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| Bill Parcells is on the ballot again. |
I have been a member of the New England Patriots Hall of Fame Nomination Committee for 17 years now. I have attended all but one of the annual meetings; the only time I was prevented from attending was when I was trapped at the office of The Sun Chronicle, putting the final touches on a 16-page broadsheet supplement containing all of the winter-season all-star teams, and I simply didn't have the time to get away.
And when I look around, I'm shocked to realize that I am one of a dying breed (no pun intended) of original members of the committee. Indeed, five of the original 27 members from the 2007 meeting have passed on. At this year's meeting earlier this month, only 11 of the originals were still in attendance.
But younger reporters from 2007 have become veterans by 2023, and we all have one thing in common.
Apparently, we all want Bill Parcells to be a member of the Patriots Hall of Fame.
The former head coach from 1993-96, Parcells has been on the three-name ballot chosen by the committee in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2020 and now again in 2023. In his four previous appearances, he was beaten out by Drew Bledsoe, Troy Brown, Ty Law and Richard Seymour, so it's tough to say he was unfairly denied membership by inferior candidates.
This year, from about maybe 10 names put into the hat, the committee selected Parcells, Logan Mankins and Mike Vrabel -- the latter, while certainly a deserving candidate, has failed to earn the red jacket in six straight ballot appearances prior to this year.
For sure, we've all heard the admonitions. "Parcells was trying to get out of town the whole week before Super Bowl XXXI," the refrain goes. "He bailed on the team! He didn't even fly home with his team! And he went to the Jets and then he stole Curtis Martin!"
That is repeated so often, on chat-room message boards, in podcasts and on sports-talk radio, that Patriots' media relations czar Stacey James has to remind us every year at the beginning of the meeting that we should not refrain from voting for someone just because we don't think he can win. It should be merit-based and nothing else.
I'm not supposed to write specifics about the discussions, but I will tell you that Parcells was nominated early in the meeting. I spoke during the discussion because at least half of the committee members weren't involved in the coverage or management of the team when interim owner James Busch Orthwein hired Parcells as head coach prior to the 1993 season.
Remember, my coverage of the team dated back to Chuck Fairbanks' tenure. Experience and history should serve for something, I thought.
So I asked my fellow committee members to forget the .500-ish record of the team during his tenure here, to forget the events of the week of Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans and his controversial departure, and anything that transpired after that.
I asked them to either remember or envision what the New England Patriots were in the months prior to the Tuna's arrival. They were, in a word, a mess.
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| Victor Kiam liked the razor, but ruined the Patriots. |
Owner Victor Kiam, the driving force (and TV spokesman) behind the Remington electric razor company, was teetering on the brink of total bankruptcy in the wake of his thoroughly inept stewardship of the team. He had tried unsuccessfully to sell the team to Reebok chairman Paul Fireman and had brought in a financial advisor named Fran Murray who was supposed to smooth the course toward new ownership, only to have that devolve into a steaming heap of failure.
At the same time, a new stadium (then to be called the Trans World Dome) was under construction in St. Louis, which had just lost the Cardinals franchise to Phoenix. A group of investors, desperate to get the NFL back in St. Louis, convinced the NFL to name one of their own as the interim owner of the Patriots with the intention of moving them to the banks of the Mississippi.
Hence came Orthwein, heir to the Anheuser-Busch beer fortune. A reserved and thoughtful man that was uncomfortable in the presence of the aggressive New England media, Orthwein had one job -- to smooth over the chaos that the Patriots had become and to prepare them for their transformation into the St. Louis Stallions within a year's time. Indeed, once the NFL put Orthwein in charge, the folks back in St. Louis started cranking our souvenir memorabilia for the Stallions -- some of which can be seen today on display inside the Patriots Hall of Fame.
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| James Busch Orthwein |
Orthwein's first job was to find a head coach. Dick MacPherson, an affable soul that had gained football fame through his many successful years as head coach at Syracuse University, had just been fired after two roller-coaster seasons with the Patriots -- the last of which included a raging case of diverticulitis that forced him to miss several games.
