Tribal Warfare
01-11-2012, 01:08 AM
Chiefs turn to Crennel’s experience (http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/09/3361951/chiefs-turn-to-crennels-experience.html)
Coaching veteran says time in Cleveland, though unsuccessful, taught him valuable lessons.
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The lasting image that Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli has of Romeo Crennel is from a photograph taken in the mid-1970s. Crennel, then an assistant coach at Texas Tech, wore a bushy mustache and a big smile while he posed with the young daughter of colleague Bill Parcells.
“It’s quite the image,” Pioli said.
Decades later, Pioli is married to Parcells’ daughter, Dallas, and is staking his reputation on the man with the mustache. The times have changed, and Crennel isn’t the young and inexperienced coach he was in the photograph. He has learned from good times and bad, and Pioli announced Monday that he trusts that Crennel has learned enough to be the face — now with only a cropped salt-and-pepper mustache — of the Chiefs’ future.
“I accept the challenge,” Crennel said at the team facility.
The image of Crennel is mostly spotless, and that led the Chiefs to removing the interim tag from Crennel’s title, making him the team’s 12th head coach. Crennel has five Super Bowl championships to his name. He won those as an assistant with the New York Giants, under Parcells, and with the New England Patriots, when he worked alongside Pioli.
But it’s Crennel’s only experience as a head coach that the Chiefs hope he learned most from. During a four-year stint with the Cleveland Browns, Crennel was 24-40. He was seen as a fair and measured but ultimately unsuccessful head coach. The Browns fired him in 2008, a year before he joined the Chiefs as defensive coordinator.
It was a mostly forgettable time, but Crennel said Monday that it was valuable.
“Probably if I hadn’t gone through that experience,” he said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here now. … When you’re in the seat for the first time, there are a lot of things that happen that, even though you’re an assistant and think you have all the answers and know exactly what’s going to happen, you don’t know what’s going to happen — because things occur every day that you’re not quite ready for.”
One of those happened in December 2008, when Browns defensive lineman Shaun Smith and quarterback Brady Quinn fought in the team’s weight room. Smith said Monday that Crennel was calm but firm, and the punishment fit the crime: Both players were fined and held out of a game for their role in the scuffle.
“If you’re a vet,” Smith said, “he’s going to treat you like a vet. He’ll treat you with respect. ‘This is what we expect of you, and this is what you’ve got to do.’ ”
Smith, who referred to Crennel as a “father figure,” respected his former coach enough that he rejoined Crennel last year with the Chiefs. Smith occasionally asked Crennel if he’d like to be a head coach again, and he said he would. Crennel will be one of the NFL’s oldest head coaches — only New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin, 65, is older than the 64-year-old Crennel — but Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said Monday that age didn’t matter.
“ ‘Romeo, why do you want to be head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs?’ ” Hunt recalled asking Crennel during his job interview, followed by his response: “ ‘Because I want to win a Super Bowl as a head coach.’ That spoke volumes to me, and that’s the kind of person that I want leading the franchise.”
Smith now plays for Tennessee, but he said Monday that it was Crennel’s attitude that he valued. He understood how to handle a situation without overreacting.
“This is what players appreciate: Players appreciate honesty, players appreciate you telling them like it is,” Crennel said. “They don’t always want to hear it, but that’s what they appreciate.”
That likely came from Crennel’s upbringing in a military household. His father, Joseph, was in the Army, and it wasn’t uncommon for the elder Crennel to rouse his son from sleep because he had missed a spot while scrubbing the bathroom.
This attention to detail stuck with Crennel, and it helped him to advance quickly in coaching. Texas Tech was his second of 11 stops, and he learned from Parcells and posed for pictures with young admirers. It took him 35 years in coaching before he was hired to lead the Browns in 2005. While there, he wasn’t always supplied with top talent by former general manager Phil Savage, who also spent four seasons in Cleveland before being fired. Crennel also contended with a quarterback controversy when he had to choose between Quinn and Derek Anderson.
Already, Crennel showed that he had learned from at least one of the mistakes he made with the Browns. The uncertainty at quarterback was a hindrance to Cleveland’s turnaround, and Crennel decided shortly after former Chiefs coach Todd Haley was fired last month that a similar decision wouldn’t again disrupt his plans. Crennel benched Tyler Palko, who was 1-3 as a starter, and chose Kyle Orton as the team’s starter. The Chiefs defeated the previously unbeaten Green Bay Packers the following Sunday, and Crennel finished the season 2-1 as interim coach.
It was common to hear players chanting his nickname, “RAC,” after the victories.
“He was put in situations to see him be the head coach and do the head coaching job,” Pioli said Monday. “And as we talked each week during this three-game stretch, we even exchanged ideas and things that had come up in the past that were relevant maybe to the Cleveland situation that he was dealing with now.”
For his part, Pioli learned a few things along the way, too. He will perhaps forever be aligned with Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who, before he won three Super Bowls with New England, also was a failed Browns coach. Pioli downplayed Belichick’s experience as having an effect on Crennel’s promotion, but he admitted that similar coaching turnarounds were “in the back of my head.”
On Monday, Crennel didn’t make many promises. He sidestepped questions about the Chiefs’ timetable to compete for a Super Bowl, who might play quarterback next season, and how his coaching staff might be constructed. He did promise one thing: fairness.
