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Thursday, January 17, 2008
Brady carries coaches on back
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Now it’s Thomas Dimitroff’s turn to join those who should blow kisses toward the primary reason they’ve become highly favored in the NFL.
Tom Brady.
“Quarterbacks probably have made everybody in this league successful,” Ken Herock said Thursday. He served as an accomplished NFL general manager for more than three decades after drafting the likes of Steve Young, Doug Williams and Brett Favre.
Added Herock, who still lives in the Atlanta area after his stint with the Falcons: “Your whole franchise’s success is based on the quarterback. Even when I was back with the Raiders [in the 1970s], we had Ken Stabler. I went on to other places. So did Ron Wolf [another noted GM]. The coaches went on. It just happens when you have a great quarterback.”
Yeah, but never like this. I mean, without Brady, Dimitroff doesn’t use his role in New England, as mostly a glorified scout with zero experience as a general manager, to get hired by the Falcons after a Webcam interview.
Without Brady, Eric Mangini doesn’t go from serving as an NFL position coach for 10 years to Patriots defensive coordinator for a season and then to head coach of the New York Jets at 34.
Without Brady, Charlie Weis doesn’t get virtually a lifetime contract at Notre Dame after just a few games on the job after leaving Foxborough.
Without Brady, Romeo Crennel doesn’t leave the Patriots at 58 for the Cleveland Browns for the opportunity he should have gotten years ago when he was a young and gifted assistant.
Without Brady, Josh McDaniels doesn’t go from nobody to somebody who is considered among the “hot” head coaching prospects at 31 after two years as the Patriots’ offensive coordinator.
Without Brady, Bill Belichick, well, it’s like this: He isn’t the Hall of Fame coach he’s expected to become. He’s just another valued coordinator who keeps floating from team to team. If you include his stint as head coach in Cleveland, his record without Brady is 42-58, and 5-13 with the Patriots. That’s opposed to the 99-26 record, the three Super Bowl trophies and the ongoing perfect season Belichick has enjoyed with Brady.
Now consider that little problem for those who leave the Patriots for elsewhere: Brady doesn’t go with them.
“Yeah, and just because people get jobs from these kinds of situations, it’s not necessarily a means that those people will be successful,” said Herock, telling the truth.
Mangini went from magic to mush in New York after he pushed the Jets to a wild-card berth in his first season. They dropped to 4-12 this year. As a result, Mangini has become more noted for feuding with Belichick (Mangini triggered Spygate) than X’s and O’s.
Maybe you heard: Notre Dame vanished from the face of the earth last season under Weis during his third season, and whether the Fighting Irish will return next season is anybody’s guess.
Crennel was on the verge of becoming the Browns’ former head coach last season, but Derek Anderson forgot he wasn’t supposed to be any good at quarterback. So can Crennel get lucky two years in a row with Anderson? Who knows?
Then there is McDaniels prospering with a New England offense that just set all kinds of records. Then again, McDaniels still has Brady. The same goes for Belichick, who should join McDaniels in checking Brady’s temperature every day.
In other words, the Falcons’ hiring of the snowboarding Dimitroff is an all-or-nothing thing. It could produce a touchdown courtesy of a youthful 41-year-old with fresh ideas, or a turnover courtesy of an overmatched neophyte GM who worked in a front office where Scott Pioli and Belichick made 100 percent of the decisions.
Just a thought: Dimitroff can solve a lot of problems by trading for … Tom Brady.
Permalink | Comments (81) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Blank searching for his Handy Dan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
As the Falcons apparently close in on a new head coach - I say “apparently” because with this club we can never be sure of anything - I feel obliged to say a few words about the Falcons’ next-to-next-to-last head coach. Revisionist history holds that Arthur Blank’s biggest mistake was firing Dan Reeves. As with most revisionist history, this is incorrect.
Dan Reeves did the greatest coaching job in team history - heck, maybe in the history of football - in leading the 1998 Falcons to the Super Bowl. But even with that giddy season factored in, he still had a losing record in seven seasons here. Dating from the end of his tenure with the Giants, Reeves posted winning records only twice in his final nine years as an NFL coach.
We remember him - actually, we remember Michael Vick - winning that famous playoff game in Lambeau Field in January 2003, but we forget that those Falcons lost three of their final four regular-season games and backed into the playoffs. Had they not qualified for the postseason, Blank might well have fired Reeves then. Blank had taken ownership in February 2002 and, out of respect and fairness, had kept the incumbent in place. But any owner wants his own man, and it soon became clear that Reeves, for all his experience and expertise, wasn’t a man after Blank’s corporate heart.
Blank believes a business should be inclusive. (“Listen to your employees” is a Blank tenet.) Reeves didn’t much care what anybody in human resources thought. He wanted to coach the Falcons in 2003 the way his mentor Tom Landry had run the Cowboys in the 1960s.
