Tuesday’s two-minute drill …
When Jerry Angelo woke up Monday morning, he could look in the mirror and see a man responsible for building a Super Bowl team and creating a legacy of a football executive whose often unpopular decisions ultimately paid off handsomely. That’s the good news.
But success comes with a price, and it went up again Monday for the Bears. Before all the confetti had been cleaned up at Soldier Field, Angelo’s old buddy, Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells, abruptly announced his retirement and created another potentially untidy situation for the Bears front office.
It’s no secret the Lovie Smith grew up in Big Sandy, Texas, worshiping the Cowboys. The team’s owner, Jerry Jones, apparently likes Smith enough to spark speculation from Sports Illustrated writer and NBC correspondent Peter King last week that he would be one of Jones’ top choices if Parcells ever left.
Well, Parcells left the building Monday and the first Super Bowl distraction looms for the Bears. The rumor mill will start churning Tuesday with gossip placing Smith on Jones’ wish list of head coaches. By Wednesday morning, unsubstantiated gossip will have the Cowboys offering Julius Jones and a draft pick for the rights to hire Smith.
The chatter might be legitimate if Smith were in the final year of his contract, but he’s not. Nor is he unhappy in Chicago as his emotional display with his players after the Saints victory illustrated.
Smith has one year left on a contract that pays him $1.35 million — the lowest head coach’s wage in the league — and his agent, Frank Bauer, and the Bears have discussed extending that deal with a salary increase. The Atlanta Falcons hired a coach with zero NFL experience, Bobby Petrino, at an average of $4.5 million per season, so Smith could seek a salary in the neighborhood of $5 million and nobody would blink.
Except maybe the Bears, that is. During the most recent negotiations between the two sides, before the Bears won the NFC championship, the team opened discussions by offering a package worth less than $3 million annually that Smith’s side found unacceptable, a source with knowledge of the talks said. That might explain why it looks more unlikely every day that the Bears will hold true to team President Ted Phillips’ declaration on Christmas Eve to have Smith’s contract issue resolved before the Super Bowl.
Envy Smith. Either the Bears up the ante and find the money somewhere in their pot of millions, as is likely to happen when all is said and done, or he plays hardball and fulfills the final year of his contract to become the hottest coaching free agent available. Why would he leave?
A team source said that as of Monday night Smith had not thought about much other than how to stop Peyton Manning. But in the big picture of the Bears organization, Monday’s Parcells development merely might have given Smith a little more leverage for a coach whose bargaining position never has been stronger.
Neither has Angelo’s position, for that matter. His role in building an NFC champion does not have social implications the way Smith’s role does, but the Super Bowl is Angelo’s moment as much as anybody’s. The Tampa 2 is not just a defense this week, it’s also the two head coaches: Smith and the Colts’ Tony Dungy, who both worked under Angelo at 1 Buccaneer Place.
It was Angelo, then Tampa Bay’s director of player personnel, who included Smith on a list of college coaches ready for an NFL staff when Dungy, then the Buccaneers’ coach, asked his boss for names of prospective linebackers coaches in 1996. Angelo and the Bears also have been talking about extending his contract that currently runs through 2008, and the 25-point win over the Saints was Exhibit A in stating his case.
Running back Thomas Jones, a free-agent castoff Angelo saw something in, gained 123 yards. Free-agent veteran offensive tackles John Tait and Fred Miller outplayed young Saints defensive ends Will Smith and Charles Grant, who were supposed to be difference-makers.
Wide receiver Bernard Berrian, a project in the third round of the 2004 NFL draft the Bears developed, capped a month in which he was the team’s most outstanding offensive player. Quarterback Rex Grossman, Angelo’s chosen one, was the most valuable.
There were ends Adewale Ogunleye and Mark Anderson–Angelo guys–applying the heat and defensive backs Chris Harris and Charles Tillman laying the wood. There was Cedric Benson, the controversial draft pick, running just hard enough to make Jones run harder.
Among employees at Halas Hall, only Grossman has endured the same type of criticism that Angelo has in Chicago. But now Angelo deserves credit for being the one who hired Smith, even if he first wanted Nick Saban, and being the one who tabbed pro personnel director Bobby DePaul and college scouting director Greg Gabriel.
Those guys have one year left on their deals and adding the words Super Bowl on their respective resumes likely just moved DePaul and Gabriel up on several short lists around the league.
What about defensive coordinator Ron Rivera? He’s likely a victim of the Bears’ success and league rules limiting assistant coaches of competing playoff teams from interviewing. All the head-coaching chairs figure to be filled by Feb. 5. If the Dolphins just signed their defensive coordinator Dom Capers to a three-year, $8.1 million contract after going 6-10, what is the defensive coordinator of a Super Bowl team worth?
It will take the best of Angelo’s acumen to help provide the answers to some of those questions to the extent he can. After all, he assembled this team and should have the biggest say in keeping it together. Yes, the issues involve money, but really they are football decisions under Angelo’s purview.
Angelo gave Smith the kind of players that fit his system, and Smith got the most out of the roster. They complement one another the way a head coach and a GM are supposed to complement one another in the NFL.
It’s a management team that works, and the team should work as hard as necessary to keep it together, even if it means working it out before leaving for Miami.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
