- Joined
- Feb 9, 2014
- Messages
- 20,922
- Name
- Peter
https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/05/05/son-of-bum-wade-phillips-book-excerpt-redskins-interview
Why couldn't Wade Phillips find work the year before he built a Super Bowl-winning defense?
WADE PHILLIPS/May 5th, 2017
Photo: Coomer, Brett, Phillips Family Photo
The following is excerpted from Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life by Wade Phillips Copyright © 2017. Reprinted with permission of Diversion Books. All rights reserved.
I couldn’t believe that I was going to spend an entire offseason without working for an NFL team, but that was what happened in 2014 after the Texans fired me. I’m not sure what was keeping me from being hired, although my age of sixty-seven probably didn’t help. I also had a year left on my contract at a pretty big salary.
Late in my second season with the Texans, Tampa Bay wanted to talk to me about its head coaching job when we were in the playoffs. Bob McNair, our team owner, said to me, “You know, I’d rather you not do that, because of the playoffs and so forth.” So I didn’t talk with the Buccaneers.
It probably would have been my last shot at getting a head coaching job. However, Mr. McNair did come back and give me a new deal that made me the highest-paid assistant in the league. It was nice of him to do that. It was a reward for turning around a defense that went from thirtieth in the NFL to second in our first year and then ranked seventh in each of the next two seasons.
But when other teams heard about my salary after I got fired, they said, “You know, we can’t pay you what you were making in Houston.”
After the 2014 season, a few assistant coaches had called to say if they got a head coaching job, they’d like to have me as their defensive coordinator. Tony Sparano had been the interim head coach in Oakland and thought the Raiders would hire him.
Pat Shurmur, who had been the offensive coordinator in Philadelphia after two years as head coach in Cleveland, had another shot at a head coaching position. Frank Reich, who was the offensive coordinator in San Diego, also called me. He thought he had a chance with the Jets or Buffalo. All three of those guys had interviews, but none of them were hired.
I felt my record spoke for itself. I had consistently coached very good defensive teams. Beginning in 2005 with the Bills, I went to the playoffs in my first year with six teams in a row. I thought real football people around the league would recognize those accomplishments. I thought everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t. The 2015 offseason began and I was still out of work.
Finally, I got a call to interview with the Washington Redskins. Jay Gruden, their head coach, had fired his defensive coordinator, Jim Haslett, and wanted to talk with me about the job. By this point my son Wes was the Redskins’ tight ends coach, so I was looking forward to the possibility of us working together again.
But my interview with Jay was strange, to say the least. I’d had unusual interviews before—like the one with Marty Schottenheimer that took forever because he asked a million questions about the 3–4 defense—but I had never gone through something quite like this.
When Jay was the offensive coordinator in Cincinnati and I was with the Texans, I faced the Bengals twice in the playoffs, after the 2011 and 2012 seasons, and beat them both times—31–10 and 19–13. I felt he knew my credentials and might have been impressed with the things we were able to do in the previous three games in which we had beaten the Bengals, including one game during the regular season.
Bob Levey/Getty Images
We watched a lot of tape of the Texans’ games versus his offense. It seemed to me a lot of the plays were of when Cincinnati did well. Most of the interview was about that. I thought we should have talked more about philosophy, technique, concepts, and my record, but he was the one interviewing me.
After the interview I told Wes of my disappointment. I felt Jay didn’t have as much regard for my coaching as I’d hoped he would. He ended up hiring Joe Barry, a friend of his, to be defensive coordinator. Joe had been with the Chargers, whose defensive coordinator was John Pagano. John had been my linebackers coach when I was the defensive coordinator in San Diego, so Joe basically learned my defensive system through John.
Although I didn’t get the job, I was happy for Joe because I think he’s a good, young coach. Of course, the main reason I had even considered going to Washington was for the chance to work with my son again. But I know Wes has enjoyed working with Jay, and they’ve done a good job with the Redskins.
Meanwhile, the Broncos hired Gary Kubiak to replace John Fox as their head coach. They were trying to get Vance Joseph to be their defensive coordinator. He was the secondary coach for the Bengals and he’d had the same job when I was with the Texans.
