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Feb. 1, 2000 By Len Pasquarelli SportsLine Senior Writer |
He retired the first time in 1982 because he said that he was burned out, and when Dick Vermeil walked away from the NFL for good on Tuesday evening with a Super Bowl championship now highlighting his relatively uneven coaching resume, this time he was cried out.
Rams, even minus Vermeil, confident heading into offseason Audio: Dick Vermeil announces his retirement Audio: Vermeil says he wants to go out on top
Watching the man known even to his players on the St. Louis Rams as "Weepin' Dick" sob during a farewell address marked far more by emotion than eloquence, we were reminded of an old adage: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
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Give Vermeil his due because, with this final exit from the NFL sideline, he offered enough hints during the week preceding Super Bowl XXXIV and still managed to fool even the media people to whom he is the closest.
Shame on all of us, because we should have seen those frequent tears for what they were, the wet and winsome prelude to the end of his tenure, and should have read more into his reluctance to slam the door shut on the rumors that Sunday evening's title game would be his last if the Rams were victorious.
Certainly there were plenty of sobs last week, but there always are with Vermeil, whose squared-off countenance belies an emotional glass jaw. More remarkable, however, were the queries about his future, as if all of us had a hunch of what was coming.
Unfortunately, no one could quite get a handle on exactly where Vermeil stood regarding retirement. Two days after the Super Bowl all of us who take pride in breaking news are, believe me, kicking ourselves in the posterior for not taking a better reading of the tea leaves.
Like a vintage Fred Astaire, a movie star from his youth, Vermeil danced deftly past questions and always sought to refocus his audience on the game at hand. It was shrewd maneuvering on his part, the same art of the double-talk he practiced on his team during the season.
Even when he was reminded during a private moment with a reporter that he had just completed a conference in which he came off as a walking contradiction, Vermeil only laughed.
Sitting one evening early in the week at the team hotel, defensive tackle D'Marco Farr, perhaps the most insightful Rams veteran, allowed that part of Vermeil's transformation this season from martinet to merry man was a confusion in his message.
"Trust me, unless you've been around him for his entire three years here," Farr acknowledged, "I don't know how you could figure out some of the time what he's trying to say. It took me three years to understand him. But this much I do know: Something went on in his life to change him this year. Something has happened to him."
Part of what happened to Vermeil, at age 63, was this discovery that football had changed and, to have any chance of pushing his talent-rich team to its potential, so must he. When he ended his 14-year hiatus in 1997, decided to climb back down from the Ivory Tower of the broadcast booth and trade in pontificating about the college game for prodding a bunch of millionaires, Vermeil talked at length about how the game had not changed much during his absence.
Not until his team nearly rebelled last season at his three-hour practices, and four top veterans boycotted the final squad meeting after the disastrous 4-12 campaign of '98, did reality settle in for Vermeil. One of the great ironies of this season was listening to Vermeil speak of how much his players loved him.
As recently as early December, when the raised expectations precipitated long practices again, players privately wondered if the old Vermeil was resurfacing. And if so, whether his private angst might eventually cost them a Super Bowl title.
In what would be his final season, Vermeil learned a key lesson about coaching in this era. He discovered that the job of head coach has become that of CEO, that the most successful coaches are the ones who delegate well, permit the assistants to handle the bulk of the hands-on work, redirect their focus more toward the big picture.
According to wide receiver Isaac Bruce, a player who suffered through two seasons of injuries that were at least in part attributable to those long practices, Vermeil became a better head coach when he removed himself from the meeting room and from game planning sessions.
Not physically removed himself, of course, but rather forced himself into the background, where he did not feel so compelled to leave his fingerprint on every element of the Rams' being.
It was a self-imposed metamorphosis, to be sure, but one about which Vermeil honestly had very little choice.
Last January, when Vermeil huddled with the franchise's brain trust at owner Georgia Frontiere's estate in Sedona, Ariz., the coach came perilously close to losing his job. With three years remaining on his contract at the time, team president John Shaw gently suggested a buyout that would permit Vermeil to walk away with financial security but also the stigma of a 9-23 record in his second NFL incarnation.
Over two days, the parties haggled and, when Vermeil came down from those red-rock mountains he still had a job. He also had an edict: Win or else.
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| Dick Vermeil was forced to quit the first time because of burnout. This time, he has what he wants.(AP) |
None of this is to purport that Vermeil was lucky this season. It takes a big man to admit that he is wrong, to completely alter his approach, to allow that the game will pass him by unless he catches up to it again.
In his last-gasp attempt to redeem himself, Vermeil built a team for speed, brought in a little-known offensive tinkerer in Mike Martz, stepped back a bit and allowed the players to do what they do best, which is play the game. It wasn't happenstance or serendipity that delivered the Rams a Super Bowl triumph on Sunday night, but rather the convergence of all the things that make a team great in this era of one-year wonders and instant gratification.
In one private moment with the media during the week, Vermeil pooh-poohed the notion he needed the Super Bowl victory to truly validate his comeback, to accomplish everything he had set out to do this second time around.
"Just by coming back," he said, "I proved everything I needed to."
Maybe so. But he needed Mike A. Jones' magnificent open-field tackle at the 1-yard line to prove to himself that the changes he made in 1999, on and off the field, were worth the sacrifice. This is, after all, not a man who will be enshrined someday into the Hall of Fame. His career coaching record is a modest 79-77 and he won just two division titles. An entire generation might recall him more for the games he analyzed on Saturday afternoons than the ones he won on Sundays.
He leaves in esteemed company, joining the august quartet of Vince Lombardi, Bill Walsh, Bill Parcells and Jimmy Johnson as the only coaches to exit after a Super Bowl victory. And he left, he claimed, after only 40 minutes of discussion with wife Carol about their future.
We'll take his word for the impulsive nature of the retirement decision because, well, he deserves to be believed at a time like this.
But from his first Super Bowl press conference, when Vermeil was at various times truculent and defiant, insightful and incredibly murky, there was always a quality of the ersatz about him. In the first five minutes of his first public session, he groused about having to play Super Bowl XXXIV without the normal "bye" week, then applauded the fact his team and coaches were not thrown off their usual seven-day cycle.
"You see," said Farr later in the week, "about how he talks in circles?"
Yeah, we saw. We heard. And when Vermeil protested a little too strongly about the reports that he would step aside, we should have known better.