Look at Holmgren Now
Posted: January 31, 2006
Twelve months ago, Mike Holmgren had coached his last game in Seattle. It was a done deal. As he walked off the field after losing to the Rams in the playoffs, he fired himself.
"I said to myself, 'This is it,'" he says now, sitting in his office overlooking the practice fields at the team's complex. "I came away thinking I might take a break here."
He told his wife, Kathy. She asked him to wait and call owner Paul Allen to find out whether he was wanted. Holmgren gave himself a couple of days. He didn't want to leave based on an emotional reaction to a difficult season and unbearable circumstances in the front office, where team president Bob Whitsitt had fostered an atmosphere so full of mistrust that the two had a noticeably strained relationship.
But when Holmgren met with Allen, his feelings had not changed. He still wanted this to be over. He was mentally drained and felt awful. It would take another three weeks for him to recover physically.
In the months since, a different kind of portrait has been painted nationally of those times in Seattle -- that it was the team that debated whether to bring back a willing Holmgren. Whitsitt even said as much shortly after the playoff loss, indicating the club had decided Holmgren would return.
But that's not how it really was. "I think I need to take a break," Holmgren told Allen shortly into their meeting. The owner, who has a hands-off philosophy toward his teams (he also owns the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers) and rarely spoke to his coach, was surprised. "Let's talk about this," he said. So Holmgren aired his concerns about the organization and why he wanted to walk away after six seasons and three playoff appearances.
"I wasn't sure I was going through another year with Whitsitt," says Holmgren. "I am not pointing fingers at anybody, but I know this: It wasn't working quite the way it should be in my opinion. Maybe it was me; maybe I was the problem. But life is too short to go through this type of thing; this business is too hard."
Allen urged his coach not to quit. "I told him, 'Look, Mike, I am going to make some changes in the front office that I think are appropriate now, that are really going to help you out,' " Allen, who also owns the Sporting News, said last week. "I told him, 'Give me a chance to do that and recharge your batteries a bit.' After a playoff loss, everyone gets discouraged, and he is no different. (I knew) he would bounce back and get back into it." Holmgren had no way of knowing Allen was aware of the front office disarray. He left the meeting committed to return. Three days later, Whitsitt's dismissal was announced.
Of all the remarkable developments affecting the Seahawks over the ensuing 12 months (the hiring of personnel whiz Tim Ruskell, the star performances of quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and running back Shaun Alexander, an 11-game winning streak), it is these two moves by Allen (his ability to persuade Holmgren to stay and his release of Whitsitt) that stand as the principal catalysts that propelled the Seahawks into Super Bowl 40. Without those decisions, Seattle would have lacked the right head coach and the necessary front office harmony to produce a championship team.
For Allen, it was a difficult time personally. Whitsitt had been with him since 1994; he previously had run the Trail Blazers. Those inside the Seahawks' organization thought the owner's loyalty meant Whitsitt, who was intensely disliked for his arrogance and derisive management style, could not be challenged, particularly after Allen allowed him to strip Holmgren of his general manager duties in 2003. Now, Whitsitt's departure sparked celebrations. And Allen followed up with another significant step. To run the football operations, he brought in Ruskell, who had been Falcons general manager Rich McKay's key associate. Ruskell soon transformed a fractured, dysfunctional situation into a relaxed, positive one.
And now this reward so quickly, the 30-year-old franchise's first Super Bowl appearance. "Let's just put it this way," Holmgren says, "I'm tickled pink I stayed. And I am glad I have a patient owner."
Allen laughs. "You don't get a chance to have a coach of Mike's caliber on your side very often," he says. "I felt good about him, about what Mike was doing, and I felt there were other changes that could be made. We hung in there, we didn't give up, we stayed the course, and -- like it does sometimes in sports -- it all fell into place."
For Seattle and Mike Holmgren, it always has been about when, not if, he would get the Seahawks to a Super Bowl. That's the reason you hire a two-time Super Bowl coach for $30 million over eight years and give him unprecedented power: control of personnel, plus a hand in overseeing the business side -- everything from marketing to picking out seat colors for Qwest Field.
But this is not the scenario Holmgren envisioned for his return to the championship game: to take seven years -- and to get there only after losing all of his extra authority. No question this is the most relaxed he has ever been; he's making sure he enjoys this ride more than any in his 14 years as an NFL head coach. And he knows a win in Detroit would make him the first coach to win Super Bowls with two different teams -- an achievement he views as deeply meaningful. Yet this failure as a general manager gnaws at him.