“He knows how to relate to players,” Smith said. “He knows how to get his point across to players, by any means necessary, when he’s a coach. You have no choice but to respect this man.”
Coaching veteran says time in Cleveland, though unsuccessful, taught him valuable lessons.
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star
The lasting image that Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli has of Romeo Crennel is from a photograph taken in the mid-1970s. Crennel, then an assistant coach at Texas Tech, wore a bushy mustache and a big smile while he posed with the young daughter of colleague Bill Parcells.
“It’s quite the image,” Pioli said.
Decades later, Pioli is married to Parcells’ daughter, Dallas, and is staking his reputation on the man with the mustache. The times have changed, and Crennel isn’t the young and inexperienced coach he was in the photograph. He has learned from good times and bad, and Pioli announced Monday that he trusts that Crennel has learned enough to be the face — now with only a cropped salt-and-pepper mustache — of the Chiefs’ future.
“I accept the challenge,” Crennel said at the team facility.
The image of Crennel is mostly spotless, and that led the Chiefs to removing the interim tag from Crennel’s title, making him the team’s 12th head coach. Crennel has five Super Bowl championships to his name. He won those as an assistant with the New York Giants, under Parcells, and with the New England Patriots, when he worked alongside Pioli.
But it’s Crennel’s only experience as a head coach that the Chiefs hope he learned most from. During a four-year stint with the Cleveland Browns, Crennel was 24-40. He was seen as a fair and measured but ultimately unsuccessful head coach. The Browns fired him in 2008, a year before he joined the Chiefs as defensive coordinator.
It was a mostly forgettable time, but Crennel said Monday that it was valuable.
“Probably if I hadn’t gone through that experience,” he said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here now. … When you’re in the seat for the first time, there are a lot of things that happen that, even though you’re an assistant and think you have all the answers and know exactly what’s going to happen, you don’t know what’s going to happen — because things occur every day that you’re not quite ready for.”
One of those happened in December 2008, when Browns defensive lineman Shaun Smith and quarterback Brady Quinn fought in the team’s weight room. Smith said Monday that Crennel was calm but firm, and the punishment fit the crime: Both players were fined and held out of a game for their role in the scuffle.
“If you’re a vet,” Smith said, “he’s going to treat you like a vet. He’ll treat you with respect. ‘This is what we expect of you, and this is what you’ve got to do.’ ”
Smith, who referred to Crennel as a “father figure,” respected his former coach enough that he rejoined Crennel last year with the Chiefs. Smith occasionally asked Crennel if he’d like to be a head coach again, and he said he would. Crennel will be one of the NFL’s oldest head coaches — only New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin, 65, is older than the 64-year-old Crennel — but Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said Monday that age didn’t matter.
“ ‘Romeo, why do you want to be head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs?’ ” Hunt recalled asking Crennel during his job interview, followed by his response: “ ‘Because I want to win a Super Bowl as a head coach.’ That spoke volumes to me, and that’s the kind of person that I want leading the franchise.”
Smith now plays for Tennessee, but he said Monday that it was Crennel’s attitude that he valued. He understood how to handle a situation without overreacting.
“This is what players appreciate: Players appreciate honesty, players appreciate you telling them like it is,” Crennel said. “They don’t always want to hear it, but that’s what they appreciate.”
That likely came from Crennel’s upbringing in a military household. His father, Joseph, was in the Army, and it wasn’t uncommon for the elder Crennel to rouse his son from sleep because he had missed a spot while scrubbing the bathroom.
This attention to detail stuck with Crennel, and it helped him to advance quickly in coaching. Texas Tech was his second of 11 stops, and he learned from Parcells and posed for pictures with young admirers. It took him 35 years in coaching before he was hired to lead the Browns in 2005. While there, he wasn’t always supplied with top talent by former general manager Phil Savage, who also spent four seasons in Cleveland before being fired. Crennel also contended with a quarterback controversy when he had to choose between Quinn and Derek Anderson.
Already, Crennel showed that he had learned from at least one of the mistakes he made with the Browns. The uncertainty at quarterback was a hindrance to Cleveland’s turnaround, and Crennel decided shortly after former Chiefs coach Todd Haley was fired last month that a similar decision wouldn’t again disrupt his plans. Crennel benched Tyler Palko, who was 1-3 as a starter, and chose Kyle Orton as the team’s starter. The Chiefs defeated the previously unbeaten Green Bay Packers the following Sunday, and Crennel finished the season 2-1 as interim coach.
It was common to hear players chanting his nickname, “RAC,” after the victories.
“He was put in situations to see him be the head coach and do the head coaching job,” Pioli said Monday. “And as we talked each week during this three-game stretch, we even exchanged ideas and things that had come up in the past that were relevant maybe to the Cleveland situation that he was dealing with now.”
For his part, Pioli learned a few things along the way, too. He will perhaps forever be aligned with Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who, before he won three Super Bowls with New England, also was a failed Browns coach. Pioli downplayed Belichick’s experience as having an effect on Crennel’s promotion, but he admitted that similar coaching turnarounds were “in the back of my head.”
On Monday, Crennel didn’t make many promises. He sidestepped questions about the Chiefs’ timetable to compete for a Super Bowl, who might play quarterback next season, and how his coaching staff might be constructed. He did promise one thing: fairness.
“He knows how to relate to players,” Smith said. “He knows how to get his point across to players, by any means necessary, when he’s a coach. You have no choice but to respect this man.”