Fighter Pilot

There are decisions to be made on Super Bowl Sunday.

If someone knocks on your door and says you have won the giant sweepstakes, you have a choice. You can take his check for $31 million or you can slam the door in his face.

No-brainer?

How about this one? On Super Sunday, you are the coach of one of the participating teams. After having led a different team to a pair of Super Bowl titles and then being forced out of the game by heart trouble, you have recovered, started all over again with this new team and are now back on top. Your owner would be happy to have you stay. Or you can slam the door in his face and start over again with a 1-15 team that has been in the playoffs only once in the previous 10 years.

No-brainer?

It wasn’t such an obvious choice in 1997 for Bill Parcells. Frustrated because he didn’t have total power to make personnel decisions, Parcells bid farewell to the New England Patriots and their owner, Bob Kraft, to join the New York Jets, where he would be head coach and chief of football operations.

Nobody is questioning Parcells’ decision now. In his second year with the Jets, he is back on the road to the Super Bowl. The Jets improved to 9-7 in their first season under him and went 12-4 this season to win the AFC East title. They will host the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday in a divisional playoff game.

So how does he keep turning bad teams into good ones?

“He has a formula, a system,” said running back Keith Byars, who has watched that formula work while playing for Parcells as a Patriot and a Jet.

“He knows how to push the right buttons to get people to play,” linebacker Rob Holmberg said. “He knows the people that need a pat on the back, the ones who need a kick in the butt, and he knows the difference.”

Receiver Keyshawn Johnson says that Parcells “respects players.”

To linebacker Bryan Cox, Parcells’ biggest attribute is that he “allows you to be yourself.”

Of course, a great formula, great system, insight into motivation and demonstrations of respect wouldn’t be worth anything to a coach if he didn’t have talented players. Parcells knows that, and he knows talent.

That’s why he’s no longer in New England. He was tired of tying his fate to the personnel decisions of others. If he was going to live and die with the fortunes of his players, he wanted to be the one to decide who those players were going to be.

Kraft, however, wasn’t willing to concentrate all that power in one man. He insisted on leaving the final decision on players in the hands of Bobby Grier, the Patriots’ director of player personnel.

The showdown came in the spring of 1996. Parcells announced that New England was going to use its first pick in the draft, seventh overall, to take a defensive player.

But Grier ultimately overruled Parcells and went with receiver Terry Glenn. Parcells seemed to take out his frustration on Glenn. When the receiver was slow to heal from a hamstring injury, Parcells derisively told reporters, “She isn’t ready yet.”

At season’s end, Parcells walked out on his Super Bowl team to come back to the city where he had already won two Super Bowls--with the Giants. Now he was leading a long-struggling franchise that hadn’t reached the Super Bowl since it was led by Joe Namath.

Parcells began with the Jets by heeding advice from an old and dear friend, Raider owner Al Davis.

“He always told me,” Parcells said, “that when you come into a town, the first thing you do is to get some guys to hold the fort. Otherwise, they will storm the gates and you don’t have a fort. People would look at the best players in the league and ask me, ‘Why didn’t you go after this guy or that guy?’ No, first you shore up the fort. You do that and then you start to build. If you don’t stabilize, the downslide never stops.”

What Parcells did at quarterback is a perfect example of his theory. Last season, he held the fort with Neil O’Donnell. This year, he picked up Vinny Testaverde, who had struggled with three other teams, and found the man who could lead the Jets to the division title and perhaps beyond.

“If I can get players who have been run out of town [elsewhere],” Parcells said, “that’s my good fortune. If I find them on my doorstep, I say, ‘Who left this?’ It’s luck. I think it’s luck.”

Are uniforms lucky? This season, Parcells changed the Jets’ uniforms back to the ones they had worn in their heyday. They might not have been ready to play like Namath and fellow Hall of Famer Don Maynard, but at least they would look like them.

“That might have seemed like a small thing,” offensive tackle John Elliott said of the uniform switch. “But we had not had a lot of success, so he started by changing our image.”

To Parcells, that was important.

“When people look at us now, they say, ‘That’s the New York Jets. That’s what we remember,’ ” Parcells said. “I think it helped a lot. You have to change the mentality.”

