Pats on the Back : Sam Jankovich and Dick MacPherson Are Making a Difference in New England

As anyone can see, it’s a strange season.

The Rams rank 27th running the football this year, the Raiders are favored over the Buffalo Bills at the Coliseum Sunday, and the New England Patriots have won four games.

The Patriots? Are they turning it around already?

Well, not exactly. They have also lost nine. But with a first down here or a touchdown there, with a field goal here or a turnover there, the team that finished 1-15 last season could be 9-4 today.

And it’s their near-misses--they nearly swept Buffalo, and should have split with the Denver Broncos--that identify the Patriots as the NFL’s comeback team of the year.

What’s more, they are coming back with style, with a new show--the exciting Mac and Jank show.

Mac is Dick MacPherson, the club’s 60-year-old new coach, who at Patriot games bounces along the sideline like a cheerleader, high-fiving the cornerback who intercepts a pass, bear-hugging the blocker who leads a running back into the end zone.

Jank is Sam Jankovich, 56, the new leader who chose his own Patriot title, chief executive officer. The title is an exact job description. Jankovich’s authority is total, under the terms of a five-year contract, in an organization that also lists a chairman, a vice chairman, a president, a general manager and six vice presidents.

How total?

Three months after taking over a team involved in a widely publicized sexual harassment scandal last year, Jankovich decided unilaterally to bring back the club’s cheerleaders.

“These young women are important to us,” he said recently. “They represent the club at community functions and help give a festive air to the games.”

The story of the rise of the Patriots, if indeed they are rising, is MacPherson and Jankovich, who last year were serving Syracuse and Miami as, respectively, coach and athletic director.

They look and act much like brothers or cousins, with Jankovich seemingly the elder, though he is actually younger, and though MacPherson is grayer.

Nothing explains either of them as vividly as the way they got together on the Patriots.

It happened only 18 days after Jankovich left the University of Miami, where, as the nation’s most successful athletic director, he had watched his teams win seven national championships in eight years--three in football, two in tennis and others in baseball and golf.

At the time, Jankovich had also quietly compiled a private 1-2-3 list of the college coaches he wanted as his first pro coach.

He didn’t have a pro job yet. He had no idea where or when he would get it. He knew only that his achievements at Miami meant his NFL number was likely to come up.

And the name at the top of his list was Dick MacPherson of Syracuse University.

In Jankovich’s national championship days, he had invited Jimmy Johnson--and then Dennis Erickson--to coach the Miami football team, but he had never worked with MacPherson. He scarcely knew him. Moreover, it’s an NFL tradition to conduct somber, lengthy searches for new coaches.

Yet, “Mac was the only one I interviewed for the (Patriot) job,” Jankovich said. “I knew he had all the qualifications.”

In Jankovich’s order of importance, they are enthusiasm, energy, college head coaching background, pro coaching experience and a realization that “attitude and chemistry are the name of the game,” college or pro.

For some of the same reasons, owner Victor Kiam had brought Jankovich to the Patriots on the recommendation of his best friend in football, Philadelphia Eagle owner Norman Braman.

“I think Jankovich would win anywhere,” Braman said, adding that he doesn’t know the man but followed his career as a fellow resident of Miami.

It’s instructive to note that Jankovich had told Kiam about the same thing that MacPherson told Jankovich.

“I’ll only come if I have complete authority to run everything my way,” said Jankovich, the only son of a Montenegro-born Serbian miner in Butte, Mont.

Said MacPherson, the youngest son in a Scotch-Irish plumber’s family of 12 in Old Town, Me.: “I’ll only come if I have complete authority to run the team my way.”

As MacPherson tells it, he insisted, for example, on 12 assistant coaches, a league record.

“Just till we get squared away,” MacPherson said.

As the Patriots began squaring away last summer, their problems, as one of the most troubled teams in league history, were nearly unbelievable:

--They were good enough to win only once last season.

--They were torn by a finding that a female sportswriter was sexually harassed in their dressing room.

--Their underfinanced owner was, and still is, in a desperate and apparently losing fight to keep the team.

--They appeared not to have, and began the season without, a qualified quarterback.

--They were regularly jeered in Boston as the area’s fourth-best sports team behind the Celtics, Red Sox and Bruins.

--They had placed their fortunes in the hands of two guys with a combined 116 years on earth but only seven in the NFL.

--And their best player was, and still is, a linebacker named Brown.

Who?

Brown, Vincent Brown. Though a stranger to most fans, Brown is so gifted that if they play the Pro Bowl without him this winter, he should sue the voters.

Since the season’s fourth game, the Patriots have also lined up a quarterback who looks more promising each week--Hugh Millen, the former Ram. He broke a leg while in Anaheim and was released.

A University of Washington walk-on, Millen, who used his college years to acquire the vocabulary of a college professor, is remembered as the player who got the highest grade ever awarded on an NFL IQ test.

He is also engaged to marry the Patriots’ chief cheerleader, Lisa Coles.

Then in October, Millen, ruining his reputation as an intellectual, made the bonehead play of the year, running out the clock to take the Patriots out of a short game-tying field goal attempt against the Broncos.

In a strange year in a strange league, that’s the sort of thing that MacPherson and Jankovich have had to put up with.