But Mike Brown, the Bengals’ owner, wouldn’t let Vance out of his contract. (After spending the 2016 season as defensive coordinator for the Dolphins, Vance would become the Broncos’ head coach in 2017 as the replacement for Gary, who decided to retire.) After that, the Broncos called me, so I was obviously the second choice.
I was disappointed that they thought somebody else would do a better job, especially because I had been with Kub in Houston, but that was the way it was. It’s just like when somebody takes your place after you’re fired, or you take somebody else’s place and you get the job. You do the best you can and you don’t worry about how you got the job.
You just make the most of the opportunity. It didn’t make me more determined to succeed. It didn’t make me want to try harder—if you’re not already doing the best you can, you shouldn’t be in it. If you don’t love it enough to deal with the fact that you’re always in danger of being fired or that you’re going to be passed over for jobs, you shouldn’t be in it.
Read an Excerpt From Wade Phillips' New Book "Son of Bum"
By TheRams.com
Rams Defensive Coordinator Wade Phillips may be new to LA, but he's hardly new to football. Phillips is recognized as one of the greatest coaching minds in football history, achieving numerous accolades (including a Super Bowl victory two seasons ago with the Denver Broncos) over a career that spans decades.
Phillips has also collected a myriad of stories along the way and he shares them in his new book "Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life" while paying tribute to his late father, Bum Phillips -- another legendary figure in NFL history. The following is an excerpt from the book that includes a window into how Bum impacted Wade's life and coaching style early on.
Bum Phillips was my hero. Pretty much everything I know about life, football, and coaching, I learned from him.
My dad shaped me as a man, as a husband, as a father, and as a football coach. It was a non-stop education that played out first in the field house at Nederland, Texas, High School – where he held his first coaching job and I always came by to visit from when I was seven – all the way through the time we coached together in college and the NFL. And that education continued even after he retired.
Dad’s actual name was Oail Andrew Phillips. There are a couple of different stories about how he became known as Bum. I’m going to set the record straight by telling the real one. For one thing, he needed a nickname, because no one could pronounce Oail, which sounds like “Uhl.” His daddy was Oail, Sr., but everybody called him “Flop.”
The version Dad liked to tell about the origin of Bum was that when his sister, Edrina, was three, she stammered and when she tried to say, “brother,” it came out, “b-b- b-bum.” The real story – and I know this because it came from his mother – was that when he was a little kid, he got into a nest of bumble bees. It was a scary experience that stayed with him.
In the country, they don’t say, “bumble bees.” They say, “bummel bees.” After that, his mom and dad always would say, “Bummel! Bummel! Bummel!” to try to scare him. Eventually, his mother started calling him, “Bummel.” But Aunt JoAnnette couldn’t say it when she was a little kid. She could only say, “Bum.”
Even though the other explanation makes no sense, I think Dad liked telling the story that way because he didn’t want to go through the trouble of telling the longer version every time. He also liked to say that one of the best things he ever did for me was not naming me Oail III.
Daddy was a genuine cowboy. He wore a ten10-gallon hat and cowboy boots; my mother claimed the only time she ever saw him wear dress shoes was on their wedding day. He rode horses and chewed tobacco. His granddaddy was a rancher, and that was the life Daddy knew – ranching and football.
He wasn’t getting paid a lot when he first started coaching at the high school level, so he would compete in rodeos on the weekend. He was a bulldogger. That’s where you jump off the horse, grab a steer by the horns, turn his neck, and take him to the ground. Whoever did it in the fastest time would win.
In 1947, when I was fixing to be born, Dad was working on the Edgar Brown Ranch in Orange, Texas. The ranch belonged to one of the two richest families in town. The other was the Starks. The Browns and the Starks both had ranches, and they basically owned Orange at that time.
Daddy would always look for ways to earn some extra income working on the ranch. People would pasture their horses there, and there was one time when a world-champion quarter horse happened to be on the ranch. In fact, he had just set the world’s record in the quarter mile.
Back then, there weren’t horse-racing tracks everywhere, so people would stage weekend match races where you could bet on your own horse. Dad and one of the other ranch hands decided they would take the champion quarter horse to a match race in Louisiana, just over the Texas border. Dad was going to bet all the money he had on him, which wasn’t a lot.
The people running those match races wouldn’t hesitate to pull a gun on you and shoot you if they thought you were cheating them. Fearing that someone might recognize the horse’s markings, my dad and his friend used brown shoe polish to cover a big white spot on the front of his head.