He mentioned this to Kathy a few weeks ago. She looked at him and said, "Just coach." Wives know best. "It has taken longer than I thought it would, and it has been different," he concedes. "We did things in a certain logical progression in Green Bay, and I thought you could anticipate pretty much the same thing here. But I was a little naive. I didn't know as much as I needed to about the front office and the salary cap -- things like that; I had just been coaching. I realize my ego is talking, but I would love another crack at it because I am better now. I am a little smarter; I understand the time commitment and the delegation involved."
Then he brings this up. Maybe if he hadn't insisted on calling plays, it would have been different. "If you are going to do it the way I wanted to do it," he says, "then in all honesty, I probably suffered in both (coaching and G.M.) areas a little bit. Jimmy Johnson did a wonderful job of running everything, but he delegated play-calling."
Holmgren takes a long time contemplating the answer to the next question: Are you a better coach without all the other responsibilities? Finally, this: "Yeah, you probably can say that you are a little better coach if you just do that -- coach."
It's all so fascinating, this internal struggle of Holmgren's. He is a rare and special coach, confirmed by this third Super Bowl appearance. Yet he wanted to prove he could do more than just be a coach; that was huge for him.
"I could understand why he wanted the dual roles because a lot of his peers were doing it, and he is certainly better than they were," says Ron Wolf, who as general manager of the Packers gave Holmgren his first head coaching opportunity in 1992. "But he is really, really good at coaching, a cut above most, and now that he is doing what he does best, they are in the Super Bowl. It is not an accident it's happened this way."
Allen agrees. "I think with Mike focusing specifically on the coaching side and not having to worry about the G.M. job and bringing in players and contracts and all that, it allowed him to do the kind of job he is known for."
Holmgren doesn't like talking about all the craziness of his tenure in Seattle, of the other times he contemplated quitting but didn't because it would have been a concession of failure. Still, so much recently had been difficult, what with the loss of authority and the increasingly destructive situation within the Seahawks' organization. Whitsitt, the point man for Allen in the hiring of Holmgren, had no football background. He was a basketball guy whose abrasive style in Portland made him the No. 1 target of fans and ultimately led to full-time concentration on the Seahawks, where he added football operations to his control in 2003. Considering the internal warfare, Holmgren's greatest accomplishment as a coach might have been his playoff teams in 2003 and 2004. "You can not exaggerate how bad it was," says one man who lived through it. "It was one side against the other; no one working together; people dreading coming to work."
Ultimately, Whitsitt communicated mostly through Bob Ferguson, who replaced Holmgren as general manager but was more of a figurehead. It became worse when Mike Reinfeldt, a much-respected cap expert and friend of Holmgren's from Green Bay, quit in 2004, reportedly after Whitsitt wanted to reduce his salary. It was all about power, from controlling parking spaces to denying team officials sideline and press box access to keeping Holmgren out of key meetings. Whitsitt also controlled the flow of communication to the owner; not until Tod Leiweke was hired in 2003 from the Minnesota Wild to be chief executive officer did Allen start receiving additional, and different, feedback.
"Mike would never complain to anyone; he just kept it bottled up inside," says offensive coordinator Gil Haskell, who also coached with Holmgren in Green Bay. "From the outside, no one could see that he would try two or three ways to get something done, but it didn't happen and he would be blamed for it."
Whitsitt shrugs off the complaints and criticisms. "I'm a big boy," he told The Seattle Times recently. "If you're frustrated running a team, it's always better to fire the suit-and-tie guy than the coach or the player. There's no sour grapes with Paul, none at all."
Whitsitt's dismissal was not the only change last year. Ted Thompson, who had run the Seahawks' drafts, left to take over the Packers' front office, and Scot McCloughan, the director of college scouting, moved to the 49ers to run their personnel department. Plus, the Seahawks had 16 unsigned free agents. The personnel side was hemorrhaging. But Ruskell stopped all that. A football guy who had helped McKay build playoff teams in Tampa and Atlanta, he's everything Whitsitt wasn't. He soon discovered how fractured the organization was. "I sensed there was a lack of communication and cooperation between the front office and coaching; walls were up," he says. "That is not me. We set out to pump people up and get a little bit of excitement going."
