Do You Love Football?! (19 page)

"What are the most important positions on a football team, and how would you rank them in terms of their priority?" Al asked me.

I obviously put quarterback as number one. Blue-chip pass rusher was number two because that's a guy who can change a game, the offensive strategy. And because ninety percent of the quarterbacks in this league are right-handed, you want that rusher coming from the right side of your defense, which is the quarterback's blind side.

Left tackle and shutdown corner tied for number three. You need the tackle to line up against that great pass rusher, and when you put that shutdown corner on a lesser receiver, you can double the opponent's best receiver and just be more creative in your defensive scheme. Fourth was a stud receiver-a guy who can catch the low ball, catch the high ball, create a big target to throw at, come out of trash, make a short pass a big gain.

There's not one position where you can afford to have a weak link, but some are more important than others. Al also asked me about the kinds of traits I look for in players: "Do you like little linemen, athletic guys? Do you like the big, massive, zone-blocking brutes? What kind of vision do you have for the halfback position? What kinds of things do you want to see in your quarterback? Is it the vertical game? Is it the decision making? Accuracy? Touch?"

Then he got into special teams. "If you've got all these star players," Al asked, "who's covering the kicks?"

I wasn't told whether I had the job or not when they put me on the plane back home. I got another call from Bruce to inform me that Al wanted to interview me again, this time in New Orleans, where he was for Super Bowl XXXI between Green Bay and New England. I met with Al in his hotel suite and I thought I did as well as before, even though he still wouldn't say whether I was hired. As I left New Orleans I thought, I'm going to get this job. It was my second interview. He must think I'm the right guy to interview me twice.

I returned to our family vacation in Tampa and while I was on the beach throwing a Frisbee with my oldest son, Deuce, my wife, Cindy, yelled to me that I had a phone call. It was Al Davis.

"Sorry, Jon, but we're going to hire Joe Bugel," he said. "Well, I appreciate the interest," I said. "Thanks a lot for calling."

I was crushed. I really thought I had a viable shot. But I did appreciate the fact that he gave me the chance to get in front of him for a head-coaching job. It just wasn't my time.

In our first two years in Philly we won twenty-one games, including the playoffs. Ray Rhodes won Coach of the Year. We had two quarterbacks coming back who had won in Rodney Peete and Ty Detmer, and young quarterback we liked in Bobby Hoying. We had Ricky Watters, Charlie Garner and Irving Fryar at receiver. We had good players.

Then, all of a sudden, free agency came along and we lost Bill Romanowski, an outstanding linebacker, to Denver after the '95 season. William Fuller, a powerful defensive end and our leader, ended up going to San Diego after the '96 season. Ricky Watters, who had had three magnificent seasons, was going to become an unrestricted free agent after the 1997 season, and there was no indication he would be re-signed. Charlie Garner was due to become unrestricted a year later, and there was no indication he would be re-signed, either.

We went 6-9-1 in '97. As poor as that record was, we actually played pretty well. Bobby Hoying got his first chance to become a starter through the final six weeks, and I'm proud to say he made the most of it. He even won NFC Offensive Player of the Week honors after throwing for three hundred yards and four touchdowns against Cincinnati. We just had some bad breaks that proved to be the difference in keeping us out of the playoffs for the first time in three seasons. I can't think of many bigger heartbreaks than the one we had in week three on Monday Night Football in Dallas. We're down 21-20 and Freddie Solomon catches a forty-six-yard pass to set up a chip-shot field goal with four seconds left. What happens? We fumble the snap.

Game over. Even after going 6-6-1, we still were only a game out of first in the NFC East. A win over the Giants would have put both of us at the top of the division. We ended up losing 31-21, yet we had a shot a wild-card berth if we beat our final two opponents, Atlanta and Washington, and got some help from a couple of other teams. But back-to-back three-point losses brought my third year in Philadelphia to a bitter conclusion.

I felt it was time to move on. As long as the team was undergoing changes, I thought I might as well do the same.

