If Tuna’s Not Coaching, Cut Bait on Him and Reel in Future

Robert Wood Johnson paid $635 million for the Jets less than one year ago. That is his money, a lot of it. This is his team, not Bill Parcells’. Woody Johnson has no real loyalty to Parcells, nor Parcells to him. Parcells has not given the Jets the best years of his football life, just the last few. If Parcells wants to come back and coach the Jets until the end of his football days, Johnson should overpay him to do it and welcome him back with open arms. If not, then he should tell Parcells that it is time to move out of the way because the Jets are moving on without him.

Parcells stepped down one year ago as Jets coach, kicked himself upstairs, gave the team to Bill Belichick, who promptly gave it right back. Before the week was out, Al Groh, another Parcells lieutenant, another member of that madcap Parcells tribe, was the Jets coach. At the time, there was no guarantee that Parcells would be anything more than an adviser by the time the 2000 season rolled around.

So he was dancing the same dance as a front-office guy he always did as a coach. It was the same with the Jets, his last coaching job, as it was with the Giants. No one, sometimes not even Parcells, knew from year to year whether he was in or out.

“It’s time,” he said when he left the Giants, using the same line Pat Riley used when he left the Lakers. It might have been time, but the timing was so awful that George Young, the general manager of the Giants at the time, ended up with Ray Handley as his head coach.

Parcells is the great football coach of his time at Giants Stadium, one of the great coaches of all time. In many ways, he was the Giants’ Lombardi. I wrote a book with him once and like him a lot. But somehow no matter where he is, he always ends up turning the whole thing into a football version of Hamlet.

And this indecision of his about what he wants to do, what sort of role he wants to have with Woody Johnson’s Jets, is one of the reasons why this organization is becoming a joke again in front of our eyes. You’re either in or you’re out; Parcells tells people that all the time.

It’s not Parcells’ fault that Belichick bailed out on him the way he did, though it’s difficult to believe that Parcells wasn’t at least aware of some of Belichick’s concerns, both about the Jets’ new ownership, and whether or not Parcells was going to stick around. You say Belichick should have voiced those concerns way before last January? He should have. Leon Hess paid Belichick a million dollars when other teams wanted to talk to him. If he was worried about what might happen to him when Hess and Parcells were both gone, he should have spoken up then.

But if Parcells didn’t at least sense that Belichick might be having second thoughts, maybe it was because Parcells was more concerned about his own future.

Now Al Groh is gone. The Jets could have stopped him, because he had a contract. They didn’t. Groh didn’t cover himself in glory any more than Parcells did. He just did what Parcells has always done, which is look out for himself.

Here is another line from Parcells: If you’re thinking about retiring, you already have. If he had one foot out the door before Groh ran to become the head coach at the University of Virginia, then he is already gone. Being the general manager of an NFL team is not a part-time job. If Parcells is really interested in the full-time job for which he is best suited, and one that would do the most for the Jets, he should come back and coach. He is a coach, not a suit.

Is Bill Parcells really willing to commit the next three years of his life to running this operation for Johnson? Or do we go through the same thing next year, when the same old doubts about his future start to creep in?

Here’s a better question: Why should the Jets assume that somebody like John Butler, the fine general manager of the Bills, currently out of work, is signed, sealed and delivered to the Chargers without at least finding out if he is interested in the Jets?

Parcells nearly took the Jets to the Super Bowl, the way he did the Giants and the Patriots. When Vinny Testaverde went down last year and Parcells wondered if he had stayed around one year too long, he went back to work and finished 8-8 with Ray Lucas as his quarterback. It was some of the finest coaching of his life.

Again: I would hire him today to coach my team. But he says he doesn’t want to coach anymore. If he doesn’t, then it is time for somebody else--and not one of Parcells’ guys--to come run the football operation for the Jets, whether Parcells gets the title of team president or not. At prices like Woody Johnson paid, he ought to keep in mind Parcells works for him. It’s not the other way around.