Parcells Always Finds a Way to Score Upsets

“This job will kill you if you let it,” Bill Parcells once said, and not just the other day. This was eight years ago, when he was on his way to his second Super Bowl with the Giants. But he was right about the job. It gave him heart trouble, gave Dan Reeves four bypasses in December. Parcells is still here. Reeves, too. Six Super Bowls between them already. There are six heart procedures between them as well.

Jimmy Johnson, a top guy, one of three guys to win both a national championship in college football and a Super Bowl, nearly quit the Dolphins this week before changing his mind. Marty Schottenheimer has the first losing season of his life, walks away from the Chiefs. After some losses this year, Schottenheimer sounded as if he were on the verge of some kind of breakdown.

He says he will be back after a brief sabbatical, the kind of sabbatical Parcells once took, and Johnson after he left the Cowboys.

They all found soft places to land on television, which is like some rest home for football coaches between one job and the next.

But they come back wanting what Parcells has right now. A game like today’s against the Broncos. A chance to show everybody they are as big and tough and sharp as they ever were. The stack of chips is just a little higher for Parcells, because if he takes a third team to the Super Bowl, if he is the man who brought the Giants back from the dead and the Patriots back from the dead and the Jets back from the dead over 15 years, then he can say he is as good at the job as anybody in pro football, all the way back to Halas and Paul Brown.

All the Jets have to do is win a game on the road against the champions of the world. Be one of those underdog teams that will be remembered.

The wisdom on this still comes from a basketball coach, Rollie Massimino, who coached Villanova to that upset of Georgetown in the ’85 NCAA basketball finals. At a postgame party that night, long after Villanova had shot 22-for-28 from the field in the game, Massimino was asked what he told his team before the game.

“I told them that they didn’t have to beat them three-out-five, or four-out-of-seven,” Rollie said. “Just once. I told them that for one night, they could beat the best team in the world.”

Jets over Broncos would not be that kind of upset. Since the Jets started out 0-2, they have been 12-2. They are not as good as the Broncos, not as deep. But they are good enough, even at Mile High Stadium. They should be an underdog, just not a 9-point underdog, not even to John Elway and Terrell Davis and Shannon Sharpe, who makes even Keyshawn Johnson look like a wallflower.

The Jets have to find a way to beat the best team--the Broncos are the best until somebody knocks them off--one Sunday afternoon.

Parcells knows this kind of game. He knows it from January 1991, against the 49ers in San Francisco when the 49ers were the defending champs. When the 49ers were the favorites, all the way until Matt Bahr kicked his fifth field goal of the day with four seconds left to beat the 49ers, 15-13.

“They’re good,” Parcells said of the 49ers at the time. “But not as good as everybody thinks. And my guys aren’t afraid of them.”

He could be talking about this Broncos team. He could be talking about these Jets. There are so many differences between the Giants of the ’90 season. There were so many players still around from Parcells’ first Super Bowl at Giants Stadium. Phil Simms was hurt, replaced by Jeff Hostetler. The 49ers were not just going for two Super Bowls in a row, the way the Broncos are now, they were going for three.

But they were favored and they were at home. Parcells found a way. More than any other coach of his time, he is counted on to find a way. He did that day. The Giants did not make mistakes. The Giants forced mistakes. The Giants did not give up big plays. They made big plays. And Parcells took the kind of chances he always takes in games like these. There was a fake punt in the fourth quarter, and Gary Reasons, a linebacker, ran 30 yards, setting up the field goal from Bahr that brought the Giants to within a point, 13-12.

Then with 2:36 left in the game, Erik Howard knocked the ball loose from Roger Craig of the 49ers and Lawrence Taylor recovered it, and the rest of it is part of the history of football in New York. The Giants shortened the game like a fighter cutting off the ring. Finally it was the kind of game where one mistake killed you.

Which is what he now talks about eight years later with the Jets. Don’t make the mistake that sends your team home.

“You don’t want to do anything stupid,” Parcells was saying Thursday. “But sometimes you do it anyway.”

The Jets made mistakes last Sunday. They are still here. So is Parcells. He came to the Jets thinking he could get them to this kind of game. He knows this kind of game better than anyone on the job.