Allen also quickly rehired Reinfeldt, who came to contract terms with, among others, Hasselbeck, left tackle Walter Jones and center Robbie Tobeck. And Ruskell remade the defense, increasing its speed and altering its chemistry and character. Holmgren was hesitant at first about the roster maneuvering. After all, he had built this team. But he soon saw the improvement. "It is amazing what you can accomplish," he says, "when everyone is pulling the same way. Tim has just done a fantastic job. It's been great."
Now, at 57, Holmgren has a chance to win another ring. He remains the same engaging, humorous man he was in Green Bay, a great spinner of tales, still the large guy (6-5, 260-plus) who draws people to him and flourishes in the spotlight. He has this way about him; he can rule a roomful of players just with his size or a glare. He still has a quick-trigger temper, and he still can be an inferno on the sideline. And he still is marvelous calling plays. But he has changed, too. "He's not getting bogged down with the little stuff anymore," says Thompson, who also worked with Holmgren in Green Bay. "He is allowing his coaches to coach and his players to play. In Green Bay, he was pushing all the time. Now he's more at peace."
He's also refreshingly different than many of his peers. He doesn't work extraordinarily long hours, and he carves out consistent in-season time for family. His four daughters are now grown; he has four grandchildren, all girls. One daughter, Calla, is a doctor who specializes in at-risk pregnancies, Emily married a minister, Jenny was a college public relations director, and Gretchen, the youngest, is finishing law school and has a job offer from the King County prosecutor. Holmgren met Kathy at a church-sponsored summer camp; since coming to Seattle, she has survived breast cancer and continues to do social work.
Now she will miss the Super Bowl. Three days before kickoff, she and Calla will journey with a regional medical relief group to the Congo, where 40 years ago, Kathy did missionary service. For 17 days, the two women will help instruct locals about medicine. The trip was a Christmas present from her husband.
"I didn't know we were going to the Super Bowl," he says about the timing of the trip. "There isn't much communications there, so she won't know what happens in the game until she comes back. But it doesn't matter; it gives me great joy that she can do this."
He laughs. "You know, I am a lucky, lucky man," he says. Patient owner, great family and, now, maybe a second ring. What a difference a year can make.
Senior writer Paul Attner covers the NFL for Sporting News. E-mail him at [email protected].
Posted: January 31, 2006
Twelve months ago, Mike Holmgren had coached his last game in Seattle. It was a done deal. As he walked off the field after losing to the Rams in the playoffs, he fired himself.
"I said to myself, 'This is it,'" he says now, sitting in his office overlooking the practice fields at the team's complex. "I came away thinking I might take a break here."
He told his wife, Kathy. She asked him to wait and call owner Paul Allen to find out whether he was wanted. Holmgren gave himself a couple of days. He didn't want to leave based on an emotional reaction to a difficult season and unbearable circumstances in the front office, where team president Bob Whitsitt had fostered an atmosphere so full of mistrust that the two had a noticeably strained relationship.
But when Holmgren met with Allen, his feelings had not changed. He still wanted this to be over. He was mentally drained and felt awful. It would take another three weeks for him to recover physically.
In the months since, a different kind of portrait has been painted nationally of those times in Seattle -- that it was the team that debated whether to bring back a willing Holmgren. Whitsitt even said as much shortly after the playoff loss, indicating the club had decided Holmgren would return.
But that's not how it really was. "I think I need to take a break," Holmgren told Allen shortly into their meeting. The owner, who has a hands-off philosophy toward his teams (he also owns the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers) and rarely spoke to his coach, was surprised. "Let's talk about this," he said. So Holmgren aired his concerns about the organization and why he wanted to walk away after six seasons and three playoff appearances.
"I wasn't sure I was going through another year with Whitsitt," says Holmgren. "I am not pointing fingers at anybody, but I know this: It wasn't working quite the way it should be in my opinion. Maybe it was me; maybe I was the problem. But life is too short to go through this type of thing; this business is too hard."
Allen urged his coach not to quit. "I told him, 'Look, Mike, I am going to make some changes in the front office that I think are appropriate now, that are really going to help you out,' " Allen, who also owns the Sporting News, said last week. "I told him, 'Give me a chance to do that and recharge your batteries a bit.' After a playoff loss, everyone gets discouraged, and he is no different. (I knew) he would bounce back and get back into it." Holmgren had no way of knowing Allen was aware of the front office disarray. He left the meeting committed to return. Three days later, Whitsitt's dismissal was announced.
