When Gurus Lose Their Juju

Back when he was offensive coordinator in Minnesota, Brian Billick’s Vikings set an NFL scoring record, making him the hottest coaching prospect in the NFL. Now, seven years later, his Baltimore Ravens are last in scoring offense, with one touchdown in the last 19 quarters.

Mike Shanahan earned the nickname “Mastermind” in Denver and led the Broncos to consecutive Super Bowl victories after the 1997 and ’98 seasons. But he hasn’t won a playoff game since John Elway retired.

Tampa Bay paid $8 million to pry Jon Gruden loose from the Oakland Raiders, and the payoff was immediate: The Buccaneers won a championship in Gruden’s first season. Then they endured the worst two-season Super Bowl hangover in history, going 12-20.

Mike Holmgren has a street named after him in Green Bay, but his Seattle teams have been postseason road kill, with an 0-3 record in the playoffs.

Evidently, the “genius” label comes with an expiration date.

“Coaches never see it coming,” said Jimmy Johnson, a Fox NFL Sunday analyst who won two Super Bowls as coach of the Dallas Cowboys. “Once you reach the level of being a head coach in the NFL, your ego is such that you think you’re going to stay at the top forever. They fall into that trap. They’re really shocked that they’re not at the top every year.”

So far this season, Shanahan and Holmgren are riding high with 7-2 teams, and Gruden’s Buccaneers are a respectable 6-3. But those coaches understand that teams are really measured after the regular season ends, and they know too well how quickly a coach can go from savior to schlub.

Of the last 10 NFL coaches of the year, half were subsequently fired: Dom Capers by Carolina, Tom Coughlin by Jacksonville, Jim Fassel by the New York Giants, Dan Reeves by Atlanta, and Dick Jauron by Chicago.

And of the other five, only Bill Belichick at New England and Marty Schottenheimer at San Diego are coaching teams with winning records. The Patriots and Chargers are each 5-4.

The league’s structure makes it especially difficult for a coach to be a consistent winner. Better teams get lower draft positions and tougher schedules, and they often have more difficulty holding on to free agents because rival teams want a piece of that success.

The wear and tear of the playoffs also plays a part. New England, for instance, has played nine postseason games in the last four years, winning all of them. That’s roughly three months’ more football played than the Redskins, Cowboys, Giants, Bills and the other six teams that failed to make the playoffs over that stretch.

All those things make it even more remarkable that the Patriots have built a dynasty in the era of free agency, having won three of the last four Super Bowls. Only in recent years has Belichick assembled his Hall of Fame credentials. He certainly wasn’t considered one of the league’s elite coaches a decade ago when he was with the Cleveland Browns.

Consider all the other coaches who have gone in the other direction, started with a splash then endured a cooling trend -- George Seifert, Steve Mariucci, Herman Edwards, Mike Martz and Jeff Fisher, to name a few.

The pressure to meet expectations can be smothering.

“It’s something you enjoy, you get paid to do it, you’re outside, you rant and rave a little bit, you can run around and hug guys and act foolish,” Holmgren said. “It’s great.

“And then there’s the tough side of it. No one likes to be criticized. You take that personally sometimes. For some guys, it’s easier, while some guys don’t get as affected by it and what it does to your family.”

The best way to judge coaches, Johnson said, is to note not how long they stay at the top, but how quickly they bounce off the bottom. Every coach is going to encounter low points. The best ones, though, don’t spend much time at the back of the pack.

Only a few coaches have been given genius or guru designation and held on to it over the years. Vince Lombardi was one of the first. Bill Walsh did it throughout the 1980s, and Don Shula has had it for more than 30 years. All of them have busts in Canton.

Now, John Madden is a finalist for induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, even though he had a relatively short coaching tenure, from 1969 through ‘78, during which his Oakland Raiders won one Super Bowl.

Part of maintaining that brainier-than-the-rest reputation is knowing when to get in and when to get out. Walsh left the 49ers at the right time. Bill Parcells has made an amazing career of turning bad franchises into good ones, then moving on. And, after coaching the Cowboys to two Super Bowl victories, Johnson went to Miami, where he led the Dolphins to the playoffs in three of four seasons.

He and Dan Marino retired after the 1999 season, both of their careers ending on an especially sour note, a 62-7 playoff loss at Jacksonville.

That was a stumble, but neither Johnson nor Marino was around for any significant step backward.

“I never got into a position where we were good and then we got bad,” said Johnson, who traded coaching for a life of TV commentary and boating around the Florida Keys. “Maybe that’s why I’m fishing now. I never wanted to experience that.”

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The Bengals play host to the Colts on Sunday. Last season, Cincinnati quarterback Carson Palmer and his top receiver, Chad Johnson, traveled to Indianapolis to watch the Colts play Minnesota in a Monday night game. Palmer and Johnson paid particular attention to the interaction between Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison, hoping to learn something from that dynamic duo.

The two Bengals also learned something about each other.

“[The drive] was boring. Carson is boring,” Johnson said this week. “The music selection was boring, country, Shania Twain, or something like that.”

Asked whether they’d taken Johnson’s pink 1971 Chevy Caprice Classic, Palmer said no.

“I refuse to go in that car,” he said.

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A joke making the rounds in Baltimore: How do you keep the Ravens out of your backyard?

Put up a goal post.

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Holmgren years

In seven seasons as Green Bay coach, Mike Holmgren took the Packers to six playoff appearances and won Super Bowl XXXI. In Holmgren’s first six seasons in Seattle, the Seahawks made three trips to the playoffs:

*--* SEASON, TEAM REC. PLAYOFFS 1992 Green Bay 9-7 Did not qualify 1993 Green Bay 9-7 l. to Dallas in NFC divisional, 27-17 1994 Green Bay 9-7 l. to Dallas in NFC divisional, 35-9 1995 Green Bay 11-5 l. to Dallas in NFC champ., 38-27 1996 Green Bay 13-3 d. New England in Super Bowl, 35-21 1997 Green Bay 13-3 l. to Denver in Super Bowl, 31-24 1998 Green Bay 11-5 l. to San Fran. in NFC wild card, 30-27

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*--* SEASON, TEAM REC. PLAYOFFS 1999 Seattle 9-7 l. to Miami in AFC wild card, 20-17 2000 Seattle 6-10 Did not qualify 2001 Seattle 9-7 Did not qualify 2002 Seattle 7-9 Did not qualify 2003 Seattle 10-6 l. to Green Bay in NFC wild card, 33-27 2004 Seattle 9-7 l. to St. Louis in NFC wild card, 27-20 2005 Seattle 7-2*

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* Seattle leads the NFC West Division by three games.