Do You Love Football?! (21 page)

But I never meant for my behavior to turn into a case of seeing all these Chucky dolls dressed in Bucs' outfits or whatever.

I've seen people show up at training camp with their kids dressed like Chucky. I've got people sending me Chucky videos so that I'll sign the containers; that's a little extreme.

I don't think the comparison is a negative thing, although when I finally saw the movie it was clear right away that he wasn't a really good guy. Put it this way, it's not something I'm going to watch with my kids, that's for sure.

From that first season in Oakland, Al Davis was very involved in everything we did. He would call me at home sometimes or he would come by the office two or three times a week late at night with four or five plays he wanted to go over with me on videotape.

Al wore distinctive cologne that I can smell to this day. I knew he was coming down the hall before he ever got to my office. Al called me by a nickname, too, but it wasn't Chucky. It was Butch, although I never knew why. He'd say, "Butch, did you see the right corner on this play?" I'd fast-forward the tape and watch the play with him to see what the cornerback was doing, or not doing, that bothered him. Or he'd ask, "Butch, did you watch the left wing on the punt team? We're going to get every punt blocked."

At first I looked at such comments maybe negatively, like he was questioning every single thing we were doing. Then I started looking at it as if I were Al and I owned the team and it was all I cared about. I started thinking I'd probably be the same way.

Jeff George had an option in his contract after the '98 season, and we didn't pick it up, thus allowing him to become a free agent. There were a couple of other free-agent quarterbacks available whom we were interested in-Rich Gannon, who had been with the Chiefs, and Trent Green, who had been with the Redskins. The 1999 draft also was going to be a big one for quarterbacks with Tim Couch, Donovan McNabb, Akili Smith, Daunte Culpepper and Cade McNown expected to be first round picks-which they were.

Gannon was thirty-three years old and had kind of bounced around the league. But he had played well against the Raiders, and Al Davis and Bruce Allen wanted me to take a look at him.

When I watched his game film, I saw a great athlete; he was always a threat to run the ball. I saw an accurate passer. The bottom line was that the guy was a winner. Back when I was in Green Bay, Rich beat us when he was quarterbacking Minnesota. For whatever reason, the Vikings traded him to Washington and then he ended up in Kansas City. But he played on a scoring machine in Minnesota. In '98, Elvis Grbac got hurt and Rich Gannon took the Kansas City Chiefs to the playoffs and played very well, even though they started Elvis in the playoffs.

Rich's touchdown-to-interception ratio was good and he was almost impossible to sack. You ask any player or coach in Kansas City, the Chiefs would have followed Rich Gannon right into the Gulf of Mexico because he was an awesome leader and they believed in him. Paul Hackett, the Chiefs' offensive coordinator at the time and my former boss at Pitt, gave Rich a ringing endorsement.

When I first met the guy I knew he was exactly what our team needed. He had a confident, detailed vibe about him, and we hit it off right away. It all went back to my answer to Al's question about what the most important positions on a football team are: the quarterback, the speed rusher, the left tackle, the shutdown corner. We had Charles Woodson and Eric Allen to take care of the corner position. We addressed left tackle the best we could with Mo Collins, another of our first-round picks the previous year. We were still looking for that speed rusher.

But for me to be the head coach of the team, we needed a quarterback who was kind of an extension of me, who would agree that if a pass protection we had called was going to be a problem against a particular blitz look, we were going to change to what was going to be a good play for that situation.

We needed a quarterback who was going to practice at a high tempo and who was going to understand that we were going to throw the ball on time and accurately and who understood that we were going to have total discipline in our pattern running, in our decision-making, in our footwork. Rich was that quarterback and we signed him.

Why on earth was he available for us-and everyone else to sign? Who knows? All that really matters is your vision of the position. As long as you look at the film, meet the player, do all your research, talk to his ex-teammates, talk to his ex-coaches, look at his win-loss record, you're going to get the complete picture of the guy. It wasn't like I wouldn't teach him the offense, wouldn't coach him constantly or be with him every day. It wasn't like I didn't know exactly what we needed from the position.

