|
|
In August 1988, while covering the Giants and the NFL for Newsday, I went to Carlisle, Pa., to write a feature story on Joe Gibbs. Tough duty. Gibbs didn't know me, had no interest in giving much time to some newspaper on Long Island I doubt he'd even heard of, and was less inclined to talk about himself during training camp than he might have during a less-pressured time of the year.
But after spending a couple of days in Carlisle, and after talking to his best friends in the world, I learned a lot about Gibbs. I learned, mostly, that he lives to compete. He's a sicko about competition. That was the theme of my story. I am told Gibbs, at 63, is precisely the same guy I profiled in 1988. If that's so, he will endure some sleepless nights starting right now. Oh, he might say he won't sleep in the office. Poppycock.
"Coaching,'' he said, "is a gut-wrenching, throw-up experience every Sunday.''
That's what life
will be like for the Redskins. Here's what else I can tell you about Gibbs:
He's a jock, even now. He plays golf, racquetball and cards, hunts, and jogs.
He has parasailed, snow-skied, water-skied, gone skindiving, drag-raced, motocrossed,
stock-car raced and built a funny car. Tickets
He has passed his love of competition on to his kids.
As he told me in 1988: "My son, Coy, had a great statement one night. I was talking to him in his room, talking about heaven. He was about 8. He said, `Hey, I'm not sure I'm going to like heaven.' I said, `What do you mean, Coy?' He said, 'There's not going to be any thrill.' I asked him what he meant and he said, 'You can't die.' "My answer to this was: 'I guarantee you, Coy, for guys like you and me, there'll be some thrill up there. We'll drive race cars or something. God'll make something for us.'
"What he was saying, really, was he can't die because there's no risk after death. There's no losing, no winning. He'd hate that. I think [risk] is a big factor in our society. There are a lot of guys working in an office who are extremely competitive. [When] I started getting older and people would say, `Are you going to grow up?' I'd say, `No. I'm going to keep playing something.' "
Coy will join his dad on the Redskins' staff.
Gibbs keeps no clocks in the coaches' offices. Moral of the story: You work until you get the job done. "It's like Las Vegas,'' his offensive line coach, Joe Bugel, said. "Time doesn't matter.'' (Not to pick on Steve Spurrier, who is such an easy target these days, but my favorite story of the Spurrier regime is that one of his assistants saw newly signed quarterback Tim Hasselbeck in the office one Tuesday, an off-day, at 4 in the afternoon studying tape. The assistant said: "What are you doing in here? It's your day off! Get out of here.'' Hasselbeck, sadly, obeyed, even though he realized he was going to be playing soon, and he knew next-to-nothing about the offense. Instead of studying six more hours so he would know his stuff when practice began the next day, Hasselbeck left the office. That would've never happened under Gibbs.)
The devout Gibbs won't curse. He will look down on those who do. Dadgum is OK. So is goldang. Someone curses and he'll say something like: "Don't curse. Bad luck to curse.''
Though he often paid scant attention to his own personal life during his first go-round as Redskins coach, Gibbs felt his players' relationships with their families were as important as any X's and O's. "Whatever your business is, we all have a drama going on in our own lives," Gibbs said. "We're all unhappy about something. You have sickness, marital problems, a myriad of things going wrong in everybody's life. You have to deal with those things right away. You have to get their full concentration on football. I'd like to be able to communicate even more with my players when things aren't going bad, but it's just like everything else in life. The problems take over, and you wind up chasing the problems. I'd say handling people is the most important thing you do as a coach. Dealing with people, really, is all football is.''
He has to win. He's a miserable loser. At age 29, when he was an assistant coach at USC, Gibbs took up racquetball. He became obsessed with the game. In 1973, while coaching the St. Louis Cardinals, after night meetings ended, Gibbs sometimes played in the racquetball court inside Busch Stadium until the wee hours. In 1976, at age 35, he won the national 35-and-over U.S. Racquetball Championship. "After I finished with team sports," Gibbs said, "it was almost like I was crazed. I had to have something to do. Racquetball filled a void in my life, a personal competitive thing. I started driving all over the country to tournaments. After the fourth or fifth year, I'm sitting up there at the national tournament in Milwaukee in some hotel room playing cards with 16-year-old kids. I said to myself, `What am I doing?' ''
Back to football. He thinks you quite literally can't win without a good coaching staff. "You're with the guys every day for six months. You're in the same little old room, the same 12-by-12 room, and you're in a pressure cooker. And you depend on them so much to succeed. If you've got someone who's a jerk, a real jerk, you'd be in real trouble."