They also told the guy who would be riding him to pull back as much as possible. They didn’t want to win by such a wide margin and
raise suspicions.
The horse won and as soon as he crossed the finish line, Daddy and the other guy ran over and threw blankets on him. They wanted to get him out of there as soon as they could, especially when they noticed that the horse’s sweat was making the shoe polish come off. They ran him into the trailer, collected their winnings, and took off.
My dad’s share was about $150 … just enough to pay the hospital bill when I was born. Nice to know I at least had a sure thing bringing me into the world.
Of the many qualities I admired about my dad, the biggest one I admired most was his great common sense. He always seemed to point something out or make a suggestion that would cause everyone around him to say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” His real gift was knowing what things to do and when to do them. I like to think I emulate that.
A lot of people think coaching is hollering or screaming at somebody. My dad always said – and I’ve always said this, too – “Coaching isn’t bitching. There’s no use bitching about something that’s already happened.” That’s the way a lot of coaches coach.
They bitch at guys after the mistake happens, calling them names or whatever, instead of teaching them how to do it right in the first place. The object is to get them to be better players. When you spend more time harping on what they do wrong than showing them how to do it right, you aren’t coaching. You’re just bitching.
My dad was unlike a lot of coaches in another way: he had no problem with being friends with his players. He believed you shouldn’t be afraid to get close to somebody. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either. Dad was approachable to all his players, and I think that’s a big reason why they played hard for him.
When players know that you’re pulling for them and trying to get them to do their best, that’s usually a pretty good combination. I know I’d rather play for somebody I like than somebody I don’t like. Common sense, right?
Daddy never believed in using fear as motivation, and he was right about that. These are grown men, and more than a few have seen some of the worst things that life can dish out long before they ever get to the NFL. They’re not scared of you. They’re not scared of anyone.
It’s part of the mindset that goes with being a football player. There was a time when coaches could get away with threatening players by saying they would cut them. If you do that now, that player’s going to say, “Go ahead and cut me. I’ll just play somewhere else.”
Using threats and kicking guys in the butt? I just don’t think you get the most out of your team that way.
On the flip side of the coin, coaching is about being honest, too. If players make a mistake or they need to hustle more or they need to do things a certain way, you’ve got to be honest with them about that. You can’t just say, “Hey, I want to be your friend and I’m only going to tell you what you want to hear.” But there’s a difference between that and constantly bitching at them.
Dad warned me early on that there would be a backlash for taking more of a player-friendly approach. “People will say you’re too soft because you get along with the players,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter as long as they respect what you say and do what you say. After that, you just let them do the things that they can do well. You get a good player and a good team that way.”
Nice guys can finish first. That’s what Daddy always believed. That’s what I’ve always believed. You’re not trying to get all the players to like you, because that’s not going to happen. But as long as they know you respect them, they seem to reciprocate.
He just had a great feel for how to connect with his players and get the most out of them without trying to jam things down their throat. Daddy never talked about winning and losing. He just talked about playing your best doing your best, working to be the best – all those things. You never heard him say things like, “Now, we’re gonna go out and kick their asses!” Or, “We’re better than them!” Or, “If we do this, we’re gonna win!”
He just talked about being the best you can be in every way possible – being the best team, being a family, being a great teammate.
You can purchase "Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life" by clicking here.
https://sportsday.dallasnews.com/da...wboys-began-shift-wade-phillips-jason-garrett
Book excerpt: How balance of power on Cowboys began to shift from Wade Phillips to Jason Garrett
By SportsDayDFW.com
With one year left on my contract, I had my agent ask Jerry for an extension on my deal. It seemed like things were good, but they weren't. Or at least, they weren't good enough. The year before, when we went 9-7, the press wanted to fire me. Now here I was, with a 33-15 record and a playoff win in three seasons, and coming off an 11-5 year. I thought I'd get Jerry to extend my contract beyond the 2010 season. But he wouldn't.
Another factor was Jason Garrett had some head coaching opportunities. He got an offer from the Baltimore Ravens [in 2008], and his agent evidently went back to Jerry and said, "If you give him what Baltimore is paying him as a head coach, he'll stay in Dallas as offensive coordinator." Jerry matched the offer and now Jason was making more than me.
I asked Jerry about it and he said, "Well, you know, we had to keep him."