NINE
If the Head Coaching Jacket Fits, Wear It
Silver, Black, and Fearless

FOR THE THIRD OFFSEASON in three years I was sitting down with Bruce Allen. For the third offseason in three years he was saying the Raiders wanted to interview me because their head coaching job was open again.

"I'll go for it," I said.

I took another trip to Oakland to meet with Al Davis. Bruce knew I respected Al and the Raiders and their place in NFL history. Al Davis might be the one guy I've met who loves football more than I do-or at least as much as I do. Football is all he does. The Raiders are all he cares about. A lot of people like golfing, they like going to the beach, they like sitting in the sun, they like going to concerts. Al just involves himself with football and he doesn't want to do anything but win. BIG!

There really was no way I could make sure I was any better prepared than I had been for our other interviews. You can't prepare for an interview with Al Davis. There are no self-help books or seminars that can show you how to make a favourable impression on him because he has his own way of doing things and it just isn't something that can be communicated in a textbook explanation. One way or another, Al's going to find out if you know football. He's also the only one who is going to determine whether you do or you don't.

The reason I think he needed to interview me as many times as he did was that I was an outsider. I wasn't a lifelong Raider like previous head coaches who had also played for Oakland-Tom Flores and Art Shell-and when they went outside the family, so to speak, things just hadn't worked out as well. Also, at thirty-four, I was very young. Tossing the keys to the Oakland Raiders to someone like me in those times, when their team had fallen a little bit, was a real risk.

Whether it worked out or not, I saw it as another step in my Harvard-quality football education. To that point I had been around some of the greatest coaches and front-office people in the game. How about Al Davis? Let's go see what this world is like. Let's be judged by him. He'll let me know if I'm good enough or not.

Although I wasn't officially hired yet, Al asked me if I could stay in town for a couple of days and stop by the Raiders' offices, which were only a few miles from my hotel, to watch some of their videotape from the previous season. Afterward he and Bruce would ask my opinions of the team's personnel. We were going over some really inside things-how many picks they had in the coming draft, who the free agents were, what the salary cap looked like-that made me feel that I had the job even if I didn't officially have it.

I would go back to my hotel room at night with a Raiders' jacket and other team gear Bruce gave me, then return to the offices the next morning to watch more video and answer more questions. I didn't know if I was still interviewing or if I had the job or anything. I was just basically going with the flow. I was very much excited about being there and was willing to do almost anything to get that job. Some nights I would put on that Raider jacket and look at myself in the mirror in my room and think, Man, this is really something!

After a couple of days, I met with my agent, Bob LaMonte, who then headed over to the Raider offices. Soon thereafter, I got a call from Bruce Allen. A three-year contract was ready for my signature.

Getting a head coaching job didn't really give me a lot of juice to jump up and down and say, "Oh, this is great!" It's not like it guarantees you anything except one game, maybe one offseason. You've got to get results.

As I understood it Al basically wanted a different approach at that point. He wanted to get some new ideas in the mix. I think he wanted to keep his core philosophy in place, but there was a sense that he was looking for a fresh start for the Raiders-that they needed to do something different from what they had been doing.

I also think Al understood that I didn't have a lot of concerns or fears based on what had happened in Philadelphia. Here I was, a young guy who had done a decent job of coordinating offenses and after only his third year into it he was willing to take a chance to find a greater challenge and more responsibility. I went in there with the state of mind that I was not at all worried about having Al Davis run me out of town because at least I had a chance to be judged. I was not worried just because he would be at practice or wanted to sit in on staff meetings. I wasn't a cocky guy, but you've got to be yourself. You've got to be all you can be while you're there.

I had studied hard. I had been around great, quality people.

This was my chance. Now that I had it, I was going to do the things that I knew how to do. I couldn't come in and have mini-camp the way the previous two head coaches, Joe Bugel and Mike White, had minicamp because I didn't know how to do it their way. I didn't know how to coach a certain play or a certain protection other than the way I had learned. And by God, we were going to do it hard.

