Do You Love Football?! (16 page)

You can go to medical school and train to become a doctor, like my brother Jim did. You can listen to lectures and take notes and watch surgeries, but at some point you've got to take that scalpel and you've got to do the incision. A lawyer's got to try his first case; he can't just read law books his whole life. I was no different from those people or a quarterback getting to face an NFL defense for the first time. You can only sit in meetings and go to minicamps and training camps for so long. At some point you've got to go out there and do it.

The way I understood this business, opportunities like this rarely knock. When you hear the knock, you've got to open the door. By God, I was going to seize the moment and never look back.

EIGHT

"Boy Wonder or" "Boy Blunder?"
Randall, Watters, Cats, Rats and Eagles

"P HILADELPHIA? YOU 'LL GET EATEN ALIVE in Philadelphia. The media. The fans. The scrutiny. It's a tough place to play. It's a tougher place to coach."

That was what people kept telling me when, at the tender age of thirty-one, I became the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator in 1995. Not "Way to go, Jon!" Not "This is a great opportunity, Jon!" Basically the message I got was that I was about to become just another helping of food for a town that can never get its fill of letting its sports teams know when they aren't getting the job done.

The Eagles were coming off a really bad year, starting 7-2 and losing every one of their last seven games. Their quarterback, Randall Cunningham, had had a rough season. They were cutting loose William "The Refrigerator" Perry, the big defensive tackle who wasn't the same player he had been for the Bears' Super Bowl team, and Herschel Walker, the great running back who also was on the downside of his career. They were in a contract dispute with cornerback Eric Allen that was not going to be resolved. And they had a new owner, Jeffrey Lurie, trying to clean up a pretty big mess.

I suppose all those issues and all the warnings I had received were what woke me up in the middle of my first night in town.

For a second I had no idea where I was. Then I realized I was at the Philadelphia Airport Holiday Inn. I thought, Holy cow!

What did I just do?

Those thoughts only intensified the first time I saw Veterans Stadium. I kept looking for a sign that said, CONDEMNED! but at the time this was home sweet home for the Eagles. It wasn't just that the Vet was old and run down. It was that we had to work underground. Our offices, our locker room, our weight room, all our facilities were literally underneath this dump of a structure.

As usual I got up early in the morning and drove in the dark to my first day at work. As I pulled into the staff parking lot I noticed there were cats all over the place. I'm not talking one or two cats. I saw maybe twenty or twenty-five cats at four o'clock in the morning. They were big cats and they were everywhere. I saw them when I was jogging around the stadium at lunch. I saw them when I went home at night.

The next day I came to work I saw all those cats again. I saw them the next day and the day after that. There was a security guard, an old Philly guy, who worked on the upper level where we parked. Finally, by about the fourth day I showed up for work, I asked him, "What's with all the cats?"

"You want cats or rats?" he said. "The cats eat the rats."

"I gotcha man," I said. "I'd rather have cats."

One of the first things I do after getting to the office is grab myself a cup of coffee. Even that was an adventure at the Vet.

There were no automatic drip coffeemakers, just the old-fashioned kind where you'd press a button and it would make the sickest sound, like someone moaning with pain. Grinds would come out of the spout, squishing together into what looked like a cup of mud.

I was confident we could overcome the rats, cats, and everything else that made that stadium a house of horrors for anyone who had to spend more than five minutes there each day. I was confident we could succeed because we had Ray. He was a bigtime guy, a very marketable guy. The 49ers had just won the Super Bowl and Ray had been their defensive coordinator. Every newspaper had a quote from someone saying that he was going to do a hell of a job as a head coach. I knew Ray's capabilities. I had sat in his DB meetings in San Francisco. I had watched the great things he had done as defensive coordinator with the Packers.