Of all the remarkable developments affecting the Seahawks over the ensuing 12 months (the hiring of personnel whiz Tim Ruskell, the star performances of quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and running back Shaun Alexander, an 11-game winning streak), it is these two moves by Allen (his ability to persuade Holmgren to stay and his release of Whitsitt) that stand as the principal catalysts that propelled the Seahawks into Super Bowl 40. Without those decisions, Seattle would have lacked the right head coach and the necessary front office harmony to produce a championship team.
For Allen, it was a difficult time personally. Whitsitt had been with him since 1994; he previously had run the Trail Blazers. Those inside the Seahawks' organization thought the owner's loyalty meant Whitsitt, who was intensely disliked for his arrogance and derisive management style, could not be challenged, particularly after Allen allowed him to strip Holmgren of his general manager duties in 2003. Now, Whitsitt's departure sparked celebrations. And Allen followed up with another significant step. To run the football operations, he brought in Ruskell, who had been Falcons general manager Rich McKay's key associate. Ruskell soon transformed a fractured, dysfunctional situation into a relaxed, positive one.
And now this reward so quickly, the 30-year-old franchise's first Super Bowl appearance. "Let's just put it this way," Holmgren says, "I'm tickled pink I stayed. And I am glad I have a patient owner."
Allen laughs. "You don't get a chance to have a coach of Mike's caliber on your side very often," he says. "I felt good about him, about what Mike was doing, and I felt there were other changes that could be made. We hung in there, we didn't give up, we stayed the course, and -- like it does sometimes in sports -- it all fell into place."
For Seattle and Mike Holmgren, it always has been about when, not if, he would get the Seahawks to a Super Bowl. That's the reason you hire a two-time Super Bowl coach for $30 million over eight years and give him unprecedented power: control of personnel, plus a hand in overseeing the business side -- everything from marketing to picking out seat colors for Qwest Field.
But this is not the scenario Holmgren envisioned for his return to the championship game: to take seven years -- and to get there only after losing all of his extra authority. No question this is the most relaxed he has ever been; he's making sure he enjoys this ride more than any in his 14 years as an NFL head coach. And he knows a win in Detroit would make him the first coach to win Super Bowls with two different teams -- an achievement he views as deeply meaningful. Yet this failure as a general manager gnaws at him.
He mentioned this to Kathy a few weeks ago. She looked at him and said, "Just coach." Wives know best. "It has taken longer than I thought it would, and it has been different," he concedes. "We did things in a certain logical progression in Green Bay, and I thought you could anticipate pretty much the same thing here. But I was a little naive. I didn't know as much as I needed to about the front office and the salary cap -- things like that; I had just been coaching. I realize my ego is talking, but I would love another crack at it because I am better now. I am a little smarter; I understand the time commitment and the delegation involved."
Then he brings this up. Maybe if he hadn't insisted on calling plays, it would have been different. "If you are going to do it the way I wanted to do it," he says, "then in all honesty, I probably suffered in both (coaching and G.M.) areas a little bit. Jimmy Johnson did a wonderful job of running everything, but he delegated play-calling."
Holmgren takes a long time contemplating the answer to the next question: Are you a better coach without all the other responsibilities? Finally, this: "Yeah, you probably can say that you are a little better coach if you just do that -- coach."
It's all so fascinating, this internal struggle of Holmgren's. He is a rare and special coach, confirmed by this third Super Bowl appearance. Yet he wanted to prove he could do more than just be a coach; that was huge for him.
"I could understand why he wanted the dual roles because a lot of his peers were doing it, and he is certainly better than they were," says Ron Wolf, who as general manager of the Packers gave Holmgren his first head coaching opportunity in 1992. "But he is really, really good at coaching, a cut above most, and now that he is doing what he does best, they are in the Super Bowl. It is not an accident it's happened this way."
Allen agrees. "I think with Mike focusing specifically on the coaching side and not having to worry about the G.M. job and bringing in players and contracts and all that, it allowed him to do the kind of job he is known for."
Holmgren doesn't like talking about all the craziness of his tenure in Seattle, of the other times he contemplated quitting but didn't because it would have been a concession of failure. Still, so much recently had been difficult, what with the loss of authority and the increasingly destructive situation within the Seahawks' organization. Whitsitt, the point man for Allen in the hiring of Holmgren, had no football background. He was a basketball guy whose abrasive style in Portland made him the No. 1 target of fans and ultimately led to full-time concentration on the Seahawks, where he added football operations to his control in 2003. Considering the internal warfare, Holmgren's greatest accomplishment as a coach might have been his playoff teams in 2003 and 2004. "You can not exaggerate how bad it was," says one man who lived through it. "It was one side against the other; no one working together; people dreading coming to work."