"That just doesn't seem right to me," I said.
After our 9-7 season, when the offense struggled, Jerry said that maybe he should have let Jason take the Baltimore job rather than give him the big raise.
Jerry did agree to give me more money. He did it by adding an option year to the two remaining seasons on my contract.
It included a bonus that would only be paid if I finished the season as head coach.
"This is just for if you murdered somebody, or something like that, you wouldn't get the bonus," Jerry said. "And it's our option to pick up that extra year."
"Well, then that's not giving me another year if it's your option," I said.
I took the deal, although I still didn't think it was right. Jerry can do what he wants to do as owner, obviously. I just didn't think it was right that an assistant coach was making more than a head coach. He could have paid me more. He had plenty of money. Still does. But he's a businessman and his business side made that decision.
SportsDay Cowboys beat writer Brandon George had a lengthy Q&A with Phillips about the book and his career. Below are some highlights.
How did this book idea come about?
After winning the Super Bowl, they came to me and said they would like a book. I said, 'Everything is pretty much documented about the Super Bowl and winning it, our team and all the great things that happened. I'd really rather do something about my dad.' They said that would be a good idea and we started working on it then.
It's been about a year and a half. It takes a while to get it done, but it's something that I kind of wanted to do family-wise and football-wise. There aren't many coaches who had a dad who coached and he was your high school coach, your college coach and you worked with him for like 11 years and I have a son [Wes] who worked with me for Dallas. It's kind of a unique situation. I think the Phillipses and the Shulas are the only three-generation NFL families, so all that tied together.
What's your favorite story in the book?
There are a bunch of them in there. Earl Campbell is probably the funniest one or one of the funniest ones, when he couldn't run the mile, it's the test for the preseason to see if players are in shape, and he couldn't make the mile. Of course he wasn't a miler, and the press all ran to my dad and said, 'Bum, Bum, what are you going to do? Earl can't make the mile.'
He said, 'Hell, if it's third-and-a-mile, we won't give it to him.' Then he said, 'We're going to give it to him the rest of the time,' and we did. That was just one of the many with him, with my dad, he came up with a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff is in the book.
Click here to enjoy the full Q&A between George and Phillips.
Why couldn't Wade Phillips find work the year before he built a Super Bowl-winning defense?
WADE PHILLIPS/May 5th, 2017
Photo: Coomer, Brett, Phillips Family Photo
The following is excerpted from Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life by Wade Phillips Copyright © 2017. Reprinted with permission of Diversion Books. All rights reserved.
I couldn’t believe that I was going to spend an entire offseason without working for an NFL team, but that was what happened in 2014 after the Texans fired me. I’m not sure what was keeping me from being hired, although my age of sixty-seven probably didn’t help. I also had a year left on my contract at a pretty big salary.
Late in my second season with the Texans, Tampa Bay wanted to talk to me about its head coaching job when we were in the playoffs. Bob McNair, our team owner, said to me, “You know, I’d rather you not do that, because of the playoffs and so forth.” So I didn’t talk with the Buccaneers.
It probably would have been my last shot at getting a head coaching job. However, Mr. McNair did come back and give me a new deal that made me the highest-paid assistant in the league. It was nice of him to do that. It was a reward for turning around a defense that went from thirtieth in the NFL to second in our first year and then ranked seventh in each of the next two seasons.
But when other teams heard about my salary after I got fired, they said, “You know, we can’t pay you what you were making in Houston.”
After the 2014 season, a few assistant coaches had called to say if they got a head coaching job, they’d like to have me as their defensive coordinator. Tony Sparano had been the interim head coach in Oakland and thought the Raiders would hire him.
Pat Shurmur, who had been the offensive coordinator in Philadelphia after two years as head coach in Cleveland, had another shot at a head coaching position. Frank Reich, who was the offensive coordinator in San Diego, also called me. He thought he had a chance with the Jets or Buffalo. All three of those guys had interviews, but none of them were hired.
I felt my record spoke for itself. I had consistently coached very good defensive teams. Beginning in 2005 with the Bills, I went to the playoffs in my first year with six teams in a row. I thought real football people around the league would recognize those accomplishments. I thought everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t. The 2015 offseason began and I was still out of work.
