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Dungy lashes out Lewis omission has Bucs head coach questioning process
Updated: Friday February 02, 2001 2:07 PM
Tony Dungy is a man of reason. He is known for his calm, unflappable demeanor. So when Dungy talks, it is rarely in anger or without thinking. Dungy felt like talking Thursday, shortly after finding out that Baltimore defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis didn't get offered the Buffalo Bills' head-coaching job. It went instead to Tennessee defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, a fine coach in his own right. And because it did, in his own quiet way, Dungy was incensed. Here's why: Four days ago, who would have predicted that Lewis still would be the Ravens' defensive coordinator? Four days ago, who would have thought that Lewis and his fellow Super Bowl defensive coordinator, New York's John Fox, would be the losers, and Williams and the University of Miami's Butch Davis would be the winners? Not Dungy, one of three black head coaches in the NFL. "It's just difficult to imagine," Dungy said Thursday afternoon shortly after he called Lewis to offer encouragement and commiseration. "I don't think anyone would have suggested 10 days ago that Marvin Lewis wouldn't have a head-coaching job after all of this sorted out. It wasn't even fathomable. But in fact it has happened and only one team really talked to him. And that's a shame on our part, on the whole league." Dungy kept coming back to the math of the situation. Counting expansion Houston, there have been nine NFL head-coaching job openings since the start of the 2000 season. That's 28 percent of the league's 32 teams. Of those, Lewis interviewed with just Buffalo, on Monday night. A large part of that is the fault of the NFL rule that penalizes assistant coaches whose teams go deep into the playoffs. But the part of the Lewis saga that prompted Dungy's strongest comments was the debate that has been going on in the NFL for decades: Does a black head-coaching candidate have as good a shot of landing a job as a white candidate? And when will that tired topic cease to be an issue? It won't as long as a Marvin Lewis can go unhired after the success of his 2000 season.
"You would have thought more than one team out of nine would say that here's a guy that should be at least talked to," Dungy said. "And you can only beg the question in your own mind: If he were white, would it have been one out of nine? I don't think so. I think it would have been more than one out of nine. I would suggest more than one team would have talked to him with the credentials he has and what he's done the last two years." This is not about disrespecting or dismissing Williams or Fox, who also received just one interview despite a Super Bowl season filled with much success. Both men have resumes that they can be proud of and have worked long and hard for a head-coaching opportunity. But somehow the process in the NFL once again failed. And more than anyone, it failed Lewis, whose resume had more luster and was hotter than anyone else's this offseason. Lewis' credentials are so well known now that we won't even take time to recount them. Suffice to say he was at the head of the line of talented and waiting assistants, and somehow wound up with nowhere to sit when the music stopped. "It's difficult to take from my perspective as a minority coach in the NFL," Dungy said. "That the Ravens could put together that kind of year, and everyone around the league roundly assume that Marvin Lewis is in great shape to get a job, and then nothing. And that only one team talked to him, that's just hard to swallow." Dungy, of course, had to play the waiting game himself. Before being hired by Tampa Bay in 1996, Dungy was perennially on the hot assistants list. If anyone in America knows how Lewis feels today, it is Dungy, a man Lewis shares much in common with, including temperament. "You're disappointed when you get close," Dungy said. "I remember in '93, we had the No. 1 defense [in Minnesota] and there were seven or eight openings that year and I didn't even get a call from anybody. Didn't even talk to anybody. And you think [to yourself], when are you ever going to have a run like that again when there are a lot of openings? You start to wonder if it's ever going to happen? But it does, and eventually it happens in the right spot." When an opportunity to interview in Cleveland slipped away Monday, just hours after Lewis and the Ravens won the Super Bowl, you knew he had lost a ton of bargaining leverage in a two-suitor situation. But when the Bills started leaning toward Williams late Wednesday, you knew that no matter the soundness of Buffalo's reasoning, there wouldn't truly be a good explanation for leaving Lewis behind. "I told Marvin sometimes the job you don't get ends up being a blessing," Dungy