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In the movies, a coach spends his time giving memorable pep talks and getting carried
off the field after a stirring victory.
These things do in fact happen in real life in addition to reel life, giving the
profession a glamorous feel. That said, the life of the coach is much more than
adrenaline-filled adventures in glory.
In fact, the coaching profession has more than its share of drawbacks. It is an
interesting life to be sure, but it is a tough life, a draining life, a life that is not
for everyone.
It is a life that desperately needs someone to invent the 30-hour day. Days that last a
mere 24 hours just don’t seem long enough for the coaching profession.
Too much work. Not enough hours.
Buccaneers head coach Jon Gruden, for example, is known for his early starts to the
day. Not early as in 7 a.m. Early as in 4 a.m. A rooster would go on strike declaring
unfair labor practices if asked to start at that painful hour.
Gruden considered the time he begins his day, smiled and said, "It’s dark,
man. It’s just me and a bunch of stray cats in the parking lot."
The traditional 40-hour work week of other professions? Forty hours is so far back in
the rear view mirror by week’s end that it becomes impossible to see.
"Usually by Wednesday we’re past the 40-hour work week," Lions defensive
assistant Don Clemons said.
Chiefs TE coach Keith Rowen said, "It’s incredible. Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday we’re here usually after midnight. It’s late. Friday is a
little more reasonable at home. It’s a lot of hours. It’s just coaches.
We’re kind of crazy, really.
"It’s just what you have to do. The amount of preparation you have for the
players and everything you do is just incredible. (Regarding) the balance between sleep
and rest, we’re in a work mode, so I don’t even think about that."
Perhaps the best way to truly appreciate the avalanche of hours coaches work is to see
how much time they put in when they think they are taking it easy.
To hear Rams special teams coach Bobby April tell it, he has it much easier than other
coaches.
"Because I’m a special teams (coach) I’m very independent because I only
consult with myself, and when the head coach is finished consulting with me and I’m
finished using the video stuff here at the office, I have a laptop and a lot of my work I
can take home," April said. "So I leave at a relatively early hour, but a lot of
times I’m taking cards to draw and depth charts to type in and all that kind of
stuff. Gosh, I don’t know. I guess (I work) about an average of 14 or 15 hours a
day."
That’s having it easier?
To hear Chiefs head coach Dick Vermeil tell it, he doesn’t work anywhere near as
hard as he used to.
"I can’t run with these young guys," Vermeil said. "I used to be
able to go from 8 in the morning to 6 in the morning the next (day).
"But I can’t do it. I set a midnight curfew for myself and come in here at
seven."
That may qualify as taking it easier, but it doesn’t qualify as taking it easy.
To hear Dolphins head coach Dave Wannstedt tell it, he and his staff caught a break
last season when Baltimore won its regular-season finale, setting up a playoff matchup
between the two squads. Had Baltimore lost, the Dolphins would have faced the Jets in the
playoffs.
"We worked all day on Baltimore, assuming they would win," Wannstedt said.
"If they didn’t, all of the coaches were going to come in at 4 in the morning,
and we were going to start on the Jets. But no wake-up call."
Welcome to the life of the NFL coach, where starting work at 6 a.m. can qualify as
sleeping in.
Another way to put into perspective the long hours of the coach is to compare their
schedule to that of their players.
When asked about last season’s Packers coaching staff, WR Antonio Freeman said,
"Their schedules are identical to ours, but they’re here probably three hours
earlier and probably stay about seven hours later than we do. … (The) coaches put a
lot of time into (the) game plan and they neglect family life and all those things, so
yeah you have to have respect for those guys."
The life of the coach doesn’t leave a lot of time for outside interests.
At last season’s Super Bowl, Rams head coach Mike Martz was talking about the
things he likes to do to blow off steam.
"I like to read," Martz said. "I enjoy reading history. I like to walk a
lot."
Martz was quickly asked if he was reading a book at the time.
"Heavens no," Martz said. "I don’t have any time now."
The life of the coach doesn’t leave a lot of time for rest and relaxation.
"Coaches in the NFL are on adrenaline right now," Jets head coach Herman
Edwards said during this past season’s playoffs. "A lot of candy, soda and
coffee is being sold to us."
The life of the coach certainly doesn’t leave any time to recover when he gets
sick.
"The flu comes and it goes right through your staff," Clemons said. "You
just keep on going."
Just how ill does a coach have to be to take a sick day?
"You’d have to be real, real sick," Clemons said, laughing at the
thought. "I’m trying to think of any time that anyone that I’ve been around
on a staff has really missed a day, and I can’t think of any offhand."