And Al liked Rich, too. He and other people in that organization respected Rich's ability as much as I did. I wasn't the Lone Ranger on this guy.

When it comes to judging any quarterback, it's all in the eyes of the beholder. Hell, look at Brett Favre. He was told by Atlanta he wasn't good enough. When I first met the guy in my first year in Green Bay, I had no idea why the Packers wanted him. My second year there, we drafted Mark Brunell on the fifth round, and in two years he appeared in two games before being traded to Jacksonville. My third year in Green Bay we signed Kurt Warner as an undrafted rookie free agent. Look at where he is now. Look at quarterbacks all over this league: Brad Johnson, Jeff Garcia, Trent Dilfer. Tom Brady was a sixth-round draft pick who became a Super Bowl MVP.

Who really knows about that position?

When you meet Rich Gannon there is a certain edge you get that this game is very important to him, so we instantly had that in common. And I wanted people to jump on board with our kind of over-the-edge attitude. Maybe we were over the top.

Maybe Rich and I did overdo it. It was a great match for me because he was a challenge to coach. He wanted answers and he wanted them right now. If the route was not run properly in practice, he wanted it corrected-or he was going to be on my ass. He wanted it to be right. He also was a lot like me in the sense that he wasn't afraid of being struck by lightning. There wasn't enough football you could bring to Rich. He was amazing. If you had 150 passes in the game plan, he had every formation memorized. He made it look like he had practiced every play thirty times, even when he hadn't. You could install six brand-new plays on the practice field and he'd execute them like you had run them for six years. He had unbelievable ability to take what you showed him on the acetate out to the grass and get it done right.

We ended up spending a lot of time together. When I wasn't watching the defense or other drills in practice, I was with Rich previewing the next period or I was going over the period we just had. He kept almost the same hours I did. The doors to the facility would be locked when he arrived around 5:55 A.M., so we eventually gave him his own key to allow him to come and go as he pleased.

The room where we held our quarterback meetings was near the players' lounge, which had a pool table, a pinball machine and an arcade basketball game. We'd be in a meeting and Rich would hear pool balls being racked and guys striking them with the cue stick and finally say, "This is distracting to me." Rich took action. One night, when no one was around, he went into the lounge, grabbed all the balls from the pool table and hid them-in my office. They were buried deep under a pile of files. It took a year before I even knew they were there. Guys would go into the lounge looking to play pool, wouldn't find any balls and they'd leave. No more distraction.

In his constant pursuit of perfection, Rich sometimes rubs people the wrong way. Rich and I had our share of run-ins.

People thought we didn't get along. Reporters would say that there was a rift between us. They couldn't have been more wrong. There wasn't and never has been any problem between Rich Gannon and me. I love Rich Gannon more than any guy I know. All I want him to do is be great.

We're just two type-A personalities. Put us together and sometimes you're going to have sparks and sometimes you're going to have fire. But there isn't a better guy alive than Rich Gannon. He's just misunderstood by some people. And maybe I am, too.

I have something I call the "grit chart," which is a way of looking at your schedule in terms of the grit that's required to win each week. You have sixteen games, and every Sunday the difference between winning and losing is usually three to seven points. Very rarely do you see blowouts. That means to be successful you have to be a team that is willing battle the whole way, a team that has the grit to hang in there and make maybe one or two more plays than the other guys. We became that kind of team with Rich Gannon as quarterback. That whole first year he was with us we were in every game until the very end, beginning with the first two-at Green Bay and at Minnesota. Rich played well against the Packers, and we nearly won before Brett Favre, the very definition of grit, made a couple of big throws at the end to beat us. A week later we beat the Vikings in Minnesota. They were 15-1 the year before.

I just kind of marveled at what Rich had done in those two games. I thought, We've got a chance with this guy. This guy's really good. What I saw was what everyone now knows about Rich Gannon: His quarterbacking skills are unbelievable. He sees everything. He almost never makes a bad play. He's hard to sack.

He rarely throws interceptions. He's accurate. And he can run.

