‘WE NEED TO DO THIS’
Delco native Ted Cottrell was at the forefront of the diversity movement in NFL coaching
From an idyllic suburb of Atlanta, Ted Cottrell heard his cell phone ring while fashioning a vegetable garden as meticulously as one of those defenses he devised to humble the great Peyton Manning during a stellar career as an NFL assistant coach.
After the usual pleasantries, the proud product of Chester High and Delaware County looked back on the critical role he played in helping shape the Fritz Pollard Alliance advocating for NFL coaches.
Cottrell’s Spartacus moment came amid a crowd of black coaches shoehorned into a room inside the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis, the league’s headquarters for the scouting combine.
The only black head coaches in the NFL at the completion of the 2002 season were Tony Dungy and Herman Edwards. The body of players in the league was nearly 70 percent black. Affirmative action had stalled.
Cottrell, then 55, was the defensive coordinator for Edwards and the New York Jets. Former NFL player and front office executive John Wooten, who had a tour with the Eagles, chaired the discreet meeting armed with a study of disparities in minority coaching positions commissioned by the late Johnnie Cochrane and civil rights lawyer Cyrus Mehri.
Wooten hoped to form a group that would advocate for black coaches.
“We didn’t have cell phones back then,” Wooten said. “We used word of mouth. The room wasn’t very big and there were guys all over the place, coaches of color. Coordinators, position coaches, everybody. I mean they were all out in the halls and sitting on the floor. The point we made at the presentation was that we needed their support to go and meet with the commissioner.”
At that time, “activism” wasn’t something you’d put at the top of the head coaching resume.
There was fear of being labeled a troublemaker, according to Wooten and Cottrell.
Wooten could sense coaches were worried they might be dismissed if they teamed up to demand more minority hiring. During the meeting, someone shouted “heads are going to roll.
“The meeting was almost through and Ted Cottrell and Terry Robiskie and Jimmy Raye, those three guys, stood up and they said openly, ‘we know that heads are going to roll,’” Wooten said. “In other words, people were going to get fired for making this move. Those three men stood, one after the other and said to the group ‘if heads roll, let my head be the first. You guys go and do this. We need to do this.’
“And I never will forget that.”
It was the birth of what would be the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a lobbying group for NFL coaches of color, and it was embraced by then league commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who already was working with Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney on the Rooney Rule mandating at least one minority candidate be interviewed when a head coaching job became available.
The rule recently has been upgraded to two interviews for minority candidates, one outside the organization for head coach, general manager and highranking front office positions.
Cottrell, now 73, had forgotten about his inspirational words until a colleague told him to watch the documentary, “Fritz Pollard: A Forgotten Man.” Cottrell was enjoying the fruits of 36 years of coaching from his home in Tyrone, Ga., a half-hour south of Atlanta, when it all starting coming back to him. The documentary described the meeting in detail.
“I was like, ‘wow’ when I saw the movie,” Cottrell said. “It was a pretty intense meeting. All I said was, ‘hey look, if heads are going to roll let mine roll, too, because we need to do something about this.’”
Robiskie would be the only member of the troika to become an NFL head coach, although it was on an interim basis.
Cottrell didn’t get a head coaching job until age 61, when he took on the New York Sentinels in the short-lived United Football League.
“There’s no way that those three men should not have been head coaches in this league, just no way,” Wooten said. “They’re outstanding people that know football inside and out, know the techniques, know how to teach it. It’s a shame that they never got that opportunity.”
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Cottrell made football look easy, following in the footsteps of older brother Billy. The duo starred at Chester High and Delaware Valley College before earning jobs in the NFL.
Billy Cottrell, an offensive lineman undrafted out of college, played five seasons in the NFL, four with Detroit and one with Denver.
Ted Cottrell was a seventh-round draft pick who played linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons in 196970. It was the best place he could have landed because Marion Campbell and Fred Bruney, who both would coach with the Eagles, not only were in charge of the defense, but were fair, too.
“I can remember they gave us a test when I first went to training camp in Atlanta,” Cottrell said. “The defensive coordinator was Marion Campbell, the Swamp Fox. And Fred Bruney was the secondary coach. Anyway, they gave us this test and it was like three, four pages. There were questions about the defense we installed. I drew up the entire defense, every position and showed what everyone was doing in the coverages because that’s what you’re supposed to do as a linebacker.”
When the results came back, Cottrell knew he had a future in the NFL.
“We have this defensive meeting and Marion Campbell said ‘some of you veterans should be ashamed of yourselves because we’ve got a rookie here who not only drew up his position but drew up the entire defense and described what everybody was doing in the scheme of the defense,” Cottrell remembered. “Ted Cottrell stand up.’”
The meeting room included the late Tommy Nobis, one of the great linebackers of that era.
