Is there a secret recipe for turning around an NFL franchise?
Published: Sunday, January 15, 2012, 1:15 AM Updated: Sunday, January 15, 2012, 1:17 AM
By
Bill Lubinger, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- There was a time when the Pittsburgh Steelers stunk.
Perennial Pro Bowl linebacker Andy Russell remembers it well. The players would call meetings to try to figure out why. They wondered whether they suffered flawed psyches. They talked about whether they were playing hard enough.
From 1964-68, the Steelers won no more than five games in a season. They won just two games twice.
Then coach Chuck Noll arrived.
"He's the guy," Russell said, "that changed the entire mind-set."
How Noll and other NFL coaches and executives who built reputations as turnaround specialists reversed the culture of losing can provide a road map for the Browns. Names such as Marv Levy with Kansas City and Buffalo; Marty Schottenheimer with the Browns, Kansas City and San Diego; Gil Brandt with Dallas; Dan Reeves in Denver, New York and Atlanta; and Ron Wolf in Green Bayall offered ideas from their own experiences.
The formula, it seems, is some combination of leadership, stability, buy-in across the board, talent (especially at quarterback) and tough love.
Soon after landing the job, Noll, who played for the Browns under coachPaul Brown and prepped at Benedictine, called Russell to his office. The linebacker expected praise for making his first Pro Bowl.
"As I walked into his office, he was doing some paperwork," said Russell, who retired after the 1976 season. "He pointed at me and said, 'Russell, I've been watching game films since I took the job, and I don't like the way you play. You're too aggressive, you're too impatient, you're out of control, you're trying to be the hero, and that's an unacceptable way to play. Your techniques are flawed, so I'm going to have to change the way you play.'"
Noll's first speech to the team wasn't much kinder.
"'I've watched the games, and I can tell you why you're losing,'" Russell recalled his new coach saying as the room went silent. "'The reason you've been losing is you're not any good. You can't run fast enough, can't jump high enough, you're not quick enough, and I'm going to have to get rid of most of you.'"
Five guys in the room that day survived to be part of the Steelers' first Super Bowl victory.
"And I was one of the lucky ones," Russell said.
That took four years. The Steelers slipped to 1-13 in 1969, Noll's first year. Then they went 5-9 and 6-8 before finally busting through the dark cloud over Pittsburgh, going 11-3 in 1972.
Browns President Mike Holmgren, as he explained when hired in late 2009, reminded the media in his postseason news conference on Jan. 5 that there is no quick fix for a franchise with just two winning seasons since returning to the NFL in 1999. The Browns and their fans have suffered through 10 seasons of double-digit losses and a steady rotation of coaches, quarterbacks and executives.
The 2011 Browns won one fewer game than the season before, leaving fans and some in the media questioning the progress and whether the latest approach is just failed business as usual.
"The difference is we're going to stay the course. ... We know what we have to fix, but we're not going to blow it up and start over," Holmgren said. "That's the difference."
Stability
The Browns are on their sixth head coach in 13 years. Holmgren has made it clear his hand-picked first-year coach, Pat Shurmur, isn't going anywhere. While such support may not sit well with some frustrated fans, it sends an important message.
As a player, retired Super Bowl coach Dan Reeves landed in a culture of losing as a rookie halfback with the Dallas Cowboys in 1965. Up to that point, the Cowboys had losing seasons in all five years of their existence. After the previous 5-8-1 season, owner Clint Murchison called a news conference, presumably to fire Tom Landry, who had been the team's head coach since Day One. Instead, the owner rewarded Landry with a 10-year contract.
"That makes everybody know that this is the man, he's the boss, the owner has confidence in him," Reeves said. "You know he's going to be there, and you're going to have to answer to him."
But after a 2-0 start in 1965, Dallas lost five straight. Landry, whose public persona was stoic and cold, broke down in the locker room after the game and accepted blame.
"He was saying, 'I apparently let you down because we have better players than that,'" Reeves said.
The players saw first-hand how much winning -- and playing to their potential -- meant to their coach. Dallas won five of its last seven games to finish .500, then won 10 games and the division the next year to jump-start the franchise on a two-decade run of dominance through the late 1980s.
Murchison's controversial support for Landry had paid off.
"Sometimes there's too quick an action taken," said Levy, who flipped losing teams into winners in Kansas City and Buffalo in the '70s and '80s. "We've got to make changes, we've got to make changes, we've got to make changes."
Leadership
A struggling sports franchise, like any floundering business, "takes a full-court press" to change corporate culture, said business consultant Jim Bennett, formerly with McKinsey & Co. "Without that strong core of leaders and without a noble purpose, I think it's hard."
In Dallas, Reeves said, Landry set realistic goals and specific methods in each area to accomplish them. So it wasn't the coach telling his team, "We're going from 6-10 to the Super Bowl," it was, "Maybe we can get to 9-7 and sneak into the playoffs."
Even during Noll's inaugural 1-13 season, he'd tell the players he wasn't interested in adding gimmicks, trick plays and overly aggressive defenses just to win a few more games. His approach was to teach the players he expected to stay with the team
how to play, starting with basic fundamentals such as lining up.
But they were head coaches. How important is an owner in setting culture?
"Huge," Reeves said. "It starts at the top with ownership."
Publicity-shy Browns owner Randy Lerner gets criticized for what fans and some in the media perceive as being uninvolved and disinterested. In a recent interview, Levy said he didn't even know who the Browns owner was.
