HOUSTON — There are no blood oaths, no mystical rituals, no secret handshakes. But it’s a bond strong enough to melt kryptonite. It’s the tie that unites two Jersey guys with a common cause.
Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn never got closer to Bill Parcells than the sight of him walking across the Giants’ preseason training camp on the Madison campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University. As a Morristown High School defensive lineman and linebacker on summer vacation, he was too busy watching Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks.
After four years as a player at Salisbury University, Quinn was off on a frequent-flyer journey that was the initiation of a football lifer, helping to coach other people’s teams — first in college at William & Mary, VMI and Hofstra and then on to the pros in San Francisco, Miami, New York and Seattle, until he finally became his own man with his own team in Atlanta.
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But watch him coach, study the depth of his relationship with his players and you can’t help but understand that the Jersey boy grown older is still the Jersey man. And so in thought and deed so is Parcells.
On a significant morning in Parcells’ vacation home in Saratoga, N.Y., the phone rang. Quinn cold-called Parcells and was invited to visit. The brief seminar has had a lasting impression, and Quinn will take that wisdom into Super Bowl LI against the New England Patriots on Sunday at NRG Stadium.
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”We were just two Jersey guys talking football,” Parcells recalled. “I told him what I had learned as a head coach. I told him that he had to have his own philosophy and stick to it no matter who around you thinks otherwise. I said that it was the only way to change the prevailing culture down in that Atlanta franchise that hadn’t won very much.
“He definitely has put together the team he wants. He’s not there yet, but he is awful close.”
Talking about changing the culture is a coaching cliche. Doing it, however, is the first step up the mountainside from losing to winning. After Parcells, Quinn sought out other winners. He had lunch with Joe Maddon, the manager who took the Chicago Cubs to place they hadn’t been for about a century. He developed a relationship with the San Antonio Spurs GM, R.C. Buford, another winner.
The truth is that he has turned the Falcons’ franchise right side up, along with the fan base that follows it. In Matt Ryan, he has a quarterback who struck everyone for years as the ultimate honest workman but that’s all. Now, with the new culture Atlanta Falcons, Ryan ought to be the league’s leading candidate for Most Valuable Player.
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Quinn is a guy who keeps his team interested. That sounds like a cliche but there were teams in the NFL this season that were not. Vince Lombardi and Don Shula would have laughed at the idea of setting up ping-pong tables in house but the Falcons love it. Other coaches might have been shocked by the suggestion that a visit from Navy Seals could impact the team, or suggested that adding training techniques under the direction of an English rugby coach was a waste of time.
Quinn didn’t think so and neither did his players when he did it. Things like this have become the Falcons way. Start with the music played at practice. Yesterday, he explained it like this:
“There is a byproduct of the music. One, we wanted the beats to be fast, so we could feel that energy. There are over 100 beats a minute to get rolling. The second part of that is we knew where we were going to play. To get our crowd into it, we wanted noise to be available for the defense and then also offensively, where that verbal and nonverbal communication could take place within the offense and the defense.
“We did make it a competition in terms of some of the music that was played, so we’ve had different DJs that have come through. We call them DJs, but they’re really part of our organization. It’s been a big job to fill to be a DJ, and the playlist, because you definitely get some critics out there among the 63 guys on the field and the coaches.”
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The competition among his players fostered by the ping-pong tables is no accident. It spills over directly into the unusual intensity that dominates the Falcons daily practices.
“We say, ‘Iron sharpens iron.’ We work hard against one another in practice –defense vs offense — and we each do it as aggressively as we can,”Quinn said. “It’s who we are.”
And they are ready for prime time.
“One of the things that I see from our team now is who we have become,” Quinn said. “Our young guys are playing like older guys and our older guys are playing like young guys.”
That ain’t a bad sign for a franchise that hasn’t played under this biggest of the NFL tents in 17 years.
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Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus for The Star-Ledger. He can be reached at jizenberg@starledger.com.
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