Adapting secret for Crennel’s long career
In 38 seasons of coaching in the NFL, Romeo Crennel has learned to expect the unexpected, but nothing prepared the Texans’ associate head coach for an experience such as the coronavirus pandemic.
Crennel, 73, thought he’d experienced just about everything working for head coaches such as Ray Perkins, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick and Bill O’Brien, but nothing taught him to worry about getting infected by COVID-19, a virus that has killed more than 170,000 Americans.
“It’s unbelievable,” Crennel said Sunday in a Zoom conference call. “It’s so different than anything I’ve ever been through and all the precautions that have to be taken to try to play a season.”
Crennel is coaching in his seventh season for O’Brien. At his age, he’s in the high-risk group, but he never considered opting out. Like the players and other coaches, Crennel is taking every precaution and dealing with the new normal at NRG Stadium and Houston Methodist Training Center.
“We’ve divided up the locker room,” he said about the players using three of them at NRG Stadium. “We have different time schedules so we can keep people apart as much as we can until we can get to the field. That’s all strange.
“Zoom meetings, ha. That’s another thing that’s pretty strange. Just like this interview (with the media), we’re doing it via video rather than being in person and talking. All of those things are different, and it’s not the norm for football.”
During Crennel’s stints as an assistant coach, the pandemic is the third monumental event that’s disrupted his “norm for football” in a distinguished career that’s enabled him to earn five Super Bowl rings.
Crennel got his NFL break in 1981, when Perkins hired him as the New York Giants’ special teams coach. That season, he was reunited with Parcells, who was in his first season as defensive coordinator. Crennel and Parcells had worked together at Texas Tech from 1975-77, when
they were defensive assistants.
In their second season with the Giants, the NFL had a players’ strike that limited teams to only nine regular-season games in 1982. Crennel became close friends with Belichick, the linebackers coach on Perkins’ staff.
“The other thing that we talk about is what I’ve been through, (and) ’82 was the first strike I was involved in,” Crennel said. “That strike, we were preparing every week like we were getting ready to play. Usually on a Thursday or a Friday, they would tell us that we’re not playing this week.
“We’d game-plan, and we’d have everything ready. Belichick and I would play racquetball to pass the time after we got the game plan and stuff together. And then we didn’t play. Then things finally got settled, and we started playing again.”
If Crennel thought the 1982 strike was a unique experience, it didn’t compare to the 1987 players’ strike that limited teams to 15 games, including three played by replacement players.
With Parcells as head coach and Crennel and Belichick as assistants, the Giants finished 14-2 in 1986 and defeated Denver in Super Bowl XXI. Then disaster struck the next season when they were trying to repeat as champions.
While the NFL negotiated
with the NFL Players Association, coaches put the replacement players through three-aday practices to prepare them for games.
“We got the replacement guys, and I knew for myself these games aren’t going to count, OK?” he said. “But they did count. We were coming off a Super Bowl, and all of a sudden, the guys we had on the replacement team were basically guys that we kind of pulled off the street from a semipro league and things like that.
“We’d never played together, and we ended up losing those games. When they settled it, they told us those games were counted, so we didn’t even make the playoffs. That was a strange time.”
It’ll be interesting to see if the NFL can avoid a COVID-19 outbreak and play a full season, unlike in 1982 and 1987. Crennel has no intention of backing out.
“COVID-19 has impacted everybody,” Crennel said. “I’m a football coach. I’m in the game of football, even though I’m high-risk. I see what we’re trying to do to protect the players and coaches with social distancing. They’ve got hand sanitizers throughout the building. They clean it constantly.
“I’ve been in it for a long time. I want to give it a shot and see what happens and hopefully — knock on wood — that it’s not a bad outcome.”
Part of Crennel’s role as associate head coach will be advising new defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver, who continues to coach the defensive line and will make the calls for the first time.
“Anthony is a smart young man,” Crennel said. “He’s organized. He’s thoughtful. That’s the thing I kind of look at. I know he’s a good coach, because I’ve seen him coach his position. He relates to the players, and they relate to him.
“The point about game-planning, putting in a system and then getting the players to buy into that system so it can be a productive group — I see that taking place, and I feel good about what he brings to the table. I think with what I’ve seen so far, he’ll do a very good job.”