Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (33 page)

He liked to needle opposing teams and coaches. Peyton Manning could never beat Florida, and when he elected to return to Tennessee for his final season, Spurrier couldn’t help himself. “Peyton Manning came back to win the Citrus Bowl again,” he said. “You can’t spell Citrus without the UT.”

The ol’ ball coach, as he was known, lasted two seasons in Washington. He liked to play golf, and that was hard to do in November in Washington. He didn’t care about defense, which is something that needs to be played in the NFL. He was out-coached. He wanted out so badly, he gave up the remaining three years on his contract. He left $15 million on the table and a 12–20 record as his legacy. He couldn’t cut it against the big boys.

“I’ll tell you this,” Snyder said. “Spurrier is a heckuva guy. The NFL stumped him.”

Snyder was reeling. He had a proven winner in Schottenheimer and forced him out in a power struggle. Spurrier was a coveted college coach, but that often doesn’t translate into success in the pro game. “I took a chance, and I think everyone respected the chance I took,” Snyder said. “I don’t regret taking the chance trying to get Spurrier. He was a cool guy. I still get along with him.”

Snyder then went for a can’t-miss with Redskins fans. He brought back the legendary Joe Gibbs. He had retired after the 1992 season, and now it was 2004. Gibbs won three Super Bowls in Washington with three different quarterbacks and was still revered by the passionate Redskins fans. The issue was whether Gibbs had lost his fastball after all the years in the NASCAR pits. He stayed four years, made the playoffs twice, and was gone.

“We were very close in ’05 to going all the way,” Snyder said. “In ’07, we went to the same place, Seattle, in the rain. Joe felt if we got through Seattle in ’07 and ’05, we might win the whole thing.”

That was a bit of revisionist history. Or wishful thinking. The Redskins beat the Bucs in 2005 and lost in Seattle in the divisional round. If they had won that game, they would have played in Carolina in the NFC championship game. In 2007, the Redskins lost in the wild-card round to the Seahawks. If they had won that game, they would have played in Dallas and then played either the Packers or the Giants in the next round. In each case, they were a long way from the Super Bowl.

After the loss to the Seahawks after the 2007 season, Gibbs left the Redskins again. Snyder was devastated. He idolized Gibbs. “It was a spectacular experience,” he said.

Snyder turned on all his charm in a futile attempt to talk Gibbs into coaching the fifth and final year of his contract. “I joked around with Joe at the end,” Gibbs said. “You can’t quit. He said, I’m not. I’m retiring. I pleaded with him not to retire. I love him. We are very close.”

If Snyder had not been able to talk Gibbs out of retirement in 2004, he was close to hiring Jim Fassel, who had just been fired by the Giants. It almost happened again after Gibbs left, and this time the story got strange even by Snyder standards. After Gibbs had left, Snyder promoted Vinny Cerrato, his right-hand man, to be general manager and executive vice president of football operations. He had been with Snyder every year except the season Schottenheimer was in charge. When something went wrong, Snyder had an easy out. He blamed Cerrato. That would come in handy.

In the weeks after Gibbs retired, Snyder hired Jim Zorn, the quarterback coach for Mike Holmgren in Seattle, to be Washington’s offensive coordinator. Snyder made that hire even though he didn’t have a head coach. Fassel, who already had interviewed with Snyder and Cerrato, was so sure he was getting the head
coaching job that he started to gather his belongings in Phoenix for the move to Washington. All that seemed to be in Fassel’s way was Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who just finished an incredible playoff run when New York’s defense shut down Tony Romo and Brett Favre in the NFC playoffs and then held Tom Brady and the Patriots’ record-breaking offense to 14 points in the Super Bowl. Snyder was not going to make any decisions until he had a chance to interview Spagnuolo.