The long hours may be why more star football players don’t choose to coach in the
NFL when their playing days are over.
Titans OL Bruce Matthews has been named to 14 Pro Bowls, and when asked last season if
he would consider going into coaching, he said, "I don’t know about at an NFL
level just because of the time requirements involved."
April said, "I think it’s a shocker for those guys that do go into coaching
that realize how much time is invested."
Martz said, "Usually there’s a real transition period for former players in
terms of just work ethic and wanting to be in there early and stay late and do all of the
little things."
For those that do coach in the NFL, the word "fun" does not quickly come to
mind. That is not to say that coaches do not enjoy satisfaction in this field. They do.
The incredibly long hours, however, make "fun" an elusive goal.
When Broncos director of football administration Neal Dahlen was asked to describe the
most fun he ever saw a coaching staff have, he said, "It’s hard to even think of
it that way. I think what coaching staffs have is hard work, hold your breath, work like
heck until the end, and if you ended up winning the last game of the season then you
breathe a sigh of relief and get a content smile and know that you’ve got a week or
two before you start planning for the next one and then you’re going to have to do it
all over again or you’re going to be disappointed. There’s a lot of temporary
relief and winning a big game that you weren’t necessarily expected to win and were
coming from behind in a game when you thought you were in jeopardy of losing it. The
smiles and the relief that coaching staffs feel in those moments, they’re
short-lived."
Even in good times when wins are plentiful, the concept of fun is hard to hang on to
for NFL coaches.
"Coaching is a job," Falcons RB coach Ollie Wilson said. "When
you’re winning it’s fun … and you’re getting something out of it. But
it’s a job. We’re still spending 12 or 14 or 16 hours a day in work, and
we’re still going home and can’t keep our eyes open. In that situation you still
don’t feel real good during the season as far as your physical makeup is concerned.
There’s still things to it that wear you down."
The reason NFL coaches can’t allow themselves to have much fun is the blindingly
quick turnaround time between the end of a game and the start of the next week’s
preparations.
"The high or low of victory is a very short-term thing," said NFL Coaches
Association executive director Larry Kennan, who coached for 15 years in the NFL.
"The game is over Sunday night, and early Monday morning we’re back breaking
that thing down. And by 4:00 or 5:00 the next afternoon, 24 hours after the game,
we’ve got to put that game aside and move on. We don’t have the luxury to feel
sorry for ourselves over the loss or to gloat over the victory. We’ve got to move
on."
The pursuit of victory has led coaches to become Sleepless in Seattle. And Chicago. And
Miami. And in every other NFL city.
"I think it goes back to the competitive situation," Dahlen said.
"Earlier in pro football for example, you had staffs of many fewer coaches than you
do now, and you had situations where maybe to get the game plan ready for practice the
coaching staff would stay after dinner on Monday and then they would probably think that
then just the normal seven in the morning until six at night would get the planning and
the coaching and all of the evaluation done to where they would be ready for Sunday’s
game.
"I think what’s evolved is that because of the competitive nature and the
technology available now, instead of 16 millimeter film and maybe one or two games of your
opponent now these coaches have every game that every opponent plays, and they have
computers to make their own cutups, and they look at everything prior to playing an
opponent to make sure they don’t miss out on one nuance of preparation and try to
sort all that information through. And game plans are larger. It’s just one of those
things where it’s a product of the competitiveness of pro football that these things
have evolved, and it’s all driven (by) if we can get one little edge that might tip
the scale our way on a given week, then they’re going to search for that edge with
every waking hour that they can muster.
"Obviously some teams’ coaching staffs are a little more efficient than
others with regard to and pragmatic with regard to how much time spent relative to being
prepared, but they’re all driving themselves long, long days with larger staffs to
get ready for the weekend, and it’s just the competitiveness of the thing.
"I don’t know whether or not the fan would notice much difference if you
limited all of the hours that are being put in and cut them in half and say put together a
game plan in half the time and let the athletes play. … It would still be probably
pretty darn entertaining, but that’s not the nature of the competitiveness of the
business. It doesn’t allow it."
It’s not just the coaches’ competitiveness that drives them to such long
days. It is their mastery of their profession. The more the coaching profession perfects
its craft, the more hours they must put in to maintain this impressive level.