Then there is the case of Johnson. Here was a young receiver who had a terrible image as a self-centered player whose attitude seemed best summarized by the title of his book, “Just Give Me the Damn Ball.”

Not exactly a Parcells kind of guy.

But what the coach figured out was that Johnson didn’t always need the ball. He simply needed to be involved. So Parcells started using him in a variety of situations and formations.

“Just get me something to do,” Johnson said. “Just don’t have me standing around like some cardboard cutout and then say I can’t play the game.

“When he [Parcells] got here, people told him I was a demon. It took him about three to four weeks to get that out of his mind. Then he realized that he just had to get me on the field. He realized I would give 100% in every situation. He understood that I would do anything to win. I’m doing more now, and that’s all I ever asked for. I don’t know if I could be a holder, but I would even give that a try if they asked me.

“I can go a whole game and not catch a pass and be happy. I really can because I know I did something, threw a block or whatever.”

Johnson doesn’t hesitate to credit Parcells for expanding his horizon.

“I’ve learned a hell of a lot from him,” Johnson said, “a crazy lot.”

Johnson desperately needed a pat on the back. Others need a kick in the butt, and Parcells has demonstrated time and again that he’s not afraid to use strong-arm tactics as well.

“Parcells will say, ‘If you mess up, you’re gone,’ ” said running back Curtis Martin, who was also with him on the Patriots.

But he surely wouldn’t use such an approach with a star back like Martin, would he?

“He’s made threats,” replied Martin with a smile.

Before a Monday night game against the Patriots in October, Parcells used one big kick in the collective butts of the team. Disgusted with what he was seeing in practice, determined to motivate his players and eager to beat his former club, Parcells, along with all of his assistants, marched out of practice, leaving the players shaking their heads.

“I had never seen or heard of anything like that in my whole career,” Byars said. “That was one for the ages. When he left, I kind of missed him hollering. We laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.

“That wouldn’t work for a lot of coaches.”

But it worked for Parcells. His team beat the Patriots that week, 24-14. It was the first of 10 victories in the Jets’ final 11 regular-season games. Parcells had once again found the right approach to success.

Now, with another possible Super Bowl looming, the rumors have already begun that Parcells, 57, will step down if he can win a title with the Jets, content at last.

“I’ve been hearing that for about 10 years,” Parcells said. “And I say the same thing every year. I’ll think about my future at the end of the year. Right now, there are bigger fish in the water and I’m interested in that.”

But would he really slam the door on the Jets after achieving almost instant success? Wouldn’t he choose to stay and enjoy the results of his effort?

Now that seems like a no-brainer.

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Before and After

Parcells has an immediate impact when he becomes coach. The teams’ average record in the three years before Parcells and the average record with him:

N.Y. Giants

Before: 6-10

With: 10-6

*

New England

Before: 3-13

With: 8-8

*

N.Y. Jets

Before: 3-13

With: 11-5

Strong Finisher

A look at his teams’ winning percentage by month

Parcell’s record

N.Y. Giants

Wins: ‘83: 3-12-1

Divison finish: 5

Wins: ‘84: Lost in conference playoffs: 9-7

Division finish: 2

Wins: ‘85: Lost in conference playoffs: 10-6

Division finish: 2

Wins: ‘86: Won Super Bowl: 14-2

Division finish: 1

Wins: ‘87: 6-9

Division finish: 5

Wins: ‘88: 10-6

Division finish: 2

Wins: ‘89: Lost in conference playoffs: 12-4

Divison finish: 1

Wins: ‘90: Won Super Bowl: 13-3

Divison finish: 1

New England

Wins: ‘93: 5-11

Divsion finish: 4

Wins: ‘94: Lost wild-card playoff game: 10-6

Division finish: 2

Wins: ‘95: 6-10

Division finish: 4

Wins: ‘96: Lost in Super Bowl: 11-5

Divison finish: 1

N.Y. Jets

Wins: ‘97: 9-7

Divison finish: 3

Wins: ‘98: 12-4

Division finish: 1

Totals: 130-92-1, .585

Postseason: 10-5, 667

Researched by HOUSTON MITCHELL / Los Angeles Times