Getting rid of Mike Ditka has cured neither the Bears nor the New Orleans Saints, who meet Sunday at Soldier Field without Da Coach.
The Bears and Saints are two of only five NFL teams that have failed to make the playoffs in the last five years, joining the Cincinnati Bengals, Baltimore Ravens and Oakland Raiders at the bottom of the postseason invitation list.
The Bears are in the midst of their longest string of losing seasons since 1969-75, the worst drought in their history.
The Saints haven’t had a winning season since 1992, when Jim Finks was their general manager. As the man responsible for turning around both the Bears in the 1970s and the Saints in the 1980s, the late Finks made it to pro football’s Hall of Fame. Now both teams face similar challenges in a free-agent/salary-cap era that would have tested Finks.
The formula for turning around an NFL team remains essentially the same–good ownership, personnel decisions and coaching–but the window of opportunity and margin for error are both smaller.
With players becoming free agents after four years, teams must see significant progress in a four-year cycle or start over, much like college. The pressure on ownership, decision-makers and coaches is greater than ever. All three areas are integrated and complementary, and no success story includes failure in any one area. The Bears have struggled in all three since the new system began in 1993.
“As long as you have a plan and stick to the plan, you’ll be fine,” said Tampa Bay General Manager Rich McKay. “You don’t have to have the best plan, you don’t have to be the smartest in this league, you just have to be committed to what your plan is and stick to it. It’s very hard to do, though, because we get into the read-and-react mode in this business. We get up in the morning and read what’s being said and then react. Reading and reacting is good when you’re a linebacker; it’s not good when you’re making personnel decisions.”
Ownership and continuity
When Bears’ decision-makers are on the same page, it is more coincidence than design. While they aren’t the only team that contends with instability, infighting, and confusion, they are one of only two teams in the NFL run by a president who hired neither the chief personnel man nor the coach. President Ted Phillips, personnel director Mark Hatley and coach Dick Jauron barely knew each other before they found themselves in the same high-level meeting rooms.
The only other franchise with a similar arrangement is San Francisco, where new owner Denise DeBartolo York did not hire General Manager Bill Walsh, and neither hired coach Steve Mariucci. However, because Mariucci uses the same offensive system that Walsh practically invented as a Hall of Fame former 49ers coach hired by York’s brother Eddie, there is obvious history and connection in that front office that is lacking in Chicago.
The St. Louis Rams went from nine straight losing seasons, including four coaches, four personnel heads and two cities, to a Super Bowl title last year, but club President John Shaw and Vice President Jay Zygmunt were calling shots from the top throughout under owner Georgia Frontiere and later minority owner Stan Kroenke. It was Shaw, for example, who convinced coach Dick Vermeil to hire offensive coordinator Mike Martz last season.
“If we didn’t have John Shaw, we couldn’t have done what we’ve done,” said current General Manager Charley Armey.
Contrary to their image, the Bears’ payroll of $75 million this season is the fifth-highest in the league, higher than the $62 million salary cap because of signing bonuses paid to free agents such as Phillip Daniels and Thomas Smith and prorated over the length of the contracts.
“Cash is king in this system,” said Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts. “If you want to turn it around quickly, you’re going to have to add free agents with that infusion of cash, and you’re not going to see an immediate return on those free agents because it will take them the better part of a year to get acclimated to a new system and new surroundings and to deal with the pressure of expectations.”
Phillips hired Finks protege Jim Miller to guard the cash as director of business operations. Although a lack of stadium revenue eventually will preclude signings, the Bears are in a decent cash position relative to rivals. Some teams, for example, are projected at more than $30 million over next year’s salary cap and will have to cut players. The Bears are well under next year’s cap and will not be strapped by “dead money” under the cap paid to players no longer here.
“We chose to spend this year because we felt we needed those immediate improvements,” Miller said, “knowing full well you can’t do that every year.”
Said Walsh: “The demise of the 49ers was paying huge dollars to players who never really played or played well. It finally has come to where we are today with terrible cap problems and without the players.”
Polian and his predecessor, former Bears personnel director Bill Tobin, turned around the Colts. Colts owner Jim Irsay hired both.
“It’s clearly to your benefit to have continuity among decision-makers,” Polian said. “To have to change tacks midway through the voyage is difficult.”
Said McKay: “Continuity is critical because the second you begin to change the decision-makers on a constant basis is the second you’re going to increase the turnover of players. As you increase the turnover of your players, you become the hamster on the wheel.”
Tampa Bay coach Tony Dungy in his fifth season is the longest-tenured coach for the Bucs since McKay’s father, John, coached from 1976-84.
The draft and free agency
Mistakes in personnel decisions battered the Bears throughout the ’90s.
No team can survive trading its first-round draft choice for a quarterback, Rick Mirer, who doesn’t play, not when the Green Bay Packers turned around their team by trading a first-rounder for Brett Favre, not when the Rams turned around their team by trading a second and a fifth for running back Marshall Faulk.