"There are so many niches within the game now, you have so many individual
packages in the game, and it’s become so refined that it takes a lot of study,"
Clemons said. "It takes a lot of discussion. And obviously those discussions lead to
smaller discussions. You start off with your general plan, and then you keep remodeling it
and rejiggering it until you get it the way you want it, and then again you adjust it some
more. There’s just a lot of little things that have to constantly be done, and all of
a sudden you look up at the clock and it’s 8 o’clock at night, and then all of a
sudden it’s 10 o’clock at night, and you go, ‘Well, I better draw these
cards for tomorrow’s practice.’ It’s interesting because I think we all
laugh about it as coaches, but it’s just one of those things. It just happens. All of
a sudden there’s a lot of hours gone."
One of the dangers of all these long hours, is that they can become counterproductive.
"It is my belief that we work too hard and too many hours, and we get to points in
the season where you just can’t be effective," Kennan said. "That’s my
belief. What happens in the NFL, and any profession, is if somebody else is working 110
hours a week then you want to do it because your owners say, ‘Well, they’re
doing it.’ So you want to do it and make sure you keep up with the Joneses, when in
reality maybe the best thing to do is walk away from it, go get some sleep and start again
the next day."
Wilson said, "I think what’s really important is that you can’t get
overproductive and get to the point where all of a sudden you’re making really
critical decisions on game planning and those types of things at times when you’re
just not mentally into making those decisions, and all of a sudden you look up on Sunday
and say, ‘Geez, I can’t believe we did that.’ "
In his book "Building a Champion," former 49ers head coach Bill Walsh said,
"It’s a battle of attrition for the coaching staff. So much sacrifice in time
and energy is given, that as the season wears on, you wonder if you can sustain your
efforts. In my job as a TV analyst, I for the first time had an opportunity to note the
telling fatigue on the faces of my coaching contemporaries as they completed their
fourteen-hour-a-day training camps."
A lack of sleep is not the only drawback to the coaching profession. Another
less-than-ideal aspect of coaching in the NFL is the fact that almost everyone — from
players to coaches to front-office executives — can be as disposable as two-week-old
milk.
Players can be here today and gone tomorrow, which can be very difficult on the coaches
who do everything within their power to make them better and eventually must tell them to
pack their bags and hit the road when they are no longer useful enough.
"I’d like to tell you it’s business, but it’s terrible," Rowen
said. "Especially what you find in my opinion is everybody has got these different
ability levels. So sometimes you cut players, and maybe they weren’t quite as good as
another, but they did a great job. And how you separate that is, hey, they competed. They
did everything they could. They got a lot out of their ability. And you’re certainly
appreciative of those guys because they did a fine job in camp. And some decisions are
very difficult. You’re talking about as much measurement as you can, but it’s
hard. You’re trying to judge how good they’re going to be in the future. So
it’s a difficult process. You say you’re not involved. Certainly you’re
involved. You hear about them, and you’ve worked your ass off with them, and
they’ve worked their asses off with you."
Kennan said, "Horrible. It’s the worst part of coaching. It’s awful.
Cut-down day is awful. I can’t even describe it."
As if it’s not bad enough that coaches must be part of a process in which they
sometimes must cut a player they respect, head coaches can find themselves in the position
of having to fire an assistant coach they’ve gone to battle with in the past.
When Mike Tice was the Vikings’ interim head coach last January, he met with the
team’s owner and front office staff. Afterward, Tice told several assistant coaches
they would not be returning the following season.
"I had to tell my friends they were no longer with the organization," Tice
said. "A little worse than cutting a player, but that’s part of it."
The fact that it is part of it is what makes coaching in the NFL a very strange
profession. The fact that coaches get fired is about as unusual as illness in a hospital.
It’s awful, but it’s matter of fact.
Even worse for NFL coaches, it especially applies to them. One of the few things NFL
coaches know with almost 100 percent certainty is that they are hired to eventually be
fired. Some get fired less than others, but it’s almost impossible to find a coach
who doesn’t know what it is like to get a pink slip.
"I remember an old saying (legendary head coach) Vince Lombardi said,
‘You’re not a great coach until you’re fired three times,’ "
Wilson said.
Kennan said, "It’s never any fun, and most of it makes no sense. Just look
around at who’s gotten fired. Virtually every great coach in the NFL has been fired
at some point. Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson, Don Shula, Tom Flores, Chuck Noll, Chuck Knox.
Virtually everybody, and the ones who didn’t are the ones who retired early. But
almost everybody else has gotten fired.
"So it makes no sense, and the No. 1 factor in coaching in the success of a team,
in my opinion, is continuity, and yet there is no continuity anymore because they just
keep firing coaches and changing systems, and it doesn’t work. And they wonder why it
doesn’t work. Well, they just need to leave us alone long enough to let it work.
