PERFECT PAIR GUIDING JAGS
TOOK A WHILE BUT MARRONE FINALLY FOUND WAY TO TEAM UP WITH COUGHLIN: CANNIZZARO
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — “Holy [bleep], that’s [bleeping] awesome.’’
Those were the first words out of Doug Marrone’s mouth when Jaguars owner Shad Khan called him to tell him he wanted to hire him as the team’s head coach as long as he was cool with Tom Coughlin being hired as the vice president of football operations, to whom he would report.
“I called Doug and told him, ‘You’re our choice. We really want you, but what do you think about us bringing in Tom and creating this structure?’ ” Khan told The Post of his recollection of that phone call. “He said, ‘Oh [bleep]. Coach? You’re bringing Coach in? I can’t believe it. Oh man. That’s awesome.’”
“Then I apologized for cursing,’’ Marrone told The Post. “I was fired up about it.’’
So often in today’s NFL, when team owners try to force arranged marriages between head coaches and front-office personnel, invariably, they end in messy divorces.
What Khan did not know was that Marrone had doggedly courted Coughlin for years — dating back to 1993 when he stalked him looking for a graduate assistant job at Boston College — despite numerous coldshoulder setbacks. But he never deterred.
“Doug told me the whole story about how he tried to get a job with Tom and how he adored Tom and I thought, ‘I think this is going to work out great,’ ” Khan said. And so it has. Khan’s Jaguars, coached by Marrone and overseen by Coughlin as the football czar, made the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade, have won two postseason games and play the Patriots on Sunday in the AFC Championship at Gillette Stadium. A win would mean the Jaguars’ first Super Bowl in franchise history. So yeah, it has kind of worked out. “It was so cool that, without either of them knowing, they wanted each other,’’ Khan said.
What’s also rather cool — and a compelling subplot to Sunday’s game — is the fact that a reason Marrone is the Jaguars’ head coach can be traced directly back to Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whom Marrone is trying to prevent from winning a second consecutive Super Bowl and third in the past four years.
When Khan was seeking a permanent head coach to direct his struggling franchise after the 2016 season (after just 17 wins in his first five seasons as owner), he sought the advice of Belichick at the NFL owners meetings.
In short, Khan inquired about Belichick assistants, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia, and Belichick politely told him that his best head-coaching candidate was already in his building. Marrone. He had been the Jaguars’ offensive line coach the previous two seasons and had been elevated to interim head coach for the final two games of 2016 after Gus Bradley was fired.
“Bill was very complimentary of Doug,’’ Khan said. “It was very genuine and sincere on his part.’’
Khan called Belichick’s compliments “a small part of” his hiring of Marrone, adding, “The most important part of it was that he was the right guy for us.”
There’s a quiet respect between Belichick and Marrone that few know about.
When Marrone controversially opted out of his Bills head-coaching contract in 2014 because of questions about the owner Terry Pegula’s direction with the team, Belichick wished Marrone well and told him he wasn’t heartbroken that he no longer was coaching one of New England’s division rivals.
The relationship between Marrone and Belichick, which is more professional than personal, began in 2006 at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, where Belichick’s Patriots staff was coaching the AFC side and Marrone was a part of Sean Payton’s Saints staff coaching the NFC.
“We went out on a charter boat — myself, Coach Payton, Coach Belichick was there, and I think Matt Patricia was there, too,’’ Marrone recalled. “When you go on those charters and you’re going tuna fishing, you’ve got to [let go] a little bit, so we spent some time together and talked a little bit of football.
“We all caught tuna, and Coach Belichick obviously caught the biggest one. Of course he did, right?”
When Marrone encounters Belichick as an opponent Sunday, he’ll feel light years removed from his departure from Buffalo, a decision that left his career in limbo.
He was hired before the 2015 season by Bradley to coach the Jaguars’ offensive line and went through a round of interviews for a head-coaching job after the 2015 season and wasn’t offered a job.
“In the beginning, I was confused, I’m not going to lie about that,’’ Marrone said. “You kind of look back and wonder, ‘Where could I have done a better job? How did it get to that point? Why did I feel the way I felt?’ Things of that nature go through your mind.
“When I went through the rounds of interviews again [in 2016] and didn’t get a job, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I had an opportunity, it didn’t work out and I’m probably not going to have another opportunity again.’