No team can survive spending the fifth pick in a draft on a running back, Curtis Enis, who can’t play, not when the Denver Broncos are drafting Terrell Davis in the sixth round and the Atlanta Falcons are drafting Jamal Anderson in the seventh round and the Packers are drafting Dorsey Levens in the fifth round, and all are taking their teams to Super Bowls.
No team can survive spending second-round picks on Russell Davis and Pat Riley and Marcus Spears and Carl Simpson and Todd Sauerbrun, a punter who couldn’t punt, not when the Rams are finding Isaac Bruce and the Bucs are finding Mike Alstott and the Colts are finding Ken Dilger and Mike Peterson in second rounds.
No team can survive signing free agents such as Bryan Cox, not when the Packers are signing Reggie White and the Cowboys and 49ers are signing Deion Sanders and the Bucs are signing Keyshawn Johnson.
If you can’t make good decisions, you have to hit on a few lucky or bold ones. The only luck the Bears have had is bad. They called Kurt Warner for a tryout and he had to cancel because of a spider bite. The Rams put Warner on the expansion draft list and the Cleveland Browns didn’t claim him.
The Bears drafted tight end Alonzo Mayes in a fourth round two picks before the Rams discovered Az-Zahir Hakim. The Bears thought Enis was a better fit than Randy Moss. Hatley was drafting for Dave Wannstedt’s team at the time, not Dick Jauron’s.
“Anytime you make an error, it’s magnified at both ends–because of the player and because of the salary-cap loss,” Armey said. “It’s double jeopardy.”
“If you make a mistake on a high draft choice, you’re going to pay for it for a long time to come,” said Polian, who chose Peyton Manning over Ryan Leaf with the first pick in 1998.
In the case of Enis, the Bears would lose nothing under the salary cap if they cut him after this, his third season, because he signed only a three-year contract. But neither would they have anything to show in return for the fifth spot in the draft.
The Saints got flak for trading nearly their entire draft to select Ricky Williams at the fifth spot last season, but at least Williams will be running this Sunday.
The NFL Management Council has determined that teams find more playoff success when retaining their own drafted players than when they raid other rosters of free agents.
An ongoing study continues to show that more free agents who stay with their old teams go to the playoffs than free agents who move.
“You have to be really disciplined to not take players who don’t fit your system,” Armey said. “People asked why would we spend money on [guard] Adam Timmerman. For us, Adam Timmerman was an integral part of what we had to get done.”
Walsh built the 49ers of the ’80s and ’90s in the pre-free agent system and now is rebuilding again.
“I’m certain the draft has become the highest priority with everyone because this is how people have come to the conclusion they build teams,” Walsh said. “The free agent market will always be there . . . but the draft has to be the key to a team’s future. The movement toward free agency and the panacea of stealing someone else’s really good player is not nearly as much a factor as it once was.”
Effective coaching
Because players become free agents after four years, teams must play them early both to determine whether they are worth keeping and because veteran rosters are too expensive.
This means coaches beg for astute personnel men and vice versa, increasing pressure on both. Some of the league’s most successful coaches–Mike Shanahan, Mike Holmgren, Dennis Green, Tom Coughlin, Dan Reeves–demand control over both areas, but most personnel directors or general managers defer to the wants and needs of coaches anyway.
“A general manager’s job description is as follows: He is there to facilitate the success of the head coach,” said Bill Kuharich, former general manager of the Saints with Ditka.
Polian, a five-time NFL executive of the year, calls coaching today “a darn near impossible job, but it’s critical. You have to get players acclimated to the NFL, get them on the field, get them developed in the system and then teach technique too.”
If players don’t fit the system, or vice versa, as in the case of Enis and Mayes, turnarounds become runarounds.
“It’s hard to develop an offensive or defensive football team within the four-year cycle unless the young players you draft come through,” Armey said.
“We very much make a concentrated effort here to find players who can play for the coach who’s in charge. We have a profile of the player we like, and we don’t vary from that.”
More than ever, coaches have to be effective, fast teachers, which is why Green Bay’s Mike Sherman first was hired by Holmgren; they shared similar backgrounds as high school and junior high teachers.
Although coaches need input about the kind of players they like, Walsh said teams must be cautious about allowing coaches too much say over personnel.
“One of the problems with any coaching staff is they think short-term,” Walsh said.
“It’s almost certainly a survival mode because they want to win the next game. Someone in management has to have a grip on the future. One of the problems the 49ers have had is to think, `We can do it this year or never.’ You can’t basically operate anything that way.”
Turnaround teams often benefit from breakthrough players, pleasant surprises such as Jevon Kearse emerging from the bottom half of the first round to set a rookie pass rushing record for Tennessee, or the Colts trading away Faulk in favor of drafting Edgerrin James, or the Falcons finding the quarterback-running back balance of journeyman Chris Chandler and late-rounder Jamal Anderson, or the Rams striking lightning with Martz coaching Kurt Warner.
“As long as you are solid in your drafting and development, you can be pretty basic and get to be a pretty good football team,” McKay said.
“Now if you’re going to win a championship, you’ve got to get a little lucky in having a couple players ascend beyond anything you could have projected.”
“Luck,” Armey said, “is when opportunity and preparation collide. I think that’s when you get good luck.”
