In my early years coaching in the NFL I made a lot of stops. I coached defense for several teams, and loved it. After coaching the defensive backs in Buffalo, I went to Minnesota to do the same under Coach Bud Grant, whose example taught me more about the art of coaching, leadership, and the importance of observing human behavior than any graduate class ever could. I loved everything about the coaching life—the strategy, the tactics, the focus, and the pace. I loved the tight-knit intensity of coaching a position group, and in my close relationship with the guys I coached, I guess I developed—for better or worse—a reputation for being a “player’s coach.”
Not everyone saw that as a positive, but I always felt it was important to have a relationship with the players I coached.
In 1990, I left Minnesota to take the defensive coordinator position with the New York Jets. While that job brought a new level of responsibility and pressure, I approached it with the same spirit I had approached every other opportunity in my career. We worked as hard and competed as much as we possibly could, and felt grateful to have the chance to do it.
After my second season with the Jets, I had the chance to interview for the Vikings’ head coaching job. Though I didn’t get it, I came to realize that as much as I loved coaching defense, I ultimately wanted to be a head coach. I now had a new goal, and my chance to test how ready I was came sooner than I could have guessed. We went 8–8 during our fourth season in New York and our head coach, Bruce Coslet, was let go. I had assumed that the team would mount a national search, but to my surprise that’s not what happened. Instead, I was called in for a two-hour interview with the Jets general manager, Dick Steinberg. Soon after, the team offered me the head coaching position. It was exactly twenty years into my coaching career.
While being a head coach is certainly challenging and an unstable profession, it is also one that many people dream of. Twenty years into my coaching career I had my first opportunity to interview for a head coaching job, and while I knew it would be challenging, I was very excited to lead an organization. So when, at forty-three years old, I was offered the head coaching job with the New York Jets, I took it and wanted to have fun doing it. I felt I had a great advantage because I had already been with the team for four years. It was a team that I believed in, and while we were certainly going to have a tough fight ahead of us, I felt the team was ready, and I couldn’t wait to put my ideas into practice.
I was coming into the job knowing the team had a clear sense of my style. I had had a lot of success coordinating the Jets’ defense, and overall I felt accepted by the group.
I remember my first team meeting as the new head coach at the Jets. We were facing a difficult situation on a number of levels, and my first priority was adjusting the culture of the team. Officially, I was addressing the players, but essentially the entire organization was there: the coaching staff, the management, and even the team’s owner, eighty-year-old self-made oil billionaire Leon Hess. The meeting room itself was familiar, but when you’re a head coach everything changes, and I think everyone was wondering how different I would be from the Pete they had worked with in the past. I wanted to show them that they were going to get the same coach they had had the past four seasons—someone who was positive, focused, and extremely competitive. I believed that the only way we were going to succeed was as a single, united team.
As far as I was concerned, the success I’d had in the past with that approach was what had gotten me the head coaching job in the first place, and I didn’t see any reason to change something that was working. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was throw away the things I had learned over the course of my career and pretend to be someone I wasn’t. Walking into the meeting, I was determined that I was not going to transform into an unapproachable head coach. I was going to be me, no matter what.
The task of turning the Jets around was a serious undertaking, but I made every effort to keep the tone positive. The vision I wanted the team and staff to share wasn’t about “not failing” but about really searching within yourself and developing a positive approach to winning. I wanted every member of the team to think of himself as a piece of our success. As I described how I saw our new competitive philosophy, the players and coaches began to buy in and seemed willing to at least give it a try. I was very pleased to watch the players, coaches, and staff members light up. They got it. They were on board. Well, most of them.
Leon Hess, the owner of the team and the man who signed my check, said nothing. It was clear from his expression that he was not a fan of the somewhat unorthodox approach I took. I respected him and his outlook, but in retrospect, I guess I wasn’t his vision of an NFL head coach. While this bothered me to some degree, I told myself that I couldn’t control how he felt, and I knew that I surely was not going to be successful by altering my approach. The tension was unfortunate, but I really didn’t feel that I had a choice.
Unfortunately, after that first team meeting, Leon and I would not speak for the remainder of the season. In this initial meeting, I could have tempered my enthusiasm and considered my audience more closely, but I was too pumped. I wanted to get the message out—and my focus was on the players with whom I had spent the previous four seasons.
The players knew that I was passionate about the game of football. They had seen me use a variety of methods to get their attention and inspire them to work hard. I had already done a lot of crazy stuff to get my players jacked up, and one example was the legend of “the Beaver.”