“I’m in a room with guys from Illinois, Texas, Southern Cal, UCLA, Minnesota, Arizona, you name it,” Cottrell said. “And I’m from Delaware Valley College. They had like 140 guys in camp. It was survival of the fittest. The intelligence thing, that was huge in breaking down some of those barriers and the thoughts people had.”
Ironically, the late Campbell and Bruney both would become NFL head coaches with the Eagles, Bruney on an interim basis.
• • •
Cottrell has great memories from coaching 24 seasons in the NFL, nine at Rutgers and short stints in the UFL and with the Alliance of American Football’s Birmingham Iron and the XFL’s Houston Roughnecks.
Yet there are a couple of things that irk him.
In 1999, Cottrell’s defense with the Buffalo Bills led the league in fewest yards allowed by nearly
300 yards. The Bills went
11-5 that season and surrendered just 229 points, the second-fewest in the league.
But the Bills were eliminated in the playoffs by the Music City Miracle, a disputed lateral on the last play of the game, a kickoff return, providing the Tennessee Titans with a 22-16 victory.
Cottrell felt that defense deserved a lot more respect and should have been mentioned with some of the league’s greats, including the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, who won the Super Bowl. Whether it was the small media market in Buffalo or being on the wrong side of the miracle finish, a stellar season not only was gone but forgotten.
“We had the No. 1 defense in the league,” Cottrell said, “and I did not get one job interview. You put in the years in college and in the league. You have this body of work that you’re supposed to be evaluated on and you can’t even get a job interview. It was crazy. And it still is. We’ve got to get better than that. All we need is an opportunity.”
The other item that can get Cottrell heated is the defense his teams played against Peyton Manning, the Hall of Fame quarterback. It’s no coincidence Manning had some of his worst games against Cottrell.
In a 2002 wild card outing, Cottrell and his Jets defense buried Manning and the Colts, 41-0. That’s the only time Manning has been shut out.
In the 2007 season, Cottrell was the coordinator for the San Diego Chargers, who intercepted Manning six times in a 23-21 Sunday night victory over the Colts at Qualcomm
Stadium. That’s double the picks Manning had thrown in 98 percent of the career games he played.
“Six interceptions of Peyton Manning and hardly anybody even knows about it,” Cottrell said. “And in the playoffs, we intercepted him three times but one was called back and we won that game.”
If a white coordinator had picked off Manning eight times in a season?
“He would have gotten a lot more recognition,” Cottrell said through a hearty laugh. “A lot more damn recognition than I got. They probably would have called him a genius.”
• • •
Cottrell was 60 when his Chargers defense made Manning look ordinary.
Sixty-seven-year-old Joe Gibbs of the Washington Redskins was the oldest head coach then.
Cottrell was just five days older than Romeo Crennel of the Cleveland Browns, 16 days older than
Wade Phillips of the Dallas Cowboys and a couple of months older than Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants, who also were head coaches back then.
In 2008, Cottrell, his best player sidelined by injury, was axed halfway through the season by Chargers head coach Norv Turner, who was 114-121-1 in 15 years as a head coach.
That was the last time Cottrell coached in the NFL.
•••
Cottrell was a finalist for an NFL head coaching position just once, that coming before the 2003 season. He was 55 and in the second of three years as defensive coordinator of the Jets.
General manager Terry Donahue and the San Francisco 49ers gave the job to Dennis Erickson, who was fired two years into a five-year contract with a 9-23 record.
“There’s disappointment but you’re not discouraged,” Cottrell said. “That’s how I felt. Just
keep on plugging.”
He dabbled with coaching in the upstart leagues. He worked for the league office in New York. Plugging these days is being a resource to the youth in the NFL, coaches, scouts or players, people of color ... people of every color.
It’s staying active with the Fritz Pollard Alliance.
There have been only 20 black head coaches hired since Cottrell was a defensive coordinator in 1998.
There are just four minority head coaches in the league now – Mike Tomlin of the Steelers, Anthony Lynn of the Chargers, Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins and Ron Rivera with the Washington Redskins.
“I’ve seen this before,” Cottrell said. “We need to remedy this situation. I was trying to be a head coach there in the league and get an interview. They’re at least doing that now. You can get interviews. Guys are getting mentioned. But we need more. A lot more. And not just the coaches.
The leadership is just as important. The general managers, the assistant general managers, the cap guys, the lawyers. There’s not enough talk about it. The thing that has changed over the last few months is now you’ve got some players speaking up and guys are writing about it. That helps.”
Cottrell always will lend his voice to the cause. It keeps fresh those memories of the past and the courage he showed. He also keeps it green with the vegetable garden he and his wife, Kathleen, have put together with the help of family and friends.
It’s therapeutic and it’s fun - much like Ted Cottrell’s life.
“We designed it, put it together,” Cottrell said. “We’ve got tomatoes, Swiss chard, romaine, bell peppers, salad greens, cucumbers, squash, zucchini. And a lot of herbs. Basil, thyme, oregano, we’ve got all kinds of stuff going on.”
Ted Cottrell always has something going on.