I have an acquaintance who knows the Redskins and owner Dan Snyder very well. On Friday, my acquaintance and I spoke, and I asked him if he thinks, finally, Snyder has gotten his team right with the hire of Gibbs.
"There is no question in my mind or in anyone's mind that Dan has hit a home run by hiring Joe,'' Deep Redskin told me. "This is the best move he's made since he bought the team.''
But ...
"But there are two questions. First, the honeymoon isn't the time any hard questions can be answered. Wait till the bullets start flying, and wait till Dan gets pissed off at something Joe does, or after some big loss. That's when you'll be able to judge if this relationship's going to work. Second, this hire had better work. This team is the king of the offseason, but then what happens? First it was signing Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith in 2000, then Marty Schottenheimer in 2001, then Steve Spurrier in 2002, then Laveranues Coles and the Jets free agents last year. Now Joe. If this doesn't work, who's Dan going to hire next year? The pope?''
Snyder might have hired him last week.
Offensive Player of the Week
Indianapolis QB Peyton Manning, whose 22-of-30, 304-yard, three-touchdown performance Sunday against Kansas City continued one of the great two-game runs in NFL playoff history. Manning has been a 79-percent passer with eight TDs and no picks thus far this postseason. During the years I've covered pro football, the only team I can recall being as equally unstoppable during the postseason as these Colts was the 1991 Bills, who scored 95 points in two playoff games leading up to Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo QB Jim Kelly was 5-1 in TD-to-pick ratio then, with 639 yards. Manning's 8-0, with 681 yards so far this postseason, and the Colts have scored 79 points. "I'm hot, I guess, right now,'' the polite Manning said after the game. "Excuse me, we're hot.''
Defensive Player of the Week
Philadelphia FS Brian Dawkins, who had eight tackles overall and an interception return in the overtime period, which set up the winning points in the Eagles' scintillating 20-17 win over the Packers. His enforcer mentality was about the only thing that saved a Philly defense that couldn't stop the run all day.
Special Teams Player of the Week
New England K Adam Vinatieri, whose 46-yard field goal in a minus-10-degree wind-chill Saturday night wafted clumsily over the goalpost with 4:06 to play and put the Patriots ahead for good 17-14. Ask any kicker, and he'll tell you that booting a football on a night that cold is like trying to move an oblong brick. "The ball wasn't real soft,'' Vinatieri said later. "But the nice thing about it [was] you really couldn't feel your feet anyway, so it didn't matter.'' Vinatieri's postseason resume now includes a 45-yard field goal during a blizzard in 2002 to send the divisional playoff game against Oakland to overtime, a 48-yarder at the gun to win Super Bowl XXXVI over St. Louis and this one.
Coach of the Week
Indianapolis offensive coordinator Tom Moore, for enabling his 11 to totally confound everyone else's 11 down the stretch this season.
Goat of the Week
(tie) Green Bay QB Brett Favre, for throwing up a silly prayer in overtime. A veteran quarterback as smart as Favre should never have tossed a rainbow like that, particularly with the Packers so close to field goal territory. I'm sure he thought WR Javon Walker wouldn't break off his route like he did, but it seemed like far too big a risk to take, to throw that thing up among two defenders the way Favre did. Dawkins came down with it, and that was the beginning of the end of Green Bay.
Kansas City SS Greg Wesley. As CBS' Dan Dierdorf aptly pointed out on the replay of Indy's first touchdown Sunday, Wesley appeared to be in a deep zone with two Colts receivers running on either side of him. Rather than picking one player to cover, Wesley let both of them run by him! He did nothing! And one of these Colts, Brandon Stokley, pranced by him for an easy TD catch.
Stat of the Week
Eddie George may have played his last game for the Titans Saturday night. His $7 million cap number in 2004 will have to be adjusted significantly downward for Tennessee to keep him. Which brings up this daunting George stat: fifty-eight players in NFL history have rushed for 6,000 yards or more. Among those 58 players, George has the lowest per-carry average, 3.66 yards per rush.
... New Falcons coach Jim Mora Jr. The 42-year-old was surprise pick over a field of more-famous names.