Rich had two defining games that season. The first came in the middle of the year when he led us back from a 20-3 deficit to beat Bill Parcells and the New York Jets 24-23. In the final two minutes, he took us on a ninety-yard drive that ended with his five-yard touchdown throw to James Jett to win the game with twenty-six seconds left. Not only did Rich have 352 passing yards, but he also was our leading rusher with 60 yards, including a 36-yard gain that helped set up our first score.

The second defining game for Rich-and the launching point for the serious contender we would become over the next two seasons-was our last regular-season game of 1999 in Kansas City. It was Rich's Arrowhead homecoming. Before that the Chiefs beat the Raiders in eighteen of twenty-one games, including the previous five. They had humiliated us and they enjoyed it tremendously. We were 7-8. We were missing seven or eight starters due to injury. This game meant nothing to the Raiders because we were out of the playoffs. It meant everything to the Chiefs because if they won, they would win the AFC West outright and get a home playoff game. If they lost, they would be out of the playoffs and Seattle would win the AFC West.

Barely two minutes into the game, Tamarick Vanover took a punt eighty-four yards for a touchdown, and before we knew what hit us, we were losing 17-0 halfway through the first quarter. Their crowd was going crazy because they were on their way to winning the division and kicking the Raiders' asses-again. Then all of a sudden we got hot. Kenny Shedd blocked a punt and returned it twenty yards for a touchdown to make it 17-7. Napoleon Kaufman went the distance on a shovel pass. Rich hit a couple of screens in the two-minute drill as we drove forty yards to tie the game 38-38 at the end of regulation.

The Chiefs started overtime by kicking off out of bounds.

We got the ball at the forty. We called Green Left Slot Fox 3 Z Bingo Cross, which we thought would be a good call if the Chiefs zone blitzed. It was a play-action pass where we sent Tim Brown on a crossing route, James Jett on a post route, Rickey Dudley clearing out the backside and two backs underneath to control the linebackers. They zone-blitzed it, both backs picked it up, and when they did, it left a big hole in the middle of the defense. Gannon hit Tim, who was wide open, on a basic cross for a twenty-four-yard gain. That put us in chip-shot field-goal range. Joe Nedney, who was our second kicker that season after replacing Michael Husted, made the kick to give us the victory.

There was a state of shock in Arrowhead Stadium. You couldn't hear anything-except the Raiders celebrating.

We were 8-8 for the second year in a row, but once you see a team that never quits, a team that has the drive to overcome adversity, you know you've got a chance. Since 1998, when we lost 44-21 at Buffalo, we never lost a regular-season game by more than ten points through the rest of our time in Oakland.

After a dozen seasons in the league, Rich made his first Pro Bowl. It would not be his last. He inspired everybody. Just when it looked like we had no chance, Rich would duck a rusher.

He'd throw a sidearm ball. He'd dive for a first down. His improvisation was amazing. He gave us a chance to win every Sunday.

As encouraging as that was, however, we also confronted tragedy after that season. Eric Turner, who had been an outstanding free safety for us, had missed six games of the '99 season because he was injured. Then, all of a sudden, he didn't take part in any of our offseason workouts. When I asked to visit with him, he refused and wouldn't say why. The next thing I know, he has intestinal cancer-something he didn't want anybody to know about-and I'm at his funeral in Southern California. That just stunned us, as Leon Bender's death had two years earlier. Two wonderful young people and outstanding football players taken away just like that.

Along with the acquisition of Rich Gannon, another highlight of those Raider years was signing Jerry Rice in June 2001.

You're talking about the greatest wide receiver of all time, the owner of every major NFL career receiving record and ten Super Bowl records.

The day we signed him, Bruce Allen and I had a little golf outing with Jerry on the Ruby Hill course in Pleasanton, California. We played nine holes, then sat in a room by the pro shop and gave Jerry a package. He opened it up and there was a black jersey with a silver number eighty on it and RICE on the back.

Jerry was approaching thirty-nine at the time, and I never felt a greater sense of responsibility in my career than in trying to find a way to somehow coach him at a level where he was comfortable. We had moved him from flanker, where he had played during all those glorious seasons in San Francisco, to split end because Tim Brown was our flanker at that time. It was a transition for Jerry, a new learning experience, and I was nervous about that because I had such enormous respect for him.