It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when the relationship between Dick Jauron and Jerry Angelo became irreparable, but it wasn’t going to get any better after a cold winter day in 2001.
That was the day, according to sources, that Jauron stalked out of a meeting with Angelo and Ted Phillips after being accused of leaking information about his contract talks to reporters after an already unpleasant couple of months of negotiations.
You can accuse Jauron of any number of things, but you don’t question the man’s integrity unless you want to be blistered in return, and Jauron gave the two an uncharacteristic earful.
Although Phillips described the Jauron-Angelo relationship as “good” Monday, the marriage was doomed from the start, given the timing of Angelo’s hiring the previous summer.
A little more than six months after the nuptials, it already had begun to unravel.
As the Bears were putting together an unlikely 13-3 season that first fall, Angelo was telling friends and acquaintances Jauron’s days were numbered.
Angelo also had begun trying to undermine Jauron by sidestepping the head coach and interfering with his assistants.
That was a practice Angelo continued throughout Jauron’s tenure, according to sources, gossiping in closed-door sessions with various members of the coaching staff rather than going directly to Jauron, and employing “spies” to listen in on coaches’ conversations and report back to him.
Secrecy has been a way of life around Halas Hall throughout the Angelo regime. Team sources say Jauron and his staff were kept in the dark about tackle Marc Colombo’s condition, for example, and as recently as Sunday’s finale, the status of Rex Grossman’s injured finger was a point of contention on the sideline between coaches wanting accurate information and trainers acting on behalf of Angelo.
Communication? Sources say it has been a joke throughout the Jauron-Angelo era. Angelo refused to give Jauron a vote of confidence after the Bears’ 5-1 start in 2001, their first season together.
His reference to their relationship as “an arranged marriage” sparked an embarrassing flurry of news reports and analysis, so Angelo sent a member of the media-relations staff to Jauron to make sure the coach hadn’t taken his remarks the wrong way.
When Angelo offered to speak to Jauron and his staff in person, Jauron told him not to bother, because they wouldn’t believe him anyway.
Team sources believe that, left to his own devices, Jauron might have fired beleaguered offensive coordinator John Shoop, who in addition to not doing his job very well the last two years was not getting along well with the other offensive coaches. But after their nasty power struggle in that winter of ’01, during which Angelo initially insisted on total control over the coaching staff, Jauron may well have let stubbornness cloud his judgment.
That’s why, given the relationship between Jauron and Angelo, Monday’s announcement came as no surprise to anyone close to the situation.