Ray had an unbelievable charisma about him. He had a great way of delivering his plan to the players so that they believed it was going to work and left the meeting room saying, "We're going to kick some ass!" And why wouldn't they believe? A lot of the theory Ray brought with him came from San Francisco, where he had worked with a truly great defensive coach in George Seifert. They had multiple fronts and coverages. They created the "elephant" position where defensive end Charles Haley could rush the passer while taking advantage of a mismatch against a back trying to block him. Good luck. Or Charles could drop in space and cover a back or cover a zone. It was a unique concept back then, although Ray was good enough to adjust with the times and generate new ideas.

I had known all along what Ray expected me to do, which was help him implement a program modeled after the one we saw the 49ers use when we were together in San Francisco. A lot of it wasn't about X's and O's. It was more about philosophy. We were going to take advantage of the notes that I had made about everything from setting up an offseason program and training camp to the player profiles we were looking for,which remain the same to this day. We wanted big receivers who give you yards after the catch; versatile tight ends who can run downfield, catch the ball and block; fullbacks who aren't just road graters, but guys who have some subtleties, who can catch the ball, who can run patterns and who understand protection; halfbacks who can line up in any eligible position, run patterns, catch the hell out of the football and run from every spot in the backfield-I-formation, split backs, off-set backs; offensive linemen who can pull, trap and run. We wanted reliable, heady players. Above all, we wanted people who loved football.

It wasn't just a case of Ray having a certain way he wanted things done and trying to convince everyone else to believe in it.

In me he had another guy with the same philosophy, and together we would try to sell it to everybody else in the organization-the personnel people, the owner and so forth.

At the time, the coaching staff consisted of exactly two people-Ray and yours truly. Assembling the rest of the staff wasn't going to be easy, because this was a team that been struggling, and there weren't a lot of guys available Ray had ever worked with, because they were under contract with other teams. Ray allowed me to help him in the hiring process, although he obviously would have final say on all hires. My top priority was to find a quality offensive-line coach, someone who could do the things I had seen Bobb McKittrick do as far as getting five guys to block just about any play you needed them to block, because that's what ultimately determines whether the game plan you spend all that time putting together is worth the paper it's printed on. I needed somebody who would work with me and who had a common philosophy to go where we wanted to go.

We interviewed a lot of college guys and pro guys. The more people we interviewed, the more obvious it became that I probably was going to have to find someone from the college ranks.

One of the best sources I had in my search was my dad, who besides being a college scout and an ex-coach is a pretty astute guy who appreciates good, solid, on-the-field coaching. One day I asked him, "Who's the best college line coach you've seen all year?"

"I'll tell you, that guy at Wisconsin is a hell of a coach," my dad said.

"That guy" was Bill Callahan. I was aware of the work he was doing because when you're in Green Bay you can't help but follow the Badgers. I also got to know him when he and the rest of Barry Alvarez's staff would visit us in Green Bay during training camp as well as in April and May to observe what we were doing. It's common for NFL teams to invite college coaches to watch their practices and look at film so that they can pick up ideas that might be useful to them.

Bill never really hung out with anybody during those visits.

He would just find a place where he could go and watch some tape. I was kind of a recluse myself, so I'd go sit with Bill and we would watch tape together. I got to know him a little bit and I liked the guy. When our search began, the Badgers had just beaten UCLA in the Rose Bowl, which made them the hottest program in the country and put their coaches in high demand.

They had done a hell of a job.

I called Bill to come to Philadelphia for an interview. He made a great impression on Ray and all the other people in the organization who talked with him. We offered him the job, but the amount of money we were going to pay him was less than he was making at Wisconsin. I think everybody had assumed that he was going to take whatever we offered just to get in the NFL, but Bill had a hell of a life in Madison. He was a hotshot guy, especially after that Rose Bowl win. That's big in Wisconsin. We upped the ante and I gave him my best recruiting pitch.

"What are you guys going to do as an encore, man?" I asked him. "How about coming out here and helping us beat Dallas?"

Bill took the job. Other than working with Ray, that was probably the best thing that happened to me at Philadelphia.