"It’s a scary thing when you’re out of a job, because most of us get
fired, and we have about two weeks left on our contract."
When asked about the worst part about coaching in the NFL, Kennan said, "Probably
the demeaning part of getting fired is awful. It’s just because there is no good way
to do it, and very few of them do it in a nice way. You know, they say you’re done,
get out of here, move on, we’ve got to make room for the new guys. It’s
demeaning, and you’ve just got to get over that and move on and get over your
resentment as to whoever you think is to blame for doing it and move on."
If the way in which they get fired is demeaning, well, coaches find that the way in
which they try to get hired isn’t much better.
"Yeah, it’s unfortunate too because when I was (coaching) in college
it’s a real bad thing," Wilson said. "It’s one of those deals where at
the college convention you’re chasing people into the bathrooms and head coaches that
are going to get jobs, and you’re talking to people, you’re dropping notes,
you’re calling on the phone, you’re trying to run into people in the lobby.
It’s a real hard situation. It’s the bad reality of a coaching situation.
"When you’re in the NFL it’s the same thing. You go to the Senior Bowl
and you’re trying to talk to people about coaching. ‘Coach, I’m here.
I’m interested in working for you.’ Those types of things. You go to the
combine, you’re in the same situation where you hear rumors that somebody is going to
get a job and you’re trying to talk to them about the job. ‘If you get it,
I’d like to talk to about it.’ Those kinds of things. It’s a bad
situation."
Zaven Yaralian, who just went into private business after spending 11 years as an NFL
assistant coach, said, "(There are) times where maybe you’re out of work and you
call people that you think you know, that you think are your friends, and all of a sudden
those same people don’t return your call."
Perhaps that is why Kennan does not view the winning and losing of games as the biggest
highs and lows of the coaching profession.
"The extreme highs and lows for coaches are the getting fired at the end of the
season," he said. "Getting your contract renewed or getting fired at the end of
the year, those are highs and lows."
Next up on the list of professional drawbacks for NFL coaches is their ability to be
with their family. During the season, this falls into the same category as sleep. Not
enough time.
"Six months a year you’re not around," Rowen said. "It’s a
difficult thing."
Rams administrator of pro personnel Jack Faulkner, a long-time coach before moving to
the front office, said, "You’re married to the damn football."
Of the 14-15-hour days and absence of days off during the season, April said,
"You’d really like to not spend that much time because God’s gifted you
with a life to live too, and you’d like to spend more time with your family and do
things, but you really can’t afford to spend any less time (at work)."
A coach trying to manage all of the responsibilities of this demanding profession with
all of the needs of his family has about the same degree of difficulty as a juggler on
roller skates trying to keep a dozen eggs zipping through the air.
"It is a balancing act," Ravens head coach Brian Billick said. "You ask
a lot of your families. I’m constantly reminding my family, having to remind them
that the job’s not more important to me than they are, it’s just less forgiving.
… The job is incessant, and it stops for no one, so you ask a lot of your family that
way. And that’s probably the toughest thing that you do with regards to them. But
like most coaching families, mine are very understanding.
"We optimize the time that we have. A formula that I have found successful for me
is that when I’m at work, I’m at work. And when I’m at home, I’m at
home. I try not to drag one or the other into it. If you’re at work worrying and
thinking you ought to be home because of those obligations, you’re not going to be
effective. And if I’m at home thinking, ‘You know what, I needed to do this, I
needed to do that, or I needed to bring … work home,’ then I’m cheating my
family. So you have to create that clear division line."
If, as Faulkner said, coaches are married to the football, then it is critical that
their real wives are not jealous.
"You have to have a very understanding wife," Wilson said.
Understanding and hard working.
"It can wear on your family," Clemons said. "You don’t spend a lot
of time with your children during the season, which is hard. Your wife has to do a lot
more work than probably she normally would."
Ideally, a coach’s wife views her husband’s profession as much more than just
a paycheck.
Martz said of his wife, "Julie has made the comment to me over the years that she
likes what I do as much as I do, so we share the same passion for the game, which makes it
a lot easier. She understands when I’ve got to be at the office, these long hours;
and the time that we have together in the offseason makes up for it. But your wife has to
have the same type of passion for what you do as you do."
It may be possible for a coach’s wife to share that passion for football, but
it’s not realistic to ask that of all of their children, especially when the kids are
very young.
"I’m looking forward to sharing this with them," Gruden said of his
young children. "… For the time being, I’m kind of living it alone, trying
to get my kids interested in it. Right now, unfortunately, they just like dinosaurs and
trucks. They’re not much into ‘23 Scat Protection.’ "
Even if the kids are old enough to think their dad’s job is cool, that
doesn’t always make it any easier for a coach/dad.