MMQB: A lot of people are asking why Atlanta hired such a young guy when there were more experienced coaches available. What do you say to those folks?
Mora: Age shouldn't be a factor in getting a head-coaching job. Experience should be. I've had 19 years of it. I've worked with some of the best football minds in the business: Don Coryell, Bill Walsh, Jim Finks. Look at the track record of some of younger guys who've been hired in recent years. Jon Gruden's won a Super Bowl. Andy Reid's in the playoffs every year. I've been coaching in this game for half my life.
MMQB: So you won the derby. How excited are you to coach Michael Vick?
Mora: I told my wife, Shannon, yesterday that this guy's got a chance to have the impact on this game that Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali had on theirs. He has a chance to be one of the great ones to ever play. I'm so happy to have [former 49ers offensive coordinator] Greg Knapp to coach him. Walsh thinks Knapp's a brilliant offensive mind. Steve Young's really close to Greg, and he loves him. I think Mike will be really excited about working with him. And this [hybrid West Coast] offense will be perfect for him. Look at what Reid and Gruden have done with it. They've changed some things. It's a fully adaptable offense, and we'll pick out the best things to make sure Mike is successful.
MMQB: As a coach, what are the traits you take from your dad?
Mora: Energy. Enthusiasm. Discipline. Attention to detail. Players used to say my dad was like a Marine. He was tough, a disciplinarian, but I think in a good way. He had some negative experiences where he lost his cool, and I'll try to learn from those.
In 1969 when Rich McKay was 8 years old, he and his brother got a new babysitter. Their dad, John, coached Southern Cal at the time, and he had perfected the practice of taking the newest, youngest guy on his staff and making him the boys' babysitter. Potentate coaches could get away with that. In 1969, the new guy on McKay's staff was an obvious choice to handle the job of babysitter. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Which, for a 29-year-old assistant in the Peace, Love and Reefer Era, was pretty surprising. The McKay boys liked the new babysitter. He didn't just stick them in front of the TV. He paid attention to them and played with them. Who was the babysitter?
Joe Gibbs.
Geez, I sound like Paul Harvey. And now you know the rest of the story.
I was in Nashville the other day to do some HBO and Sports Illustrated reporting. While setting up for a TV standup inside the Titans' practice bubble the other day, the producer kept looking over my shoulder, annoyed by the background. Finally, I turned around and saw the annoyance. His name was Gary Anderson. There he was, during lunch hour, fly-fishing rod in hand, practicing his casts.
After practice, I came to find out there is a very good chance that Titans kicker Anderson will retire at the end of the season as the NFL's all-time leading scorer and, in all likelihood, become a professional fly-fisherman.
"I think we are the best team in the NFL. I will not leave this stadium thinking we got beat by a better team. I think [the Patriots are] not a very good team, and it sickens me that we lost to them.''
--Tennessee guard Zach Piller, following New England's 17-14 win Saturday night.
The not-very-good Patriots have won 13 in a row, Z-man.
It sure is interesting how the folks who liked my stance on the Peyton Manning-should-have-won-MVP-alone theory are from Indiana, and those who don't are from Tennessee. A sample follows.
PRO-MCNAIR. From Terence Fails of Nashville, Tenn.: "Steve McNair and Manning as co-MVPs? I'm befuddled, too. McNair has no mass media overexposure, no Gatorade or Xbox deal, no patriarch who was a mediocre QB, no sibling who's a better QB. McNair had 16 writers answer the question, 'With your (life, mortgage, playoff hopes) at stake, who do you want leading a two-minute drill when things are looking very grim?' If he had started Week 17, he might have won the MVP outright."
The post-Thanksgiving portion of the schedule, I take it, is unimportant? That's when Billy Volek and Neil O'Donnell won big games for Tennessee, and when McNair lost to Manning for the second time this year. And you believe, I also take it, that Eli Manning will have at least five 4,000-yard passing seasons by age 27, like his lousy older brother?
PRO-MANNING. From Brian Cochran of Indianapolis: "McNair benefitted from constant hype the entire year. After the Houston comeback two weeks ago, the announcer said, 'That's your MVP, right there.' Manning never received that type of publicity. He just went out and put up better numbers. Everyone says you evaluate the MVP with a simple formula: Take the player away and see how the team does. Well, didn't the Titans win the two games when McNair was out?