downtown Dallas: “Hats Off to Tom Landry,” which attracted a hundred thousand people. Many of them surely were the same fans who wanted Landry fired and then lamented when Jones did the dirty work.

Johnson took over a team that had the least talent and the worst record at 3–13 and the lowest expectations in the league. As long as the owner was patient and willing to spend to win—this was five years before the salary cap—it was an ideal situation. Johnson couldn’t make it worse, and he was confident he would make it better. He just needed time. He won one game in his first season.

“Taking over for Tom Landry, as much respect as I had for him, that wasn’t a concern because they had struggled so much before I got there. And people were ready for a change,” Johnson said. “They were last in the league. What was stressful for me is I had been accustomed to winning football games. We lost two regular season games in my last four years at Miami. So to go there and all of a sudden lose fifteen—that was hard. It wasn’t taking over for Landry and being the head coach of the Cowboys. It was being so unaccustomed to losing. The only thing that kept me going was my supreme confidence that we were going to get it done.”

It was not a stretch to think that Johnson’s teams at Miami had more talent and might have defeated the Cowboys. The Landry shadow didn’t exist for Johnson. Landry had left him a big mess to clean up.

“Again, had they been coming off a playoff year or Super Bowl, it would have been different,” Johnson said. “But they were so bad. People don’t realize how bad they were. I realized it at our first minicamp. Plus, just the way they were operating back then. The players didn’t even work out at the facility. Remember, they didn’t even have an enclosed weight room. So the players, once the season was over with, that’s the last they saw of them. Even the one minicamp they had, [conditioning coach] Bob Ward is the one that ran the minicamp; the coaches weren’t really involved. I had gone around and visited pro camps for three or four years prior to going to Dallas. I had seen how other pro teams operated. The Cowboys weren’t operating that way.”

The first piece of the rebuilding project was a present from Landry: the first pick in the 1989 NFL draft. The Cowboys had clinched the valuable leadoff spot in the draft on the final day of the 1988 season when they lost to the Eagles and the Packers won in Arizona. UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman was going to be the first pick by either the Cowboys or the Packers and Aikman watched his fate unfold from the stands in Sun Devil Stadium as Green Bay beat the Cardinals. Johnson’s first decision was an easy one: he drafted Aikman. The Packers selected tackle Tony Mandarich, who became one of the all-time draft busts, leaving Barry Sanders, Deion Sanders, and Derrick Thomas on the board. Aikman went on to win three Super Bowls, and he and the two Sanderses and Thomas are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.