'Next time, you're not gonna slip': What the Giants, and football, owe to Bill Parcells | Capital New York

Good to see there won't be a Rent-a-Tuna sighting down in the Big Easy. If it pushes the clock back to five years on his HOF wait, that makes the decision more difficult. It may take those idiots five years to figure out he may have been one of the top football coaches of this era.

'Next time, you're not gonna slip': What the Giants, and football, owe to Bill Parcells | Capital New York:

"He spoke very, very quietly, in his naturally hoarse voice, as if to focus my listening attention to the single most important nugget of coaching wisdom he was in possession of.

“When they choose their methods, they want them to be ’aesthetically pleasing’ to them. They want to be creative. They want to be the next Bill Walsh. They have computers, they have four, five hundred plays. My teams might have had 60. They have schemes, they have wrinkles. It’s a highly technical world they live in."

“But some of them get on the plane on Sunday night, and they don’t know why they lost. They’re busy saying, ‘Oh, we turned the ball over here, this guy didn’t do that’ … But they neglect the rationale of the complexity of what they’re doing contributing to the demise of the execution, to the point where it’s game-affecting.

“So I want to do a few things, I want to do them well, and I want to be concerned with what we’redoing. I don’t want to be concerned with what they’re doing. I want them to be worried about what we’re doing.”

That was Parcells’ coaching philosophy. It was simple and straightforward, prizing execution and effort over complexity and creativity. One had to do with the other: The simpler the system was, the less the players had to worry about anything but trying their damndest to execute it.

COACHING EFFORT” ISN’T AS SIMPLE AS IT SOUNDS. Parcells took great pride in it, seeing himself as a master motivator who had a keen insight into the psyches of his players and which buttons needed to be pushed to extract their best effort on Sundays.

“I called him Sigmund,” remembered Kenny Hill, the strong safety of the ’86 team. “He really thought he was gifted with the ability to read people, to understand people, to glean who they were and what motivated them. A lot of times, he got it wrong, but that didn’t stop him.”

“The needle,” his players called it. With a comment here and a comment there, he’d get under his players’ skin, injecting them with the feeling that they had something to prove to him. Parcells would play on the insecurities of Brad Benson, the Giants’ Nervous Nellie of a left tackle, by talking up the beastly pass-rusher he was facing. Or he’d gushingly compliment other defensive players in front of Lawrence Taylor, knowing it would trigger Taylor’s grandiose pride in being the best player in the world.

But it wasn’t all ball-busting. It went the other way too. There was just enough of a tender side to Parcells to keep his players as allies and prevent them from writing him off. Midway through the 1986 season, he approached quarterback Phil Simms, who was struggling through a rough year and getting booed by the fans. He told Simms to keep his confidence, and not worry about interceptions.

“’I know it’s hard on you,’” Simms remembered Parcells telling him in his book, Sunday Morning Quarterback. “’It’s not all your fault. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Be fearless. Believe me, it’ll work. It’s gonna work.’”

“He spoke in the same tone in which your father would speak to you at a particularly rough moment in your life,” Simms wrote. “I felt a tremendous burden lifted off my shoulders.”

The season ended with Simms completing 22 of 25 passes, a game M.V.P. performance that is widely considered the greatest ever by a quarterback in the Super Bowl.