Curtain Call

For NFL Coach of the Year Dick Vermeil, a 14-Year layoff from coaching and an undying commitment to outwork his opponents finally paid the ultimate dividends
by: Gene Frenette
Florida Times-Union
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After two long seasons in St. Louis, the experiment was failing badly. Dick Vermeil, in his attempt to reinvent himself as a football coach and erase the lingering, distasteful image that haunted him when he left the Philadelphia Eagles in 1982, appeared to be hitting another dead end.

The 1998 season ended with the St. Louis Rams losing six of their last seven games. Their 5-11 record, preceded by a 4-12 mark in Vermeil's first season as Rams head coach, was only half the problem. Several players also skipped the end-of-season team meeting, leaving many to wonder if Vermeil - after a 14-year exile from coaching - made the worst decision of his life by leaving the television booth to return to the sideline.

"I knew a couple players that missed the meeting weren't going to come back anyway," says Vermeil. "The others, I understood their frustration and why they weren't there. The trouble with this business is people only evaluate the progress you're making by the won-loss record, but we could see progress in a lot of little things.

"When we were losing, I wasn't all shook up. I wasn't going to jump off a bridge. I didn't have a magic wand. We had to right a lot of wrongs, but I kept telling management that things we're going to get better."

But who could have dreamed that in one year, the Rams would go from the NFL's losingest franchise in the 1990s to a Super Bowl champion? Or that the 63-year-old Vermeil - American Football Monthly's selection as NFL Coach of the Year - would find himself retiring on top of his profession instead of becoming a victim of burnout for a second time?

Two days after the Rams held off the Tennessee Titans, 23-16, in the most dramatic Super Bowl finish in history, a teary-eyed Vermeil saw no point in going on. Whatever demons had remained from his days in Philadelphia were exorcised.

Vermeil had come full circle. A 16-3 season that ended with him being presented the Vince Lombardi trophy made for the perfect exit.

Rather than pull a John Elway and return for one more title shot, Vermeil retired.

For a coach who became a poster boy for burnout in the early 1980s, who spent a good part of his coaching existence agonizing over all kinds of decisions, this was the easiest choice of all. He handed his job over to Rams offensive coordinator Mike Martz, his hand-picked successor, because the time and circumstances dictated it.

With nothing left to prove as a coach, Vermeil opted for a more laid-back life with his wife, Carol, and more time with his 10 grandchildren on his ranch in West Chester, Pa.

"My wife had talked to me after we beat the Minnesota Vikings (in the NFC playoffs), saying, 'Maybe when the season is over, we should talk about retiring.' But I didn't want to discuss it then."

But in the Super Bowl post-game afterglow, Vermeil knew retirement was inevitable when his 40-year-old son, David, told him: "Dad, why don't you come home? We need you."

It didn't take long for Vermeil to announce publicly that he would join Bill Walsh as the only coach to retire from the NFL after winning a Super Bowl. Walsh did return to coach at Stanford, but Vermeil insists there'll be no coaching comeback in his future.

"When we got home from the victory parade, Carol and I talked for about half an hour (about retirement)," says Vermeil. "Then we slept on it, got up in the morning and knew it was the right thing. I've always been of the philosophy that once you talk about retiring, you better do it. You don't want to be in the middle of a season and find yourself saying, 'I wish I would have'."

Sticking to the plan

On two previous occasions, Rams' owner Georgia Frontiere tried to hire Vermeil - after the 1991 and '95 seasons - and both times he opted to remain in the television booth a college football analyst for ABC.

He initially turned it down again, but Vermeil felt if he were ever going to give coaching another shot, he couldn't wait any longer because the market for 60-year-old NFL head coaches was almost non-existent. And since the Rams were willing to give him total control over football operations, his most critical employment condition, Vermeil accepted.

But this was a greater challenge than when he took over the Eagles back in 1976. It was a different NFL, with unfettered free agency and players having egos as large as their monster paychecks, that greeted Vermeil in his return engagement.

Speculation was that he might not be ready for the changes, that he had to learn to adapt or get swallowed up by the process. Many observers believe Vermeil was more mellow than in his previous coaching life, but those closest to him insist the changes weren't as dramatic as the media portrayed them to be.

Yes, he did learn to delegate more authority to his assistant coaches, but Vermeil didn't veer from the philosophy that took the Eagles to a Super Bowl in 1980.

"People talk about all the changes in Dick Vermeil," says former Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski, now an ESPN analyst and a close friend of Vermeil's. "I'll be honest, I don't see them. About the only thing he did different was take the pads off more. He took only five minutes off the practice schedule. What he did do was make some adaptations.

"He got rid of the whiners who complained about long practices and film sessions. He surrounded himself with players who understood what it took to be a champion, guys like (linebacker) London Fletcher. That's the change. He got players that adapted to him more than the other way around. If the players didn't adapt, they were gone."

Vermeil, convinced that the only way to improve as a team was through repetition, put the Rams through long, tough practices in his first two years. It didn't yield the results he hoped. When controversy followed - the failed Lawrence Phillips reclamation and too much coddling of former quarterback Tony Banks - the coach who had been given total control found himself on the verge of being forced into retirement.

If Vermeil didn't deliver in 1999 on that five-year, $9 million contract, the Rams were prepared to show him the door. Vermeil did lighten up, but more importantly, he pushed all the right buttons.