The Beaver saga actually started back when I was at Minnesota, with the help of my friend and Viking colleague Paul Wiggin. Paul was a longtime NFL player, former head coach at Stanford University and the Kansas City Chiefs, and a great coach. We were like the Odd Couple, with Paul playing Felix and me in the role of Oscar; he was keeping everything clean and I was messing everything up. We spent a great deal of time together, and of course we shared stories about working for other teams.
Late one night at the office, Paul told me how, when he’d been in charge of the service teams as an assistant coach at the 49ers, he used to give out an award to the player who practiced the hardest. It was such a small thing that it was almost silly. The player who worked the hardest earned the title of “eager Beaver.” We laughed about it, but I listened when Paul told me that he’d gotten some really positive results with his gimmick. He had brought it up as a funny story, but I saw it as another possible way to create a competitive environment. It was a lesson I was careful not to forget.
When I left Minnesota to go to the Jets as defensive coordinator, one of my highest priorities was coming up with a way to emphasize the importance of forcing turnovers, and after giving it some thought I decided to take a page from Paul’s book and institute my own award, Beaver of the Week. We started with the lesson that the beaver is the most diligent worker in the animal kingdom, and the player who was able to force the first fumble that was recovered by us would earn the Beaver of the Week award. We found a stuffed toy beaver that we put in the winner’s locker each week. Like Paul’s version of the contest, it was no big deal, but it stuck. And over time, the Beaver took on a life of its own. Somehow, part of the lore was that no one was allowed to talk about the Beaver outside of our meeting room. We would never talk to the media about it, never speak about what it was. We made it our little secret. The media suspected there was something about a beaver, but no one would ever tell them. I think that secrecy was actually part of what made it work so well. The Beaver gave our guys something to compete for, and it also gave us a common experience that no one outside our circle could share. It really was the best of both worlds.
Ultimately, the Beaver phenomenon outgrew the locker room, and it got so big that it followed us everywhere we went. Each game, after the first fumble recovery, it would get tossed onto the field—which was totally illegal, of course. And all of a sudden a second competition evolved, as we had to get the Beaver off the field before the referees spotted it. This wasn’t always as easy as it sounds.
We were playing the Patriots in New England and had just forced a fumble during the first quarter. Greg Robinson, one of our defensive coaches at the time, had the Beaver on a rope hanging from his belt, and in an excess of enthusiasm he threw it out there a little too far—and it landed right at the feet of a referee on national television! The poor official couldn’t figure out whether to throw a penalty or not, and the legend of the Beaver grew.
It was a little thing, but it helped keep us focused on what I had decided was important to our success. In this case it was turnovers, but it could have been anything. What mattered was that we did everything in our power to focus the players on our priority and have them buy into it without worrying whether it was silly or not. I think anyone who was on the team back then would tell you that it was more than just a fun distraction; it helped us play better football.
Even though we were developing an unconventional approach, I believed that these shared experiences built trust within our team, an essential part of being successful. I wanted the coaches and players to know that I had the utmost confidence in them, so they could work hard and enjoy the ride. This laid the foundation for what I thought I needed to succeed as a head coach.
After the annual NFL draft and our fall training camp, it was finally time for our first game of the season, and it was one to remember. The date was Sunday, September 4, 1994, and my first game as a head coach of the New York Jets was against the Buffalo Bills. The Bills were then coached by the great Marv Levy, and they had a roster full of Pro Bowl players, such as Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, and Bruce Smith. They had been winning for years and had just appeared in four straight Super Bowls. Their organization set the bar in the league, and their “K-Gun” offense was as difficult to defend against as any offense I had ever seen.
We were in a rebuilding mode in New York, trying to put together something that would give us some substance and momentum. We beat the Bills that day 23–3. It was a huge victory and a great moment for us. After the game, I was on cloud nine. I was 1-0 as a head coach and confidant that we would have a winning season.
That night after the game, like I’ve done on many occasions, I went back into the stadium. When the crowds are gone, and the only people around are the guys sweeping up, there’s a special quiet in the air that speaks to me in a way that nothing else does. That’s exactly what I did on this occasion—I was hoping to hang on to such a great feeling just a little bit longer.
After a couple of minutes, I turned to walk back toward our team buses. I noticed for the first time all of Buffalo’s division championship banners on display—and it dawned on me that, while we had just won a great game, since Coach Levy had been there, they had put up winning season after winning season, division championship after division championship. There must have been six or seven of them up there. And as I stood there congratulating myself on my brand-new 1-0 record as an NFL head coach, it hit me: Now that’s success. Those guys had shown that they had what it took to continue to win year after year, in an almost permanent state of winning.
It would be years before the phrase “Win Forever” formed as a philosophy for me, but from that day forward, the image of those championship banners lined up one next to the other at Rich Stadium was fixed in my mind. During my time with the Jets, the San Francisco 49ers, and later the New England Patriots, I kept returning to that moment. It was something I knew was important, although at the time I couldn’t quite put it in its place.