There wasn't a nicer guy to be found than Coach Mac, and he did manage to get his first team to a 6-10 record. His on-field enthusiasm was the genesis for a series of car commercials in which the catch phrase "No hugging!" poked good-natured fun at his penchant for emotional displays. But in the NFL, he was clearly overmatched and undersupported by his front office.
Here's where Orthwein did something that should almost rate his own membership in the Patriots Hall of Fame.
Parcells had left his post as head coach of the New York Giants as a result of heart problems in 1990, not long after the Giants beat the Bills in Super Bowl XXV. His "retirement" included time in the NBC television booth and brief flirtations with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Green Bay Packers. But in 1992, Orthwein offered him the job to resurrect a 2-14 team not only on the field, but off it as well. Although he was not to officially carry the title of general manager, Parcells had the task of straightening out the corporate structure of the team from soup to nuts, and to get it functioning as well as his championship teams in New York had -- no doubt, with the goal in mind of having a smooth-running operation ready to hit the ground running when the transfer to St. Louis was made.
Parcells' moves were swift. He cleared the roster of deadheads and malcontents, and anyone he thought would not adapt willingly to a much more structured and disciplined football operation. So it was also with a bloated front office filled with warring factions from the Sullivan and Kiam ownership eras. The chain of command became uncluttered and straightforward -- it was truly Bill's way, or the highway.
Meanwhile, Patriots' fans that were in denial about the looming St. Louis threat reacted positively and hopefully to having a "real" head coach for the Patriots. They set a franchise record for season-ticket sales in the first few days following Parcells' hiring, and suddenly a stadium that had trouble attracting 15,000 fans at some points in the recent past was going to be close to full going forward.
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| The Parcells presser was like a football classroom. |
Parcells found assistant coaches that mirrored his philosophy. He stocked the roster with former Giants that still had something left to give (mostly leadership), or players that fit a specific mold that included toughness, intelligence and commitment to detail. And with the No. 1 pick in the draft, he got Drew Bledsoe -- and say what you want about him in the wake of Tom Brady's career, Bledsoe was clearly the best QB the Patriot ever had to that point.
The first year was a struggle, but all the parts seemed to come together toward the last third of the season when the Patriots ripped off four straight wins. The last of those was an overtime victory over Miami at Foxboro Stadium before more than 55,000 fans, the crowd swelled by the knowledge that it might be the last pro football game ever played in the Boston area.
As I told my fellow committee members, I remembered standing in the parking lot behind the press box side of the stadium as I headed to my car, my post-game interviews having been conducted. But I soon realized that a majority of those 55,000 fans had stayed in the stadium, cheering and chanting and basically pleading Orthwein not to take this suddenly interesting team away from them. It was surreal, and the first real evidence that with the right pieces in place, Boston and New England could become prime pro football territory.
That was the impact of Bill Parcells. Yes, he got them to the playoffs the next year (where the Patriots lost to the Bill Belichick-coached Cleveland Browns in the first round), and then two years after that, had them in the Super Bowl.
Yes, it ended badly. Yes, he left in a huff, looking to shop for his own groceries. But let's not think about that for a second.
Back at that season-ending game against Miami, the cheering fans had reason to fear that the Patriots might indeed be headed out of town. But what they didn't know was that in the months leading up to that, Orthwein and his lawyers learned to their horror that the 20-year-old lease that bound the Patriots to play at Foxboro Stadium was almost impossible to break without having to pay a seven-figure penalty, maybe even more. Whatever the final total would have been, it was something that Orthwein and his St. Louis partners were both unwilling and unable to accept.
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| Orthwein gives Kraft the keys in 1994. |
At that point, Orthwein moved swiftly toward Plan B -- to find local ownership for the Patriots and hope the NFL would reward him and his native city in an upcoming round of expansion. Waiting in the wings was Robert Kraft, who already had part-ownership of the stadium after being awarded it in a sealed-bid bankruptcy auction. A long-time season-ticket holder who ran a very successful paper products empire, Kraft bit the bullet and offered the sum of $168 million for the team. By late January 1994, the team was his -- and stability was finally on the horizon.