Bill had the same work ethic I did, if not a better one, and he stimulated me to push myself even more than I had up to that point. We had a lot in common, including the fact that we both were former Division III college quarterbacks. Bill did better at Illinois Benedictine College than I had done at Dayton, starting for three years and becoming an honorable mention All-America pick. But we still looked at ourselves as a couple of ham and-eggers working together to try to get the Eagles' offense moving in the right direction.

I was brought to Philadelphia to help resurrect Randall Cunningham, who had once been the MVP of the league but had fallen on hard times. He had never worked in the "West Coast" offense before, but I believed he would be able to pick it up. After all, in Green Bay, Brett Favre, even when he was learning the system on the run, was enjoying magnificent success. As I watched Brett I thought, Even though it might not be perfect, if you have a guy with superb ability-with a gun for an arm, great toughness, mobility-and a system like that, you could get results. That's how good this system is.

Randall was a tremendous talent in his own right. He was "Robo-quarterback." He was "Starship Twelve." He was THE man at one time, one of the most feared men in football. When I was with the Packers he came to Green Bay, to Lambeau, and ripped us when Ray was our defensive coordinator. Randall could throw the ball the length of the field. He could punt. His hands were the size of frying pans. I've never seen a spiral like the one he threw.

About three weeks after being hired I got on an airplane and flew to Las Vegas, where Randall and his wife had a beautiful home. I called to let him know I was coming, but we had never met before, and when Randall opened the door he looked at me like I was the pool guy or someone who was there to clean his house.

"I'm Jon Gruden," I said.

Randall started laughing.

"You've got to be kiddin' me, bro," he said. "You've got to be kiddin' me, man."

I was supposed to help him regain his rhythm, his style, his status. To do that, I had to sell our system to him. First, though, I had to sell myself-that is, once Randall finally stopped laughing. He had worked with veteran coaches his whole career. He had been around big-time guys like Doug Scovil and Ted Marchibroda. Now here was little Jonny coming along to help him. Until I proved otherwise I don't think he believed I was qualified to do much more than hand him a towel and maybe a cup of water. It's different from the college game where kids the same age are always coming through. As young as I was then, I was sometimes dealing with veterans who were older than me and skeptical. But I knew if they just gave me a chance, I could do a good job. I was confident.

I brought along some game film for Randall and me to watch in the movie theater in his house. I had cut-ups from the 49ers and Green Bay. I had intercut some of the film to show a pass play we were going to be installing executed by both Joe Montana and Brett Favre. We talked about formations and how our terminology worked. He seemed to be listening and, more than anything, seeing if I knew what I was talking about. He was getting a feel for me as a person and for how to communicate with me so I could best understand him.

After a day of watching film Randall took me out to dinner at Caesar's Palace. He showed me a good time. He bought me an expensive shirt. He let me spend the night at his house. He gave me a feeling of acceptance. Randall knew that we needed to work together and trust each other.

"We can do this," I told him. "We really can do this if we work together. There are going to be some tough times and there are going to be some good times, but we've got to keep it on an even keel. We've got to relentlessly devote one year of our lives to get this 'Starship Twelve' going again. It's system. It's discipline. It's trust. It's commitment. It's a relationship we've got to work at."

When you're the starting quarterback in Philadelphia you're an important guy, right up there with the mayor. You're also exposed to as much criticism as praise, and probably a lot more criticism. But until that trip I didn't realize what Randall had been through during those previous ten years in Philadelphia as a black quarterback in the league, as a guy who had gone from enjoying unbelievable success to a guy who had endured some really trying times. I wasn't there for any of that. Randall had survived and maintained his status under Buddy Ryan, Richey Kotite, different quarterback coaches, different centers, different personnel changes.

He had a warning for me.

"Hey, bro, this place is going to change you," Randall said.

"This place is tough. I just hope that you don't change, but just watch. They're going to try and split us apart. They're going to try and break you down. They're going to test you."