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Bucs head coach
Jon Gruden
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NFL coaching salaries have taken a huge leap upward the past two years. The entry level
for good coaches seems to be close to $3 million a year now. Steve Spurrier signed a
contract for $5 million a year with the Redskins, though he has never coached in the NFL.
Spurrier’s contract was dismissed by many as an aberration; the reasoning was that
any coach who signed on with Washington owner Daniel Snyder would have to get much more
than the going rate just to put up with Snyder.
Then Tampa Bay entered the picture. The Buccaneers’ owners, the Glazer brothers,
had spent most of the offseason discovering new ways to embarrass themselves. First, they
dumped Tony Dungy, a solid coach. Then they conducted an elaborate dance with Bill
Parcells, who is notorious for backing out of deals after they seem to be made. Indeed,
he’d done it with Tampa Bay before.
If they had begun their pursuit sooner, the Glazer brothers could have had Spurrier,
who wanted to stay in Florida; he had coached the Tampa Bay team in the USFL at one point.
But they were certain they had Parcells locked up, so Spurrier went to the Redskins. And
then Parcells decided he didn’t want to get back into coaching after all. Surprise.
The Bucs went after Jon Gruden, whose agent assured them he wanted to get out of his
Raiders contract, which had one year to run. Dealing with Al Davis is never a picnic, and
the Glazers soon decided it wasn’t worth it.
Buccaneers GM Rich McKay interviewed Marvin Lewis, then the Ravens’ defensive
coordinator. McKay thought Lewis was the man for the job and recommended him to the owners
while working out details of the contract. But the Glazers decided they didn’t want
Lewis because of his defensive background.
Next, the Glazers had 49ers head coach Steve Mariucci in their sights and received
permission from the 49ers to talk to him by saying they would offer him a combination job,
coach/general manager. "We wouldn’t have given permission if it was just for
another coaching job," said Bill Walsh, who has stepped down as general manager,
making way for Terry Donahue, but remains a consultant to the club and has a powerful
voice in team decisions.
Mariucci was conflicted because he didn’t want to move his family, and he was
happy with the 49ers, but the Glazers were talking a lot of money, reportedly $5 million a
year at the start of their discussions. Some reports said the figures had grown to $42
million for six years when either Mariucci said no (his version) or the Glazers took the
offer off the table (their version).
Then the Glazers called Davis and made a deal to hire Gruden. The salary figures are
high enough — $17.5 million for five years — but the truly eye-popping part of
the deal was what the Bucs gave the Raiders: four draft choices, including two
first-rounders, over the next three years and $8 million in cash.
Is any coach worth that? The Glazers think so, and they may be right.
The NFL has always been a coach’s game, and it’s even more so now, a point
reinforced by the Patriots’ win in the Super Bowl. The Patriots’ players were
clearly outclassed by the Rams, but New England head coach Bill Belichick put together a
superb defensive plan that stymied the high-powered attack brought to the Rams by Mike
Martz, who was first the offensive coordinator and is now the head coach. This Super Bowl
was the biggest coaching mismatch since Walsh against Forrest Gregg 20 years earlier.
A San Francisco Chronicle colleague, Ira Miller, correctly picked nine of the 11
postseason games, including the Super Bowl, by picking winners on the basis of their
coaches, not the players.
Why have coaches become so important? There are two principal reasons:
 The defenses
brought into the league in the last half-dozen years, with all the different blitzes, have
turned the NFL into a defensive league (except for the Rams). After the 49ers beat the
Saints in the first game between the two teams last season, I was talking to Mariucci in
his office when he pulled out a big sheaf of papers. "These are the Saints’
blitzes that we had to prepare for," he said. "There are about 60 there. And
they showed us another 10 we hadn’t seen before!"
So teams are either looking for a coach who can bring in that kind of paralyzing
defense, or one who can devise an offense that can beat these blitzing defenses. Spurrier,
who had the famous "Fun ’n Gun" offense at the University of Florida, and
Gruden and Mariucci, who run versions of the offense brought into the league by Walsh,
have put together effective offenses. Neither Gruden nor Mariucci runs a wide-open offense
— nobody but the Rams, with their great talent, does — but their teams get into
the endzone.
With the
constant turnover because of free agency and the salary cap, coaches have to bring a team
together and create a cohesiveness very quickly.
The 49ers are a good example of the change. In their dynasty years, the 49ers had a
core of star players who set the tone for the rest of the team. If Joe Montana, Steve
Young, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig went full-bore in practice, rookies would
too. Now, though, the 49ers are a very young team with few veteran leaders. Mariucci, who
coached a year at Cal before coming to the 49ers, often draws on his collegiate experience
as a guide in dealing with his team.
With the Raiders, Gruden took a team that was notorious for its underachievers, got rid
of the troublemakers and created a team that played hard and never quit — and a team
that last season was better than the sum of its parts.
Every team in the league wants that kind of coach — except, as always, the
Raiders. Davis talks about the team winning because of the organization, and he seems to
believe that coaches are interchangeable parts. We’ll see, but I suspect the Raiders
will prove next year how important the right coach really is, by falling on their
collective face.
Glenn Dickey is a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and has covered pro
football since 1967. He can be reached via e-mail at Gdickey@sfchronicle.com |
