Around the NFL, It’s the Firing Season : Head Coaches, and Their Assistants, Live in the Shadow of Uncertainty

If you are a National Football League assistant coach, you know the rules.

You have little security. You can go at the whim of a head coach, an owner or a general manager. You already have enough familiarity with the moving-van companies to write an article for Consumer Reports--or will soon.

The head coach’s job might be in danger; and if he goes, so, almost certainly, do you. You might be the best of friends with the head coach, or you might have come to realize he could be outcoached by the 24-year-old at the high school down the street. Either way, your professional lifeline is tied to him--for the moment.

Or the head coach might push you out the door himself. It could be an effort to placate his own critics (“You’re OK, but your defense stinks, so why don’t you fire those guys?”) and save his own job. You might be coaching linebackers for a team that hasn’t drafted a decent one in six years, but that doesn’t save you from getting a perhaps inordinate share of the blame for their ineptitude. Maybe you aren’t getting along with the head coach. Maybe you just aren’t doing the job.

Regardless of the scenario, the final days of the football season, all of the Holiday season, and the early days of the New Year are the nervous time for NFL assistant coaches. It can come down to this: With the Christmas tree lights flashing in the background in the living room, you call the family together and tell them it is time to move on.

That’s the business.

Joe Gardi and Joe Walton seemed to be good friends. They both had served as assistants under New York Jets coach Walt Michaels, and when Michaels was fired, Walton became the head coach before the 1983 season. Gardi was the highly respected assistant head coach and defensive coordinator. They would ride together from their Long Island homes to the team’s Hempstead offices. They would talk about the children, the weather, politics--and about football.

But on Dec. 28, the Jets announced Gardi was gone. “Resigned by mutual consent,” were the official words. Unofficially, Gardi and two of his defensive assistants--Bill Baird and Ralph Baker, who were “released”--were being made the scapegoats for a 7-9 season; and while Gardi had volunteered the idea that maybe he ought to leave, his car pool partner at the very least didn’t try to talk him out of it.

The New York media have been critical of Walton, who spent much of the season knocking his own defense, for making his defensive assistants the scapegoats, and dodging any of the blame himself.

“I’ve been here nine years, and I’m not going to say anything negative about the Jets,” the 55-year-old Gardi said from his home in Sayville, N.Y. “This was something I had been thinking about for a long time.”

Gardi said he “planted the seeds during the season. I said if we didn’t get it turned around, you ought to bring in whom you want--and I even mentioned a couple of names. It kind of sprang out of emotion, since we were trying to find some of the answers as we were driving to and from work.

“You know, now that I look at it, it might not have been the smartest thing to do.”

Especially when Walton went along with the suggestion.

When Frank Kush bailed out on the Indianapolis Colts, one of his last acts was to recommend the firing of three of his assistants--offensive coordinator Zeke Bratkowski, running backs coach Roger Theder, tight ends-special teams coach Mike Westhoff. The three spent much of the season arguing with Kush about the offense. “It was just a matter that Frank said we were going to run the football,” Bratkowski said from his home in Indianapolis. “I don’t want to embellish it beyond that.”

The Colts went along and fired them, and while they or any of the rest of the staff conceivably could be rehired--or unfired--by Kush’s replacement, the custom usually is that the new coach will bring in his “own” staff. Gunther Cunningham, the defensive line coach, already has accepted a job with the San Diego Chargers.

The good news for the 53-year-old Bratkowski is that he already has landed another job--with Walton and the Jets. (No car pool arrangements have been made.) As a player, he was with three teams (Rams, Bears and Packers); as a coach, this makes it four (Packers twice, Bears, Colts and Jets). The bad news: He will live in a New York hotel for at least a month, while his wife remains behind in Indianapolis--where they lived less than a year--trying to oversee the sale of their house.

When it became apparent that Kush would be leaving, said Bratkowski, “We didn’t know what was going to happen to us (the staff). We would like to have thought that Mr. Irsay (Robert Irsay, the Colts’ owner) would have some concern for us because we had to move within a span of 48 hours (notice), to come to Indianapolis. It was, ‘We’re moving to Indianapolis, and we’ve got to start packing.’ At that point, all the coaching jobs in the league were filled, so we didn’t have much choice. We all had to come.”

At least Bratkowski didn’t have to put a house on the market in Baltimore: He didn’t buy one there because he had problems selling the one he owned in Green Bay.

John Petercuskie got the bad news Dec. 18, two days after the Cleveland Browns finished off a tumultuous season with a win at Houston.

Cleveland head coach Marty Schottenheimer told Petercuskie he wouldn’t be back as the Browns’ special teams coach next season. “He said this was the toughest decision he ever had to make,” Petercuskie recalled, speaking from his home in Strongsville, Ohio.

It was tough, but Petercuskie was out of work. Schottenheimer, the defensive coordinator who took over from the fired Sam Rutigliano in midseason and apparently will hold onto the head job for 1985, gave the same message to four other Browns assistants: Howard Mudd (offensive line), Joe Daniels (receivers), Joe Scannella (offensive coordinator) and Keith Rowen (running backs). They were part of Sam’s staff; Schottenheimer wanted his own.

“A lot of us in that eight-week period, the way things were going, kind of got the feeling that we wouldn’t be around,” said Petercuskie. “In our business, you accept that aspect. You look at a new head coach who’s been in the business a while, and he suddenly gets a head-coaching opportunity. You know that he’s talked to people, that he’s said, ‘Somewhere along the line, if I got a head-coaching opportunity, I want you to work for me.’

“His commitments necessitate some changes. I don’t think that was true in my case, because, with me, evidently he just felt he had to make a change, for one reason or another. You’d like to know the reason, but if he doesn’t advance it, you don’t ask. I would like to know. He never told me. Our special teams weren’t very good this year, but they weren’t the worst, either.

There are a lot of other men who are going through the job-hunting rite in the early days of 1985.

When head coaches Monte Clark of Detroit and Les Steckel of Minnesota were fired, their staffs officially went out with them. Bud Grant, however, rehired two members of Steckel’s staff--linebackers coach Floyd Reese and special teams coach Dick Rehbein.

New England head coach Raymond Berry announced it four days before Christmas. Rod Rust, the Patriot defensive coordinator, and special teams coach Dante Scarnecchia still had jobs. Not so the other assistants on the staff Berry inherited when he took over from the fired Ron Meyer. Berry already has hired Don Shinnick, Bobby Grier, Jimmy Carr (from the Denver Gold staff), Rod Humenuik (Kansas City) and Dean Brittenham (Minnesota) from the outside.

When Rutigliano seemed destined to become head coach of the Buffalo Bills--before the Bills decided to retain Kay Stephenson--Petercuskie seemed set. “If Sam got a job, I was going with him,” he said.

But now he, and a lot of others, are looking.

Each year, league officials brief the coaching staffs during training camp. One new NFL assistant remembers realizing what he was getting into when the man doing the briefing told him, “You know, I see the same faces every year--but they’re in different places.”

Welcome to the NFL.