said. "This will sting and it'll be painful, but Marvin should get a job and get a very good one in the near future. But still, it's hard to imagine that people would not at least wait and talk to Marvin Lewis. And it's hard for me to imagine why they wouldn't. And they didn't wait and talk to John Fox, either." The word on the street already is that Lewis didn't interview well when he met new Bills general manager Tom Donahoe in Baltimore for five hours on Monday night. Maybe so, but see how coherent you are coming off of Super Bowl week -- where your future is the focus on every third question -- when you've slept all of three hours Sunday night heading into your make-or-break Monday interview. How flawed is the system that makes the league's top candidates go through an endurance test like that with so much riding on the line? And another thing, isn't that what they used to say about the mild-mannered Dungy? That he didn't sell himself much in an interview setting? Lewis' week hasn't been a total loss. Besides the Super Bowl victory Sunday, the Ravens on Tuesday gave him a raise that would in effect ensure that he didn't have to make a bad choice based on financial decisions alone. His pay will go from the $300,000 range to more than $500,000 this year, putting him neck-and-neck with Denver's Ray Rhodes for the honor of being the NFL's most well-compensated coordinator. Ravens head coach Brian Billick asked for and received permission from owner Art Modell to make Lewis the offer. There are whispers that Lewis' price tag -- believed to be in the range of $1.5 million per season -- scared the Bills away, or that Donahoe didn't like the way Lewis' experienced agent, Ray Anderson, was handling things. Some say it was simply a matter of Williams wowing Donahoe in his interview. The bottom line is Lewis never even got to throw a dollar figure at Donahoe because their talks never progressed to contract parameters. "It's inexcusable, if the decision was made based on economics, when we didn't even get a chance to chat with [Donahoe] about the topic," Anderson said. "It's another way to run from the reality that Marvin was the top candidate." Anderson said he and Lewis became suspicious about the Bills' hiring process rather quickly. At no point was there any indication from Donahoe that Lewis would meet team owner Ralph Wilson, tour the city of Buffalo or the team's facilities, or talk contract parameters, Anderson said. "Those are three things that are kind of fundamental when you're talking about hiring a guy as your head coach," Anderson said. "The absence of those three components of the process certainly had us thinking that this was unusual to say the least." Don't look for Lewis to howl at the moon regarding his fate. Others will be a lot more outraged than he. It is not in his nature. "He's not going to moan or go ballistic," Anderson said. "Marvin is savvy about the world in which he lives and works, and being what he is, he'll have to understand that the NFL is a place where some of these things are apparently going to continue to happen. "But he's going to learn a very, very difficult and painful lesson. Even if it's one that's not totally unexpected, because he has seen others go through it." Billick, who went through the interview process with Cleveland and Baltimore in 1999, admitted Thursday that he never dreamed he would retain Lewis on his 2001 staff. "Never, no," he said. "It was inconceivable to me that we would get through the process and him not have an opportunity to go on." But for Billick, explaining what happened to Lewis is more complicated than that. He believes that while the Bills got it wrong, they hired a very qualified coach in Williams, and most importantly, Lewis was not denied the opportunity he so richly deserved. He also maintains that while there is no overt racism being practiced by NFL owners or front offices, Lewis had to deal with the hard, cold fact that there are few minorities in decision-making positions, meaning the familiarity factor and a comfort zone with minority coaches still has yet to sufficiently develop. "I think Marvin would have been the smarter hire, but I'm biased," Billick said. "Marvin will make a great head coach. But the Bills went through a process and they found a damn good coach. There is an equity in that Marvin was considered in an interview, and that's a big step. "I think the process is equitable. It's certainly not perfect. And management would be wise to be more inclusive in their perspective. But Marvin has been enriched by the fact that he has gotten to go through the process. I have no doubt in my mind that someone's going to wisely make him a head coach." Of course, when it comes to that last line, that's what we all were saying just four days ago. Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.
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