Is Gruden new Raiders coach?
“I think I am being considered, yes. I hope I’m a candidate,” he says.
Jon Gruden last coached in the NFL in 2008. That makes him way overdue to return to the sideline, says one of the few people on the planet who ought to know.
“He’s got a talent that’s being wasted in the broadcast booth,” Dick Vermeil said by phone Tuesday. “I’ve always felt that way about Jon.”
As speculation mounts that Gruden will return to the Raiders after an extended stint on the ESPN airwaves, it’s worth remembering that Vermeil blazed this unusual career path a generation ago.
Vermeil retired from the Philadelphia Eagles after
the 1982 season and took a prolonged detour into television. Vermeil held off a return to the coaching ranks until 1997, with St. Louis, and led the Rams to a Super Bowl victory in his third season.
Now 81, he hopes Gruden won’t make his mistake of waiting so long. “I’ve been on his (case) for five years,” he said. “I think he has a burning passion for the game — and he can’t hide it.”
Vermeil, like Gruden, had been a successful and charismatic figure famous for working preposterous hours. He stepped away from the Eagles, citing burnout at age 46. Vermeil at the time had a 54-47 regular-season record and was coming off four consecutive playoff appearances, including a loss to the Raiders in the 1980 Super Bowl.
Also like Gruden, he stayed connected to the game from the broadcast booth: Vermeil served as a game analyst for CBS (1983-87) and ABC (198896), often paired with play-by-play man Brent Musberger.
Vermeil said that in 13 of his 14 years as a broadcaster, he was approached by someone trying to lure
him back to coaching. He might own the NFL record for saying “no.”
He wished he had said “yes” earlier.
“I think I stayed out too long,” Vermeil, a member of the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame, said Tuesday. “I’m not a guy that regrets. I don’t. But if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have stayed out as long as I did.”
That’s why he wants Gruden back, ASAP. Vermeil has known the onetime boy wonder since Gruden was a graduate assistant at the University of Tennessee (1986-87). When Gruden was the offensive coordinator for the Eagles from 1995-97, he often sought out Vermeil for advice.
This might be another time to check in.
“He’ll see, I think, the big picture better than he’s ever seen it,” Vermeil said. “And I feel Jon is a better football coach than I was.”
That last part is highly debatable. Vermeil graduated from San Jose State in 1959, where he had been a backup quarterback. He soon got a job at San Jose’s Del Mar High School, the first step in a remarkable coaching career.
He would go on to the distinction of winning Coach of the Year honors at four levels: high school, junior college, NCAA Division
I and the NFL.
But Vermeil pushed himself past his limit in Philadelphia. After seven years of self-imposed 1820 hour work days, he stepped away from the job he loved on Jan. 11, 1983. “I’m emotionally burned out,” he said, repeating the phrase about a dozen times during his press conference, according to a New York Times story at the time. “I don’t mean I’m about to go off my rocker, but I’m burned out.”
Vermeil eventually recovered from the stress but returned to the NFL only after making peace with a new way of doing things. That included hiring an offensive coordinator, a role he had previously handled while head coach.
“I didn’t want to end up in the same hole I was in when I left,” he said. “I allowed a passion to become an obsession. And when I went back, I felt very comfortable: I knew what I had to do. I was going to control my own emotions. And I felt like I was in a better position to overall evaluate the needs of everybody in the entire organization.”
Only a handful of other coaches have returned after such an epic hiatus. Joe Gibbs coached Washington from 1981-92, before coming back for a second stint from 2004-07.
Art Shell coached the Raiders from 1989-94 before coming back for a miserable 2006 season (2-14). Less dramatically, Tom Flores had a fiveyear gap between coaching the Raiders in 1987 and the Seahawks starting in 1992.
Vermeil actually went through the retirementand-return twice. After guiding Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk and the “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams to the Super Bowl after the 1999 season, he briefly stepped away — but this time only for a year.
Vermeil came back to coach the Kansas City Chiefs from 2001-05. At all three of his coaching stops, Vermeil took over a team that had a losing record before his arrival and made the playoffs in his third season.
He retired for good after the 2005 season and now operates Vermeil Wine in his hometown of Calistoga.
Vermeil said he suspects that Gruden, now 54, will come back to the NFL both wiser and mentally refreshed.
“When you have that passion as a leader,” Vermeil said, “more often that not it provides you with the opportunity to transfer some of that passion to that organization, which I think he is very capable of doing.”