Holmgren told the media he met with Lerner the day before the wrap-up news conference.
"He cares deeply about what happens here," Holmgren said. "He is committed to helping us in any way he can as an owner to get this done."
Those who have been part of successful NFL turnarounds say an owner's style doesn't have to fit one extreme or another to set a culture of winning.
The Steelers, even when they were bad, were run like a family business under the late Art Rooney. He attended practice, even in sleet, snow and rain. He'd visit the locker room, offering players pats on the back and expressing concern about their injuries.
When his son, Dan, became team president, he was smart enough to hire Noll, who hadn't been a head coach but was a proven NFL assistant.
The good owners, Levy said, know and study the game, ask provocative questions and may participate in meetings and the draft but don't dictate.
But an owner doesn't have to be visible or vocal to be effective.
"I worked in Green Bay, and we didn't
have an owner," said former Packers General Manager Ron Wolf.
The Packers, run by a team president and a board of directors as the only publicly owned NFL team, had just five winning seasons in 24 years from 1968 to 1991 when Wolf arrived. The losing, woe-is-me attitude was so thick, he said, "you couldn't cut it with a set of shears. ... They didn't know how to win."
He said they began to hack through the thicket by emphasizing Green Bay's winning tradition, reminding players Lambeau Field was the jewel of the NFL and by bringing in stars from the Vince Lombardi era who won five NFL titles in seven years.
"It changed the mind-set [to one of], 'Yes, you can be successful here,'" he said. "I played a lot on that."
Reeves said the owner must hire the right people and give them a chance to get the job done.
"I'm old school, but [owners] need to be there. They need to know what's going on, but they don't need to be out front. The main thing is you've got to be on the same page with the people you've hired."
Talent -- especially at quarterback
"That's the other thing," Russell said. "Coaches can't do it by themselves. They have to have the talent."
The Steelers, being so awful, had relatively high draft positions each year, but too often swung and missed. But Noll's drafting was brilliant, especially his selection of defensive tackle "Mean" Joe Greene, who absolutely hated losing -- an attitude that spilled over.
"Maybe some of us older guys started accepting the losses, thinking, 'Well, that's just us, we're not that good,'" Russell said. "But Joe Greene went crazy."
Noll and his personnel staff valued a player's intelligence, not just size, speed and strength. Levy and his general manager, Bill Polian, architect of the Buffalo turnaround, sought players with solid character.
"Ability without character will lose," Levy said. "When things go wrong, and they will, the guy without character is going to quit or blame others or be more concerned with himself than the team or be disruptive with a drug bust or something like that."
Kansas City had gone 17-39 in the previous four seasons when Levy took over as coach in 1978. The Chiefs went 4-12 his first year, then 7-9, 8-8 and 9-7. At Buffalo, Levy took over after back-to-back 2-14 seasons and a poor start in 1986. The Bills went 7-8 his first full year there, then 12-4 in 1988 as the franchise was built around quarterback Jim Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas and wide receiver Andre Reed -- all building-block draft choices.
In Green Bay, Wolf hired Holmgren and pushed trading a first-round draft choice for quarterback Brett Favre, a young, unproven backup in Atlanta whom the GM was sold on coming out of college.
"I got lucky," Wolf said.
As Holmgren reminded the Cleveland media Jan. 5, it took his Green Bay Packers five years to reach the Super Bowl after finding its quarterback in the first year. In Seattle, it took his team three years to find a quarterback and seven to reach football's Holy Grail.
Gil Brandt, vice president of player personnel for Dallas from 1960 to 1989, recalled how Green Bay beat Arizona on the last day of the season to improve to 4-12. That gave the 3-13 Cowboysthe worst record and the chance to take quarterback Troy Aikman with the first pick in the 1989 draft. Then new head coach Jimmy Johnson helped orchestrate the trade of running back Herschel Walker for five players and six draft choices.
"We had bottomed out," he said, "so getting the quarterback was kind of the coup de grace."
Brandt said the Browns under Holmgren have done a good job evaluating talent and setting a foundation with such players as Phil Taylor, Jabaal Sheard, Joe Haden and T.J. Ward.
"You have to turn the team over and play with younger guys," he said, "and I think that's what they're doing."
Buy-in
Former coaches and team executives say a winning culture is built on being prepared, organized and making everyone -- from players, coaches and the executive team to the support staff -- feel like an important part of the team.
"That's the only way you can get things turned around," Reeves said.
The other important ingredient, Levy said, is that ego steps aside.
"Bill's first words to me were, 'It's amazing what we can accomplish if no one cares who gets the credit," Levy said of Polian. "'Let's get to work.'"
Former Browns coach Marty Schottenheimer directed turnarounds in Cleveland, Kansas City and San Diego. The Chiefs had one winning season in seven years, and back-to-back 4-11 seasons, when he took over. Schottenheimer's team went 8-7-1 the first year, and he led them to six double-digit winning seasons in eight years.
He took the Chargers from no winning seasons in six years to a record of 8-8 the first year, 4-12 the second, and then 12-4, 9-7 and 14-2.
"There can be progress without winning, absolutely," he said. "But at some point in time, there's a moment of decision where: 'Hey, this isn't going to go on forever.
We've got to show some positive results or that negative reaction will result in failure.'"
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01-25-2012
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