Once the Giants returned from the Super Bowl, Snyder interviewed Spagnuolo for a total of twenty-eight hours. But Snyder already had hired Zorn as the offensive coordinator. Head coaches like to hire their own staff, but Snyder was caught off guard by Gibbs’s retirement and felt he needed to start assembling a staff before all the quality assistants were off the market. Spagnuolo decided to return to the Giants. Snyder and Cerrato asked Fassel to speak to Zorn to see if he would be a good fit on his staff. While that was going on, there was a lot of negative feedback in Washington regarding what appeared to be the imminent coronation of Fassel, who had not been offered a head coaching job in the four hiring cycles after he was fired by the Giants following the 2003 season.

“We went through staffing. My fingerprints are all over that staff. We were framing a contract,” Fassel said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but Vinny knows and likes Zorn, and they had been close friends for a long time. Once Zorn got there and they had time on their hands, he is an engaging guy. Very glib, polished.”

After Spagnuolo turned down the job, Snyder and Cerrato decided to interview Zorn to replace Gibbs. He was the tenth and final candidate to be interviewed. He was already in the building, so why not?

“We conducted a full search and ended up with the right guy,” Snyder said after he hired Zorn.

After two disastrous seasons in which Zorn managed to win twelve of thirty-two games—the same record as Spurrier—
Snyder fired Zorn, and Cerrato resigned. Zorn was not ready to be a head coach. Snyder had to blame somebody. Instead of admitting he’d had the ultimate authority and made a mistake, he blamed Cerrato.

“The mistake he made is, this is where I learned a lot, the general manager needs to prevent the owner from hiring someone who’s not qualified,” Snyder said. “And that’s why Vinny is no longer here, to be truthful with you. He’s not here because his job was to prevent the owner from hiring a not-qualified coach. Having said that, we went in and had the worst two-year experience I ever dreamed. I apologized, according to my wife, ten thousand times. I apologize openly. I made a big mistake. It’s a terrible experience when you know you got the wrong guy to lead the franchise.”

Snyder then hired Bruce Allen, the former GM of the Bucs and the son of Redskins legendary coach George Allen, as general manager and Shanahan as coach. Snyder liked Shanahan from the first time he met him at the Pro Bowl after the 1999 season, the first year he owned the team. Snyder brought his parents, his wife, and his kids and was staying at the Four Seasons in Honolulu. One day walking around he bumped into Shanahan, then the Broncos’ coach, who had struggled to a 6–10 record in the first season after Elway retired. Shanahan and Snyder had a few beers. They had dinner a couple of nights later. They were always friendly at the league meetings and sat near each other.

Snyder fired Zorn one year after Shanahan was fired in Denver. Shanahan sat out the 2009 season and was a natural fit for Snyder. He was also available. Shanahan spoke on the phone with Gibbs for ninety minutes before he took the job. “My job is to help the coach any way I can and support him,” Snyder said.

Snyder has tremendous passion for the Redskins but hasn’t figured out the right formula for success. Until the Redskins get to a Super Bowl, he will be viewed as a rich kid owner who has no idea how to win. He is the steward of one of the NFL’s most
treasured franchises, and he has a responsibility to reward the Redskins’ loyal fans.

He has grown up in the years since he joined the NFL’s exclusive ownership club in 1999. Both he and his wife, Tanya, are cancer survivors. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2001, and the
New York Times
reported that he underwent an eight-hour operation at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and now has a faint scar at the base of his neck. Tanya was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. She told the
Times
she underwent two operations for early-stage breast cancer one year apart. Tanya Snyder had been active in breast cancer awareness before she was diagnosed and later became the NFL spokeswoman for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Snyder has faced difficult challenges that have helped put things in perspective.

“I’m a lot older now. I’ve had cancer, my wife had cancer. We have plenty of kids,” Snyder said, sitting in his office. “It matures you. When you are young and full of energy and enthusiasm, you make mistakes.”

If he keeps making them, he has a solution: You’re fired.

Rex Ryan
was leaning against a wall outside the fashionable Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans after his second season as coach of the New York Jets. Right off Canal Street and a few blocks from the famed French Quarter, the Fairmont is the hotel the NFL often uses for one of the teams when the Super Bowl is played at the Superdome. The lobby was crawling with NFL royalty as the billionaire owners and millionaire coaches were checking in at the front desk for the annual league meetings.