Finally, I got a call to interview with the Washington Redskins. Jay Gruden, their head coach, had fired his defensive coordinator, Jim Haslett, and wanted to talk with me about the job. By this point my son Wes was the Redskins’ tight ends coach, so I was looking forward to the possibility of us working together again.
But my interview with Jay was strange, to say the least. I’d had unusual interviews before—like the one with Marty Schottenheimer that took forever because he asked a million questions about the 3–4 defense—but I had never gone through something quite like this.
When Jay was the offensive coordinator in Cincinnati and I was with the Texans, I faced the Bengals twice in the playoffs, after the 2011 and 2012 seasons, and beat them both times—31–10 and 19–13. I felt he knew my credentials and might have been impressed with the things we were able to do in the previous three games in which we had beaten the Bengals, including one game during the regular season.
Bob Levey/Getty Images
We watched a lot of tape of the Texans’ games versus his offense. It seemed to me a lot of the plays were of when Cincinnati did well. Most of the interview was about that. I thought we should have talked more about philosophy, technique, concepts, and my record, but he was the one interviewing me.
After the interview I told Wes of my disappointment. I felt Jay didn’t have as much regard for my coaching as I’d hoped he would. He ended up hiring Joe Barry, a friend of his, to be defensive coordinator. Joe had been with the Chargers, whose defensive coordinator was John Pagano. John had been my linebackers coach when I was the defensive coordinator in San Diego, so Joe basically learned my defensive system through John.
Although I didn’t get the job, I was happy for Joe because I think he’s a good, young coach. Of course, the main reason I had even considered going to Washington was for the chance to work with my son again. But I know Wes has enjoyed working with Jay, and they’ve done a good job with the Redskins.
Meanwhile, the Broncos hired Gary Kubiak to replace John Fox as their head coach. They were trying to get Vance Joseph to be their defensive coordinator. He was the secondary coach for the Bengals and he’d had the same job when I was with the Texans.
But Mike Brown, the Bengals’ owner, wouldn’t let Vance out of his contract. (After spending the 2016 season as defensive coordinator for the Dolphins, Vance would become the Broncos’ head coach in 2017 as the replacement for Gary, who decided to retire.) After that, the Broncos called me, so I was obviously the second choice.
I was disappointed that they thought somebody else would do a better job, especially because I had been with Kub in Houston, but that was the way it was. It’s just like when somebody takes your place after you’re fired, or you take somebody else’s place and you get the job. You do the best you can and you don’t worry about how you got the job.
You just make the most of the opportunity. It didn’t make me more determined to succeed. It didn’t make me want to try harder—if you’re not already doing the best you can, you shouldn’t be in it. If you don’t love it enough to deal with the fact that you’re always in danger of being fired or that you’re going to be passed over for jobs, you shouldn’t be in it.
Read an Excerpt From Wade Phillips' New Book "Son of Bum"
By TheRams.com
Rams Defensive Coordinator Wade Phillips may be new to LA, but he's hardly new to football. Phillips is recognized as one of the greatest coaching minds in football history, achieving numerous accolades (including a Super Bowl victory two seasons ago with the Denver Broncos) over a career that spans decades.
Phillips has also collected a myriad of stories along the way and he shares them in his new book "Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life" while paying tribute to his late father, Bum Phillips -- another legendary figure in NFL history. The following is an excerpt from the book that includes a window into how Bum impacted Wade's life and coaching style early on.
Bum Phillips was my hero. Pretty much everything I know about life, football, and coaching, I learned from him.
My dad shaped me as a man, as a husband, as a father, and as a football coach. It was a non-stop education that played out first in the field house at Nederland, Texas, High School – where he held his first coaching job and I always came by to visit from when I was seven – all the way through the time we coached together in college and the NFL. And that education continued even after he retired.
Dad’s actual name was Oail Andrew Phillips. There are a couple of different stories about how he became known as Bum. I’m going to set the record straight by telling the real one. For one thing, he needed a nickname, because no one could pronounce Oail, which sounds like “Uhl.” His daddy was Oail, Sr., but everybody called him “Flop.”
The version Dad liked to tell about the origin of Bum was that when his sister, Edrina, was three, she stammered and when she tried to say, “brother,” it came out, “b-b- b-bum.” The real story – and I know this because it came from his mother – was that when he was a little kid, he got into a nest of bumble bees. It was a scary experience that stayed with him.