Yes, it was unlucky that Vick broke his leg in the 2003 preseason, but the way that team splintered told Blank he needed a new coach with newer ideas. (It’s also a truism that, once players start believing their coach is in peril, they never view him the same way again.) As cold as it was then, as cold as it sounds now, Reeves needed to go.
And for those who insist Vick would have stuck to the straight and narrow had Reeves been there to guide him … there’s a grand jury indictment that suggests otherwise. According to the indictment, Vick bought the property at 1915 Moonlight Road two months after Reeves traded up to draft him, and in 2003, even as Vick was supposed to be rehabbing his broken leg, he was allegedly traveling out of state to attend dog fights.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Dan Reeves a lot. He’s a pro’s pro, and in his prime he was a coach’s coach. But he wasn’t the same coach in 2003 that he’d been in 1998, and local consensus - how conveniently we forget - when Blank did the deed was that the owner had done the right thing.
Firing Reeves wasn’t the mistake. The mistakes were in hiring two men who, for various reasons, weren’t long-term upgrades. Maybe this time Blank will get it right. Maybe Blank, who was himself fired by a home-improvement chain name Handy Dan, will finally find a handier Dan.
Permalink | Comments (124) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
Perhaps a turning point for Jackets, Hewitt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
They are still winless in the ACC and 7-9 overall, even if you count narrow losses to North Carolina and Kansas as moral victories, which Paul Hewitt doesn’t.
“It’s a tired song,” he said late Wednesday night. “We still believe we can make something out of this season. We’re trying to get to the NCAA tournament, but we’re 0-3.”
It was the right thing for the Georgia Tech coach to say, even if the Yellow Jackets had just played their best game of the season in defeat. Their performance in an 83-82 loss to North Carolina projected something other than disaster this season.
These have not been fun times for Hewitt. He took Tech to unexpected heights in 2004, exciting the masses and raising the expectation level in the process. The Jackets hadn’t won an NCAA tournament game in seven years. Then they won five, reaching the national finals.
But coaches will tell you the only thing more difficult then elevating a program is keeping it there. Tech’s one tournament win in three seasons since might’ve satisfied the masses before, but not now. That, combined with this year’s dreadful start, seemingly has worn on Hewitt. The losses of Javaris Crittendon and Thaddeus Young to the NBA hit the team harder than he expected, or at least publicly projected. With each defeat, Hewitt has become increasingly sensitive to perceived criticism. It all bubbled over on a sportstalk radio show Wednesday morning, when he vented frustrations on the team’s flagship station (790 The Zone). He countered perceptions that the program was on a slide with statistics. He made some bizarre reference to several coaches being offered the Tech job before he was, effectively saying people shouldn’t expect so much at little old Georgia Tech. Hewitt also said the media has been overly critical and connected that with this newspaper’s declining circulation figures. It’s believed to be the first time a coach connected readership habits with his team’s situation at point guard.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Hewitt said of his radio comments. “Everybody has a job to do. Your job is to sell papers. My job is to win games.”
The latter comment still suggested some disconnect, as if there’s an agenda to attack Hewitt or the Tech program. The coach denies such paranoia.
Then came this: “If somebody wants to make the case that we’re not doing the job this year, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. But if you’re trying to make the case that we haven’t been getting it done here in general, that’s unfair.”
It hasn’t been easy. But maybe Wednesday’s game will signal a turnaround.
The Jackets ran step for step with the nation’s best team, only to fall by a point. The same team that suffered losses to UNC-Greensboro and Winthrop took the now 18-0 Tar Heels down to the final second.
A moral victory?
“No,” he said. “There are no moral victories, although I do take some positives out of this.”
The Tar Heels won their first 17 games by an average of 22 points. The Jackets entered the night as the only team in the ACC with an overall losing record (7-8) and had only one victory in their last four games, that over Presbyterian. That Tech nearly pulled the upset of the upset leads to one obvious conclusion: UNC-Chapel Hill isn’t nearly as intimidating as UNC-Greensboro.
Actually, Tech has made a habit of this. Carolina had dropped four straight in Alexander Memorial Coliseum, including 84-77 last season, when the Tar Heels reached the NCAA East Regional final before losing to Georgetown (their last loss).
Nothing else suggested there would be much in the way of drama Wednesday. But the Jackets ran with the Heels from the opening tip. They had been averaging 76 points per game, but had matched that with seven minutes left Wednesday.
“We showed we can run with the fastest team in the country,” Hewitt said.
Trailing 54-49 early in the second half, Tech went on a 14-2 run to take a 63-56 lead. But the Heels’ depth eventually took over, they went to the free-throw line 26 times (making 20) to the Jackets’ 10 (making eight).
“We’re hanging around,” Hewitt said. “But Saturday has to be a turning point for this team.”
Tech faces Virginia Tech. If it’s a real victory and not a moral one, a coach won’t have to be on the defensive so much.
Permalink | Comments (68) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
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