The NFL was in the middle of a 136-day lockout. The doom and gloomers were predicting that the 2011 season would be wiped out, but there was Rex just being Rex, which is what makes him so much fun and so different from all the other coaches in the league. The Jets had made it to the AFC championship game in each of his first two seasons, and now Ryan was predicting bigger things for the 2011 season, assuming there was a 2011 season. In the process of talking up his team, he somehow found a way to compare himself to Babe Ruth.

In one memorable sentence, Ryan referenced Teddy Roosevelt and the Babe.

“They talk about walk softly and carry a big stick. I love that. I agree with that 100 percent,” Ryan said. “But I guess I feel more like Babe Ruth. I’m going to walk softly, I’m going to carry that
big stick, and then I’m going to point, and then I’m going to hit it over the fence.”

Walk softly? Maybe. Talk softly? That wouldn’t be Ryan.

Baseball legend has it that Ruth pointed to center field during an at bat in the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 World Series and on the next pitch blasted the ball over the center field fence at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Up to the plate steps the Rexino.

“It’s like he had the courage to do that. I think I’ve got the courage,” Ryan said. “Now granted, I can’t hit anywhere close to Babe Ruth and I’m not as good a coach as Babe Ruth was a player.”

His Jets didn’t have the Babe’s back in 2011. They were too busy stabbing one another in the back as the locker room became dysfunctional and the team limped to the finish line with three straight losses to complete a disappointing 8–8 nonplayoff season.

By then, Ryan’s annual declaration of greatness had turned him into the boy who cried wolf. Going into the 2009 playoffs, he insisted that the Jets should be the favorites to win it all. They won two playoff games on the road against the Bengals and Chargers and then lost the AFC championship game in Indianapolis. Going into the 2010 and 2011 seasons, he proclaimed the Jets would win it all. They came close again in 2010, winning road playoff games against the Colts and Patriots, beating all-time greats Peyton Manning and Tom Brady back to back, but then lost the AFC title game in Pittsburgh. Their 2011 meltdown and inner turmoil left Ryan questioning the way he handled the team; he admitted he was oblivious to the tension in the locker room.

On the day he was introduced as the Jets coach, he promised a trip to the White House for his team, and he wasn’t referring to one of those tours where people line up for hours and never come close to meeting the president. He was talking about being the invited guests as Super Bowl champion. Ryan wanted it all for the Jets: the Oval Office, the Rose Garden, a green and white jersey
for the president, the “J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets” chant reverberating through the halls of the West Wing. Basically, Mr. Ryan Goes to Washington.

A few months after he took the job, Ryan woke up the Patriots in New England when he told Mike Francesa in an interview on WFAN in New York: “I never came here to kiss Bill Belichick’s rings.” Ryan’s players loved it. A few weeks later Ryan said, “I’m not intimidated by anybody. Does that mean I am disrespecting Belichick? No. I think he’s a hell of a football coach.”

Ryan had waited a long time for his chance to become an NFL head coach, and he wasn’t going to hold back. This could be his one and only chance. In 2008, he had interviewed with the Ravens, Falcons, and Dolphins. Even though he was the defensive coordinator on Baltimore’s staff and had been with the Ravens for ten seasons, owner Steve Bisciotti, after firing Brian Billick, chose to go outside the organization and hire John Harbaugh. It was a blow to Ryan’s ego, but he accepted Harbaugh’s invitation to remain on the staff as the assistant head coach/defensive coordinator. Ryan had a good relationship with Bill Parcells, who was then running the Dolphins, and the Tuna and Ryan’s father, Buddy, really went at it when Parcells was coaching the Giants and Ryan was coaching the Eagles. But Parcells didn’t hire Rex in Miami. He chose Tony Sparano, who had worked for him in Dallas. (When Ryan needed a new offensive coordinator in 2012, he chose Sparano, who had just been fired after four seasons in Miami.) Atlanta went with Jacksonville defensive coordinator Mike Smith. He and Ryan had worked together for four years in Baltimore.