In the country, they don’t say, “bumble bees.” They say, “bummel bees.” After that, his mom and dad always would say, “Bummel! Bummel! Bummel!” to try to scare him. Eventually, his mother started calling him, “Bummel.” But Aunt JoAnnette couldn’t say it when she was a little kid. She could only say, “Bum.”
Even though the other explanation makes no sense, I think Dad liked telling the story that way because he didn’t want to go through the trouble of telling the longer version every time. He also liked to say that one of the best things he ever did for me was not naming me Oail III.
Daddy was a genuine cowboy. He wore a ten10-gallon hat and cowboy boots; my mother claimed the only time she ever saw him wear dress shoes was on their wedding day. He rode horses and chewed tobacco. His granddaddy was a rancher, and that was the life Daddy knew – ranching and football.
He wasn’t getting paid a lot when he first started coaching at the high school level, so he would compete in rodeos on the weekend. He was a bulldogger. That’s where you jump off the horse, grab a steer by the horns, turn his neck, and take him to the ground. Whoever did it in the fastest time would win.
In 1947, when I was fixing to be born, Dad was working on the Edgar Brown Ranch in Orange, Texas. The ranch belonged to one of the two richest families in town. The other was the Starks. The Browns and the Starks both had ranches, and they basically owned Orange at that time.
Daddy would always look for ways to earn some extra income working on the ranch. People would pasture their horses there, and there was one time when a world-champion quarter horse happened to be on the ranch. In fact, he had just set the world’s record in the quarter mile.
Back then, there weren’t horse-racing tracks everywhere, so people would stage weekend match races where you could bet on your own horse. Dad and one of the other ranch hands decided they would take the champion quarter horse to a match race in Louisiana, just over the Texas border. Dad was going to bet all the money he had on him, which wasn’t a lot.
The people running those match races wouldn’t hesitate to pull a gun on you and shoot you if they thought you were cheating them. Fearing that someone might recognize the horse’s markings, my dad and his friend used brown shoe polish to cover a big white spot on the front of his head.
They also told the guy who would be riding him to pull back as much as possible. They didn’t want to win by such a wide margin and
raise suspicions.
The horse won and as soon as he crossed the finish line, Daddy and the other guy ran over and threw blankets on him. They wanted to get him out of there as soon as they could, especially when they noticed that the horse’s sweat was making the shoe polish come off. They ran him into the trailer, collected their winnings, and took off.
My dad’s share was about $150 … just enough to pay the hospital bill when I was born. Nice to know I at least had a sure thing bringing me into the world.
Of the many qualities I admired about my dad, the biggest one I admired most was his great common sense. He always seemed to point something out or make a suggestion that would cause everyone around him to say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” His real gift was knowing what things to do and when to do them. I like to think I emulate that.
A lot of people think coaching is hollering or screaming at somebody. My dad always said – and I’ve always said this, too – “Coaching isn’t bitching. There’s no use bitching about something that’s already happened.” That’s the way a lot of coaches coach.
They bitch at guys after the mistake happens, calling them names or whatever, instead of teaching them how to do it right in the first place. The object is to get them to be better players. When you spend more time harping on what they do wrong than showing them how to do it right, you aren’t coaching. You’re just bitching.
My dad was unlike a lot of coaches in another way: he had no problem with being friends with his players. He believed you shouldn’t be afraid to get close to somebody. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either. Dad was approachable to all his players, and I think that’s a big reason why they played hard for him.
When players know that you’re pulling for them and trying to get them to do their best, that’s usually a pretty good combination. I know I’d rather play for somebody I like than somebody I don’t like. Common sense, right?
Daddy never believed in using fear as motivation, and he was right about that. These are grown men, and more than a few have seen some of the worst things that life can dish out long before they ever get to the NFL. They’re not scared of you. They’re not scared of anyone.
It’s part of the mindset that goes with being a football player. There was a time when coaches could get away with threatening players by saying they would cut them. If you do that now, that player’s going to say, “Go ahead and cut me. I’ll just play somewhere else.”
Using threats and kicking guys in the butt? I just don’t think you get the most out of your team that way.