Ultimately, Whitsitt communicated mostly through Bob Ferguson, who replaced Holmgren as general manager but was more of a figurehead. It became worse when Mike Reinfeldt, a much-respected cap expert and friend of Holmgren's from Green Bay, quit in 2004, reportedly after Whitsitt wanted to reduce his salary. It was all about power, from controlling parking spaces to denying team officials sideline and press box access to keeping Holmgren out of key meetings. Whitsitt also controlled the flow of communication to the owner; not until Tod Leiweke was hired in 2003 from the Minnesota Wild to be chief executive officer did Allen start receiving additional, and different, feedback.
"Mike would never complain to anyone; he just kept it bottled up inside," says offensive coordinator Gil Haskell, who also coached with Holmgren in Green Bay. "From the outside, no one could see that he would try two or three ways to get something done, but it didn't happen and he would be blamed for it."
Whitsitt shrugs off the complaints and criticisms. "I'm a big boy," he told The Seattle Times recently. "If you're frustrated running a team, it's always better to fire the suit-and-tie guy than the coach or the player. There's no sour grapes with Paul, none at all."
Whitsitt's dismissal was not the only change last year. Ted Thompson, who had run the Seahawks' drafts, left to take over the Packers' front office, and Scot McCloughan, the director of college scouting, moved to the 49ers to run their personnel department. Plus, the Seahawks had 16 unsigned free agents. The personnel side was hemorrhaging. But Ruskell stopped all that. A football guy who had helped McKay build playoff teams in Tampa and Atlanta, he's everything Whitsitt wasn't. He soon discovered how fractured the organization was. "I sensed there was a lack of communication and cooperation between the front office and coaching; walls were up," he says. "That is not me. We set out to pump people up and get a little bit of excitement going."
Allen also quickly rehired Reinfeldt, who came to contract terms with, among others, Hasselbeck, left tackle Walter Jones and center Robbie Tobeck. And Ruskell remade the defense, increasing its speed and altering its chemistry and character. Holmgren was hesitant at first about the roster maneuvering. After all, he had built this team. But he soon saw the improvement. "It is amazing what you can accomplish," he says, "when everyone is pulling the same way. Tim has just done a fantastic job. It's been great."
Now, at 57, Holmgren has a chance to win another ring. He remains the same engaging, humorous man he was in Green Bay, a great spinner of tales, still the large guy (6-5, 260-plus) who draws people to him and flourishes in the spotlight. He has this way about him; he can rule a roomful of players just with his size or a glare. He still has a quick-trigger temper, and he still can be an inferno on the sideline. And he still is marvelous calling plays. But he has changed, too. "He's not getting bogged down with the little stuff anymore," says Thompson, who also worked with Holmgren in Green Bay. "He is allowing his coaches to coach and his players to play. In Green Bay, he was pushing all the time. Now he's more at peace."
He's also refreshingly different than many of his peers. He doesn't work extraordinarily long hours, and he carves out consistent in-season time for family. His four daughters are now grown; he has four grandchildren, all girls. One daughter, Calla, is a doctor who specializes in at-risk pregnancies, Emily married a minister, Jenny was a college public relations director, and Gretchen, the youngest, is finishing law school and has a job offer from the King County prosecutor. Holmgren met Kathy at a church-sponsored summer camp; since coming to Seattle, she has survived breast cancer and continues to do social work.
Now she will miss the Super Bowl. Three days before kickoff, she and Calla will journey with a regional medical relief group to the Congo, where 40 years ago, Kathy did missionary service. For 17 days, the two women will help instruct locals about medicine. The trip was a Christmas present from her husband.
"I didn't know we were going to the Super Bowl," he says about the timing of the trip. "There isn't much communications there, so she won't know what happens in the game until she comes back. But it doesn't matter; it gives me great joy that she can do this."
He laughs. "You know, I am a lucky, lucky man," he says. Patient owner, great family and, now, maybe a second ring. What a difference a year can make.
Senior writer Paul Attner covers the NFL for Sporting News. E-mail him at [email protected].
