The son convinced the father something had to be done. Their football team was going nowhere and hadn’t arrived in years.
The father was reluctant at first to turn his franchise over to a stranger. The son persisted until the father finally relented. He would hire an outsider and give him control and authority over everything football.
The Detroit Lions and Matt Millen? No, that’s just the latest version of old news. It was 26 years ago when George “Mugs” Halas Jr. convinced George Halas Sr. to hire Jim Finks to run his Bears.
The only difference was Finks had experience. He also never made $3 million a year, although he made the Hall of Fame.
Unlike Millen, who came straight out of the television and radio booth, Finks had built the Minnesota Vikings into a four-time Super Bowl team. He had hired Bud Grant to coach and had drafted players such as Ron Yary and Hall of Famer Alan Page.
Millen has never hired or drafted anybody, but his first day on the job he reached Barry Sanders on the telephone, which was more than anybody with the Lions had been able to do since the running back retired unexpectedly two years ago.
Millen’s experience is winning Super Bowl titles as a middle linebacker with three organizations–the Raiders, San Francisco and Washington–put together by three Hall of Famers–Al Davis, Bill Walsh and Joe Gibbs. Presumably he was taking notes.
“Football is about one thing,” Millen said. “Football’s about people. You have to get good people. That’s the first thing. From the outside I believe this: Attitude is the most important thing you can do. You look at what Jim Haslett did down in New Orleans and what Mike Holmgren was able to do up in Green Bay and what Andy Reid did in Philadelphia and what Tony Dungy did down in Tampa Bay.
“They did the hardest thing you can do. It wasn’t personnel; it wasn’t coaching. It was an attitude change. They took a team that didn’t believe in themselves. They took places that were beaten down, and they got it changed. That’s what we have to do. We have to change an attitude–in all aspects.”
William Clay Ford Jr. was able to change his father’s attitude only after the Bears surprisingly knocked the Lions out of a playoff trip in the season finale. Had the Lions made the playoffs, Ford Jr. conceded it would be “hard to say” whether a change would have been made. With his contract worth a reported $3 million a year, Millen already has changed the attitude of a lot of general managers and team bosses who are going to feel seriously underpaid.
Not so fast: There has been an attitude change toward Dick Vermeil in St. Louis. The coach who took the Rams to last season’s Super Bowl title is taking severe hits for taking over as coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Chiefs will pay second- and third-round draft choices for Vermeil, who also will pay back the first $500,000 installment on a $2 million parachute the Rams gave him when Vermeil retired two years before his contract expired. The Chiefs had argued the payment technically voided any obligation Vermeil had in St. Louis. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue upheld the spirit of the agreement by awarding the draft choices. There were no No. 1 picks involved as in the case of Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick in recent New York Jets-New England Patriots deals because Vermeil was not technically under contract.
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Rams owner Georgia Frontiere, President John Shaw and president of football operations Jay Zygmunt felt jilted by Vermeil.
“I would have definitely preferred that he had spoken to us before he had spoken to the Chiefs,” Shaw told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “That’s the part that violates any type of integrity or trust in this situation. … I’m absolutely shocked that he didn’t call Jay, or myself or Georgia and tell us what he was thinking. And ask us rather than go to lawyers first and try to find a technical way out of it.”
Vermeil told the paper it was on the advice of attorneys that he didn’t call the Rams before negotiating with the Chiefs.
Maybe it’s Vermeil’s payback for knowing he was almost fired after going 9-23 in his first two Rams seasons. But Shaw also knows it was only after he and others forced changes that the Rams turned it around last season.
You’ve got mail: This is how Gunther Cunningham found out he was fired as the Chiefs’ coach: the Internet at 5 a.m. Jan. 4. President Carl Peterson let Cunningham show up to work for 11 days after the season ended while he secretly courted Vermeil, then didn’t call Cunningham to fire him formally for a full day after the news was posted on the team’s Internet site.
Peterson said: “I think it was handled properly. It’s never easy to fire somebody. I didn’t have a deal with Vermeil. The minute we got into this thing and saw there was going to be a disagreement specific to the contractual status of it, I had to put things on hold.”
Vermeil said: “It was a very, very uncomfortable situation. I always respect the feelings of a football coach. Always have and always will. I haven’t resolved that feeling yet. I don’t know if you ever resolve it. You just live with it. That’s the way it is in this business.”
The Parcells way: Bill Parcells is a candidate for the Hall of Fame because he won two Super Bowls as coach of the New York Giants, got to a third with the New England Patriots and reached an AFC title game with the New York Jets.
He will be remembered as one of the all-time great manipulators of the NFL system. While almost every coach eventually gets fired, Parcells fired three teams, leaving all three in difficult straits. He quit the Giants after the 1991 draft, disrupted the 1997 Super Bowl for the Patriots with speculation over his future and left the Jets in coaching chaos after stepping down. His second-choice successor Al Groh quit after a year, and now Parcells has decided he’s unwilling to make “a long-term commitment” to help owner Woody Johnson pick up the pieces.
Then Parcells acknowledged he could catch the coaching bug himself again, sometime, someplace.
Who says coaches don’t “own” teams?
One for Wannstedt: Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga didn’t know Dave Wannstedt very well when he tapped him to succeed Jimmy Johnson last year.
Now the boss says: “Dave did a fantastic job. I think he did a heck of a job with what we had this year. I think we’re really blessed to have Dave here.”