For years, Kraft complained that he "overpaid" for the Patriots. But now that he's worth more than $5 billion -- and Dan Snyder's pending sale of the Washington Commanders may set the next sale price for a franchise at $7 billion -- Kraft has very little to complain about.
But would the team had been as attractive if Parcells had not been the head coach? I'd guess probably not.
Over the years, the canyon that opened between Kraft and Parcells appears to have become unbreachable. Even though both men, now in their early 80s, have expressed regrets over how things unfolded at the end, fans have elevated the schism to mythical proportions. It's as if Parcells guided a Soviet invasion force to the beaches of Cape Cod and burned down everything in their path all the way to East Rutherford, N.J.
Especially the "He didn't fly home with the team!!!" part. A lot of coaches often travel on their own. I know from personal experience that Bill Belichick was not on the team plane after Super Bowls 36, 38, 39, 49 and 51 because he stayed behind to accept the Lombardi Trophy from Roger Goodell at the day-after MVP pressers.
OK, different circumstance, I know. I also know that Parcells liked to drive that big, black Cadillac sedan of his to and from the games at the Meadowlands every year because the drive relaxed him -- just as he would lock his office at the stadium after each season ended and point that Caddy toward Jupiter, Fla. Making a big deal out of Parcells' travel habits is sheer nonsense. The truth is that two powerful men that were extremely comfortable in leadership positions had far too much trouble finding common ground for them to continue working together.
It happens. I wish they could have found that common ground and not have subjected us to Pete Carroll for three years thereafter, but that's history and it can't be rewritten.
Still, for all that Parcells accomplished and despite what he couldn't, he did lay the groundwork for the Patriots' successful future. Belichick lost his job in Cleveland just before the Browns moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens, but Parcells brought his former long-time assistant to the Patriots' staff in 1996 as the secondary coach (and de facto defensive coordinator). Not only did that benefit the team on the field immediately, it also brought Kraft and Belichick together to forge a friendship that would culminate in Belichick's hiring as the head coach in 2000.
Those that hate Parcells for his departure will probably not be swayed. But their vitriol is polluting the minds of younger fans, early 30s and younger, who cannot remember from personal experience what the Patriots were before they became a dynasty. I see it as my job to bring historical fact to this argument.
So please, fans, go to Patriots.com and vote for Bill Parcells to be in the Patriots Hall of Fame, and we can all move on. If you don't do it, we'll keep putting him on the ballot year after year after year -- or maybe, eventually, old farts like me will finally convince Kraft to put Parcells in the Patriots Hall of Fame as a "contributor" -- an honor that the owner rightfully bestowed upon long-time assistant coach Dante Scarnecchia at our last meeting.
Please, just do it. Parcells is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It makes no sense that he's not in this team's hall of fame as well.
DISCLAIMER: At this point, I have to admit that I did not put Parcells in the top position on my ballot this year. The three-name ballot assigns five points to the top spot, three points to the second and one point to the third individual, and the total number of points determines the ranking that results in three finalists.
I had actually put wide receiver Wes Welker's name in nomination and spoke to how I believe he took the slot receiver position and redefined it for himself and everyone else that followed. Discussion about him was very positive, so I assumed that I had done my job and put forth a worthy candidate.
On my ballot, I put down offensive guard Logan Mankins as my first choice (as I had the previous year; he was a true warrior, strong and silent in the Gary Cooper mold, and one of the best linemen they ever had).Welker was my second choice, and then I stopped and pondered the words of Stacey James about how I shouldn't make my choices because of the alleged electability of the candidate.
So, Bill Parcells made it to my ballot again.
I just wish you fans will think about it as much as I did. Even a few seconds of thought is better than none at all.