"You don’t get to see your kids play high school football," Kennan said.
"You don’t get to see them play little league. In a lot of cases, all that stuff
happens that you miss out on."
Clemons said, "My oldest is 11 and he got his report card the other day, and there
were a couple of things I wanted to talk to him about. He did very well, but there were a
couple of things I know that I probably could have helped him with a little bit more, but
I wasn’t there. So sometimes you’re talking over the phone when you should be
there."
As if that doesn’t make a coach feel guilty enough, imagine how he feels when he
sees his family feeling the stress of his profession when the team is going through tough
times.
"When you don’t do well your family suffers more than you do so that
consequently you suffer, because when your family suffers it’s going to hurt you
maybe more than it hurts them," April said. "You take on your burden plus
theirs.
"They suffer from the standpoint of the negativity that surrounds the job.
It’s so high profile. If you don’t do well, there’s a
rats-deserting-a-sinking-ship mentality that goes along with that. And kids experience it
too. Their peer pressure and their peer groups and all of that. I don’t think my kids
ever suffered greatly from any of that, but as an example when my son was a freshman in
high school, we had just a really poor season in New Orleans in 1996. That was a tough
year for him to go through, because kids would make comments to him and different things
like that about how bad we were. That’s hurtful."
Steelers head coach Bill Cowher said, "You do feel for the coaches, but I probably
feel more for the families. We’re in here working 70 hours a week in a controlled
atmosphere, but my wife goes out and my three kids are in school, and they hear everything
that is said."
When the Chiefs got off to a lousy start this past season, Vermeil said, "You get
on the bus, and your wife’s sitting there in tears after your (behind) has been
handed to you. That’s never a good feeling, because more than me is exposed to the
negatives."
The negativity can be everywhere when times are tough. A coach isn’t like a
traveling salesman who has gone too long without making a sale. When times are tough for a
coach, it’s not just his boss who knows it. Everyone knows it. And everyone has an
opinion.
The newspaper columnist writes that the coach is an idiot. The sports talk-radio host
says that the coach is an idiot. The cashier at the grocery store is thinking that the
coach is an idiot.
"A lot of coaches don’t read the newspapers, don’t listen to the
talk-radio shows because really and truly the talk-radio shows, there’s a bunch of
guys on talk radio making judgments (who) don’t have a clue as to what went on, and
they’re making judgments about coaches lives, and they don’t have a clue, and
they’re getting paid money and told (they) need to be controversial and … rip
these coaches," Kennan said. "And it’s terrible that it happens, because
they don’t have a clue. And I’ll promise you there are some guys on TV … on
Sunday mornings and on talk radio that you’d think would have an idea that don’t
have a clue. I watch the same games they watch, and I know what went on, and they
don’t have a clue, and they’re killing coaches, and it’s terrible.
"And it doesn’t matter whether it bothers you or not, because the owners hear
all that and they believe it. And the fans hear it, and they believe. And it makes it
harder for you."
When asked if he has critics, Gruden said, "Shoot, everybody’s a critic.
You’ve got more critics than you can even dream about."
Billick does a lot of corporate speaking in the offseason. He used to wonder why people
were interested in what he had to say. After a while, he surmised that it was because they
were interested in the fact that he lived in such an high-profile fishbowl.
"I guess people are constantly interested in what someone like myself’s
perspective is in that every move that you make is so scrutinized and second-guessed and
in a lot of cases denigrated," Billick said.
None of this even takes into consideration a coach’s biggest critic of all.
Himself.
"When something goes wrong, then you start blaming yourself," Faulkner said.
"The system didn’t work right, or maybe a player didn’t do things right, we
didn’t get him in a proper position, and those typess of things drive you nuts."
Add it all up and you have a profession in which there seems to be only a couple of
ways for a coach to achieve low blood pressure.
Retirement.
Death.
"It’s pretty intense," Kennan said. "Obviously there’s a lot
of stress on Sundays, particularly the head coach and the guys calling the game. You know,
the people calling the offense and defenses. And there’s a lot of stress when those
(coaches) are reading in the newspapers how dumb they are and how stupid they are, and the
talk-show hosts are ripping them. And it’s stress when their kids are reading it in
the papers that their dad’s a dumb ass and going to get fired. That’s stressful.
I don’t know how it fits into the rest of the stress of the world, but it’s
pretty intense."
Part 3: Coping with defeat
Part 2: The player-coach relationship
Part
1: Setting the tone
Series index |