After that first game, our season continued to be promising. Our team had come together and we started 6-5 in the difficult AFC East. In many ways the season at that point actually seemed to be shaping up better than our record showed.
Then came the Miami game. We were playing at home for first place in the division against the Dolphins and Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino in front of the largest home crowd to date, 75,606. We were up 24–21 with twenty-two seconds left and Miami had the ball at our eight-yard line. With the clock winding down, Marino yelled, “Clock, clock!” signaling that he was about to spike the ball and thus stop the clock. Instead, Marino faked the spike and threw a beautiful fade route to Mark Ingram for a touchdown. “The fake spike” is justifiably remembered as one of the all-time great bait-and-switch plays in NFL history. It was also a devastating loss for our team, and we were never able to recover our momentum. We went on to lose our next four games to finish a once promising season 6-10.
As tough as it was for us, what really worried me were the decisions we were going to have to make in the off-season. The new salary cap had just gone into effect, and to make matters worse, a few of the veteran leaders on our team were approaching the end of their careers, and it was not likely that we were going to keep them.
As we were working our way through it early in the off-season, and as I was dreading a few of those personnel decisions, I soon found out that it would not be my problem.
Late one afternoon in early January, I was summoned to Dick Steinberg’s office, a more or less daily occurrence in those days. Dick, the general manager at the time, had hired me for the head coaching job, and I knew he was as stressed out as I was about the future of our veterans and the direction of the organization. I also knew he believed there was a light at the end of the tunnel and trusted that we were on our way to getting there. I assumed this was another one of our many strategy sessions.
I walked across the hall into his office, and as I entered, Dick was sitting at his desk with his head down, avoiding eye contact with me. Right away, something didn’t feel right, but I still had no idea what was up. Then, looking around, I saw Leon Hess sitting all the way across the room from Dick in a single chair, with another chair in front of him. Gesturing toward the chair, Leon said, “Pete, come over here and sit down.”
I crossed the room and sat down, wondering what this was all about. True to form, Leon didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “In the business world,” he said, “a man in your situation would resign. But I know you’re not going to do that, so I’m going to have to let you go.”
I was caught completely off guard and couldn’t believe my ears.
A man in my situation?
Was he serious? I had been in the job for less than a year, and here I was being blindsided! I couldn’t think of how to respond, but it was clear that nothing I said would make any difference at this point. All I could see in Leon’s eyes was that he had made up his mind.
At first I was in total disbelief.
My very next thought was, This might be the best thing that ever happened to me. After all, I had a four-year contract with three more years left on it, and this guy was letting me go. Rebuilding a team with an owner who doesn’t see eye to eye with you is an uphill battle in the best of circumstances, and while I was looking forward to the challenge, there was no question that it would have been incredibly tough to pull off. Moments earlier I had been full of dread about what the next season would hold, and all of a sudden everything had changed. In any case, there wasn’t any point in arguing.
I didn’t say anything. I just walked out. Later I heard that he had made the decision to get rid of me after learning that Rich Kotite had been fired from the Philadelphia Eagles and would be available to step in. Personally, though, I think he had more or less made up his mind during that first team meeting, considering we never spoke one time during the entire season. In that first meeting, I think he came to the conclusion that I was somehow not right for the situation, or possibly not serious enough, to be the head coach his organization needed.
At the press conference when he announced the change, Leon Hess put on a big smile for the occasion. “I’m eighty years old,” he told the reporters. “I want results now, not five years from now.” Fair enough, but unfortunately for everyone involved, results were exactly what he got—dramatic results, just not the ones he wanted. The Jets went 4-28 for the next two seasons, after which Kotite was unceremoniously fired as well.
And where was I during that press conference? After I walked out of Dick’s office, I rounded up my wife and kids, and within days we were on our way to Disney World, obviously seeking a drastic change of scenery.
Was Leon wrong to fire me? Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. It was his team, and he had the right to do whatever he wanted with it. A more interesting question is whether he made that decision because of what I was doing or because of how I was doing it. If I am being completely honest, I would have to say that it probably was a bit of both. I was new in the role of head coach and did not have my act completely together. That said, I still think that we were on the right track, and I wish I could have seen how it all would have played out, given more time.
In the long run, I have to admit that I probably contributed to my firing by the Jets because I didn’t do everything I could have done to make sure the owner understood my vision. Looking back, I didn’t understand the scope of my approach well enough to explain it to him in a convincing way. I mistakenly thought that having the team’s attention was enough. I still had some work to do when it came to defining and articulating my philosophy.