First, he hired Martz away from the Washington Redskins as hisoffensive coordinator, reuniting him with starting quarterback andfree-agent signee Trent Green. By the time the season began, only nine players remained from the team Vermeil inherited in 1997. Eighteen players on the 53-man roster were undrafted free agents, six of whom ended up in starting roles.

In other personnel moves, he used a second-round and fifth-round draft pick to trade for former Pro Bowl and Indianapolis Colts running back Marshall Faulk. He gave the Rams' already stellar receiving corps a huge boost with the drafting of Torry Holt.

Things looked promising until Green sustained a season-ending knee injury in preseason, but Vermeil's decision to go with Kurt Warner as his backup quarterback over a more proven veteran turned out to be the shrewdest move of all. Warner, with virtually no NFL experience, stepped in and became the league MVP.

"We didn't make a lot of mistakes personnel-wise," says Vermeil. "More importantly, the chemistry was there from the start. This team really believed in themselves. They respected the leadership of the coaching staff. They listened and were very unselfish."

With eight new starters on offense and eight on defense from his first season, Vermeil hit on a winning formula. By trusting his coaching staff to do more, and relying on the talents of the NFL's fastest offense, Vermeil produced one of the greatest turnarounds in league history.

The Rams got off to a 6-0 start, then stumbled, 24-21, on the road against Tennessee, but nearly erasing a three-touchdown deficit convinced Vermeil and the players that they were on track to something special. Game in and game out, their speed was overwhelming opponents, especially in the first quarter and on the artificial turf of the Trans World Dome.

"Our whole theory was to start the ballgame as if we had alreadygained momentum," Vermeil notes. "Why should we sit around and wait for something to happen? We should already have that level in us. We worked hard on getting that across to the players.

"The team was finally convinced that the only team that could beat the Rams was the Rams. We sold that the whole year."

Going the distance

Still, the satisfaction of a 13-3 regular season had cynics castinga suspicious eye toward the Rams' glowing record. Despite the remarkable numbers, including an offense that put up the third-highest point total in history (526 points), doubters persisted that St. Louis had capitalized on the NFL's weakest schedule among the playoff participants.

But a 49-37 drubbing of Minnesota quickly established the Rams as the Super Bowl favorite. And if there was any doubt about the toughness of Vermeil's team, of how it would handle the pressure when the quick-striking offense did struggle, the Rams removed that in their 11-6 NFC Championship victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Trailing, 6-5, with under five minutes remaining, Warner hit wide receiver Ricky Proehl with a 30-yard touchdown pass to make Vermeil only the fifth coach to take two different teams to a Super Bowl.

Nearly two decades after reaching the big game with Philadelphia, he did it again. Vermeil proved that being off the sideline for 14 years didn't necessarily mean he was out of football. It's just that when he was in the television booth, dissecting college and pro games, he was just seeing, and learning, the game from a different vantage point.

"What Dick has done is unparalleled," says Jaworski. "He might have left coaching in 1983, but don't forget, he spent a lot of time on game weeks with Bill Parcells, Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs and people like that. It's a tremendous advantage to see the operations of other teams.

"A present-day coach doesn't have that opportunity because he's got tunnel vision on his own program. Dick is a meticulous note-taker. He needed the insight of those people for his broadcast preparation, but it sure didn't hurt to have that when he came back to coaching."

Vermeil came back, he says, for two reasons. One, he wanted to clear the guilt he felt within himself about how his coaching stint ended in Philadelphia, flaming out with a 3-6 record in the strike-shortened 1982 season. Secondly, he wanted to be part of the camaraderie that comes from competing on the field and developing relationships with the players.

Now he's gone from coaching for good, but not from working. Vermeil will do speaking engagements for corporations and entertain offers to return to television.

"He's 63 years old and working 18-hour days," Jaworski says. "Retiring was the right thing to do."

This time, it'll be a lot easier to leave the sideline. Dick Vermeilgoes out on top. And best of all, the second retirement is guilt-free.

"I did what I came to do and thanks to the help of a lot of people - the front-office, players and coaches - we got it done faster than I thought we could," says Vermeil. "We set upon a plan and did it. It wasn't sophisticated."

"We proved something that I've believed all my life. Winning isn't complicated. People complicate it."
Dick Vermeil

"We set upon a plan and did it. It wasn't sophisticated."


Three-hour practices and marathon film sessions caused a near revolt in 1998, but the players who stuck with Vermeil's system earned mutual love and respect.

THE VERMEIL FILE

1956-57 San Jose State player/QB

1959 Del Mar H.S. (Calif.) assistant coach

1960-62 Hillsdale H.S. (Calif.) head coach

1963 San Mateo College assistant coach

1964 Napa Junior College head coach

1965-68 Stanford assistant coach

1969 L.A. Rams special teams coach

1970 UCLA assistant coach

1971-73 L.A. Rams ST/QB coach

1974-75 UCLA head coach

1976-82 Philadelphia Eagles head coach

1983-96 CBS, ABC networks NFL, college football analyst

1997-99 St. Louis Rams head coach

Notes:
* Is only the fifth coach to take two different teams to a Super Bowl
* Has been named coach of the year on four levels: high school, JUCO, NCAA Div. I-A and the NFL
* Twice was named NFL Coach of the Year (1979 and 1999)
* Is the only head coach to both coach in and win a Super Bowl and a Rose Bowl

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