On the flip side of the coin, coaching is about being honest, too. If players make a mistake or they need to hustle more or they need to do things a certain way, you’ve got to be honest with them about that. You can’t just say, “Hey, I want to be your friend and I’m only going to tell you what you want to hear.” But there’s a difference between that and constantly bitching at them.
Dad warned me early on that there would be a backlash for taking more of a player-friendly approach. “People will say you’re too soft because you get along with the players,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter as long as they respect what you say and do what you say. After that, you just let them do the things that they can do well. You get a good player and a good team that way.”
Nice guys can finish first. That’s what Daddy always believed. That’s what I’ve always believed. You’re not trying to get all the players to like you, because that’s not going to happen. But as long as they know you respect them, they seem to reciprocate.
He just had a great feel for how to connect with his players and get the most out of them without trying to jam things down their throat. Daddy never talked about winning and losing. He just talked about playing your best doing your best, working to be the best – all those things. You never heard him say things like, “Now, we’re gonna go out and kick their asses!” Or, “We’re better than them!” Or, “If we do this, we’re gonna win!”
He just talked about being the best you can be in every way possible – being the best team, being a family, being a great teammate.
You can purchase "Son of Bum: Lessons My Dad Taught Me About Football and Life" by clicking here.
https://sportsday.dallasnews.com/da...wboys-began-shift-wade-phillips-jason-garrett
Book excerpt: How balance of power on Cowboys began to shift from Wade Phillips to Jason Garrett
By SportsDayDFW.com
With one year left on my contract, I had my agent ask Jerry for an extension on my deal. It seemed like things were good, but they weren't. Or at least, they weren't good enough. The year before, when we went 9-7, the press wanted to fire me. Now here I was, with a 33-15 record and a playoff win in three seasons, and coming off an 11-5 year. I thought I'd get Jerry to extend my contract beyond the 2010 season. But he wouldn't.
Another factor was Jason Garrett had some head coaching opportunities. He got an offer from the Baltimore Ravens [in 2008], and his agent evidently went back to Jerry and said, "If you give him what Baltimore is paying him as a head coach, he'll stay in Dallas as offensive coordinator." Jerry matched the offer and now Jason was making more than me.
I asked Jerry about it and he said, "Well, you know, we had to keep him."
"That just doesn't seem right to me," I said.
After our 9-7 season, when the offense struggled, Jerry said that maybe he should have let Jason take the Baltimore job rather than give him the big raise.
Jerry did agree to give me more money. He did it by adding an option year to the two remaining seasons on my contract.
It included a bonus that would only be paid if I finished the season as head coach.
"This is just for if you murdered somebody, or something like that, you wouldn't get the bonus," Jerry said. "And it's our option to pick up that extra year."
"Well, then that's not giving me another year if it's your option," I said.
I took the deal, although I still didn't think it was right. Jerry can do what he wants to do as owner, obviously. I just didn't think it was right that an assistant coach was making more than a head coach. He could have paid me more. He had plenty of money. Still does. But he's a businessman and his business side made that decision.
SportsDay Cowboys beat writer Brandon George had a lengthy Q&A with Phillips about the book and his career. Below are some highlights.
How did this book idea come about?
After winning the Super Bowl, they came to me and said they would like a book. I said, 'Everything is pretty much documented about the Super Bowl and winning it, our team and all the great things that happened. I'd really rather do something about my dad.' They said that would be a good idea and we started working on it then.
It's been about a year and a half. It takes a while to get it done, but it's something that I kind of wanted to do family-wise and football-wise. There aren't many coaches who had a dad who coached and he was your high school coach, your college coach and you worked with him for like 11 years and I have a son [Wes] who worked with me for Dallas. It's kind of a unique situation. I think the Phillipses and the Shulas are the only three-generation NFL families, so all that tied together.
What's your favorite story in the book?
There are a bunch of them in there. Earl Campbell is probably the funniest one or one of the funniest ones, when he couldn't run the mile, it's the test for the preseason to see if players are in shape, and he couldn't make the mile. Of course he wasn't a miler, and the press all ran to my dad and said, 'Bum, Bum, what are you going to do? Earl can't make the mile.'
He said, 'Hell, if it's third-and-a-mile, we won't give it to him.' Then he said, 'We're going to give it to him the rest of the time,' and we did. That was just one of the many with him, with my dad, he came up with a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff is in the book.
Click here to enjoy the full Q&A between George and Phillips.