For three years in Philadelphia I had helped organize our off-season program and training camp schedule in terms of what we practiced, when we practiced it, the installation of the offense. I helped set up our year-round calendar. When I was Mike Holmgren's assistant in Green Bay I spent a lot of time making sure that all the offseason dates worked within league policies. I didn't have the authority to make the final decisions in either place, but I had learned about what went into that kind of organization. When I was with San Francisco, I had taken copious notes about hitting the seven-man sled the first three or four days of pads. I had learned about making sure that when the horn blows in practice, everyone knows where to go and moves briskly to the next drill. I had discovered the value of videotaping the coaches' installation of the offense, so that those classroom lectures would be accessible in the future when new players and coaches came aboard.

The things that I witnessed were things I was going to do in Oakland. We were going to do all of it, including the way we traveled in San Francisco. If a player wants his own room, a player can get his own room. I was with the players a lot in San Francisco and they loved the way the 49ers practiced, which was often without pads because it helped keep them fresh and extend their careers. I learned that happy players usually are more productive players.

Until I got to the Raiders, they never did their game plans on computers, which we had started doing in San Francisco. The Raiders didn't have an Avid video system-now standard equipment for every team in the league-that breaks down game tapes into play catalogs that are easy to sort, giving you an instant video library. There were a lot of things that hadn't been done in Oakland before that we were going to do. We had a program that I had seen work with the 49ers. I saw Mike Holmgren turn the Packers around with that program. When we put that program in at Philadelphia, Ray Rhodes won Coach of the Year.

There were a lot of things I was experiencing for the first time-running meetings of the entire staff, disciplining players, thinking about what to say to the whole team, making sure I was visible enough to the defensive players and the special teams, which is an area I could still improve on to this day because of my commitment to being an offensive guy. The way I've always tried to stay involved with our defenses in Tampa and Oakland is to try to rip them every day in practice with six completions in a row, nine completions in a row and then tell them, "We're going to get eleven tomorrow!" They love spitting right back in my face, saying, "No completions today! No yards for you today!"

Another new area of responsibility was dealing with the media, something you don't have to do on a regular basis as an assistant. The Raiders have a certain way with the media. Basically they don't want you saying very much. When I got the job, some of the team's administrators put me through a forty-five-minute mock press conference the day before the actual press conference introducing me as the new head coach. I stood at the podium and they asked me questions that they believed the media would ask me. After I gave an answer they would tell me a different way I could say something or what I should include in a particular comment. They wanted certain themes to be projected to the fans and to the world. They also pointed out that I was talking to our players as well. It was a good experience and helped me to get better in that area. For the most part I tried to be myself but I didn't elaborate on some issues as much as I might have otherwise.

But I had been around football my whole life. I had been around enough team meetings led by great coaches. It wasn't as if I had no idea what to do. Even if you're an assistant coach, after you listen to what the head coach has to say in a team meeting, you think, Those were some great points he made in there. Or you might walk out of the meeting and say, I wish he would have jumped that guy's ass. Or I wish he would have given that guy some more credit. Or I wish he would have been more specific. You have an idea of what needs to be said. You're not oblivious.

I also was kind of eager to learn about doing things the Raider way, about the family tradition that is encouraged throughout the franchise. I was asked if I would mind legendary former players-such as Jim Plunkett, George Blanda, Ted Hendricks and Tom Flores, who also was a Super Bowl-winning coach for the Raiders and part of their radio broadcast team-being around the building. I guess some coaches didn't feel so good about having those guys around, but I loved it. In fact, every year in the offseason I'd have a "legends dinner," a little get-together at a steakhouse where we'd bring in guys like Clarence Davis, Jack Tatum and George Atkinson. I wanted to learn about the history and tradition of the Raiders. That was what we wanted to return to. I was fired up about that. I bought into that wholeheartedly.