“But I felt that if I got an opportunity again, the things that I thought I didn’t do a good job of I was going to work on and do a better job the next time. That’s how I approached it.”
It helped lead to a 10-6 season, an AFC South title, a wild-card win over the Bills, in what was the first home playoff game in Jacksonville since 1999 when Coughlin was coaching the team, and last Sunday’s upset victory at Pittsburgh.
Marrone said the biggest changes he made from Buffalo to Jacksonville had to do with being more himself. He felt he was too guarded when he was in Buffalo, because he didn’t have a lot of experience with the media.
“I put a lot of time and thought into not really giving anything up, and that wasn’t who I was. I wasn’t myself,’’ he said. “When I was able get the job here, I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to do a better job here.’ I’m not this person that maybe some people have painted me to be. I’m a normal person, but I’m not very social, I’m not very fun, boring.’’
Teaming with Coughlin in Jacksonville has felt like teaming with family for Marrone, despite it being a union many outsiders felt certain was one of those arranged marriages that was doomed to fail.
“I would find it hard for two people in this profession to have a better relationship,’’ Marrone said. “The greatest thing about Coach Coughlin is he only has one agenda, and that’s whatever we have to do to win. How many times can you bring somebody in that’s not blood, that’s not family, and all they want is for you to be successful? That’s all he wants for me. He really should be the executive of the year. I love the guy, I really do.’’
The reciprocal love came
a bit slower on the part of Coughlin.
Marrone, who played at Syracuse, felt he had a connection with Coughlin, because Coughlin also played at Syracuse. So, when he got out of college and wanted to pursue coaching, Marrone heard of a graduate assistant job on Coughlin’s Boston College staff and he went after it.
“With my connection that he had gone to Syracuse and I had gone to Syracuse, I thought, ‘ Shoot, I have a chance of getting this GA job,’” Marrone said. “So I was like, ‘I’ve got to get to him.’ BC was playing at the [1993] Hall of Fame game and I was going to go to the team hotel, use my Bronx knowledge and go to a hotel phone and say, ‘ Can you connect me to Coach Coughlin’s room please?’
“It’s like 10 at night. I call. The operator says, ‘I’ll connect you.’ The phone rings, Coach Coughlin picks up the phone and I say, ‘Coach Coughlin, this is Doug Marrone. I went to Syracuse University. I wanted to talk to you about your GA job.’
“Basically, he was off the phone within in like 30 seconds with me. I can’t remember exactly what he said. It wasn’t anything really rude, but he was getting ready to coach a bowl game, and he didn’t want to talk to someone about a GA job.”
To no one’s surprise, Marrone didn’t get the job.
A couple years later, Marrone was on George O’Leary’s staff at Georgia Tech, and O’Leary brought the coaching staff to Jacksonville to observe Coughlin’s Jaguars. This, Marrone thought, would be his perfect chance to connect with
Coughlin.
“Coach was busy working and just said hello and that was it,’’ Marrone said. “That was the first time I met him face-to-face.’’
His next Coughlin encounter came when Marrone was an assistant with the Jets and was at the NFL Scouting Combine with GM Terry Bradway and coach Herman Edwards.
“I see coach Coughlin talking to Terry Bradway and Herm and I’m like, ‘OK, now I’m going to get him,’ ” Marrone said. “I walk over and say, ‘Hey, coach how you doing, Doug Marrone from Syracuse.’ He was like, ‘Uh, yeah, how you doing?’ Then he turns around and starts talking to Terry and Herm and I’m like, ‘This guy must hate me.’”
When Marrone coached at Syracuse, with the help of associate athletic director Floyd Little, who played in the same backfield as Coughlin, they finally connected.
“That’s where the relationship started to build,’’ Marrone said. “When I left Syracuse and went to Buffalo, if I had issues or problems, I would call him and ask him, ‘Hey, how did you handle this, how’d you handle that?’ It was great.’’
So when the two were united in Jacksonville, it was as if they could finish each other’s sentences.
“I feel like Coach [Coughlin] and I were aligned right off the bat, and that’s helped our team,’’ Marrone said.
Asked if he ever brings up that late-night call before the Hall of Fame game, Marrone said, “Yeah, I tell him all the time, ‘Just think, if you had hired me maybe you’d have won a national championship.’” M aybe, just maybe, all these years later, they’ll go one better and win a Super Bowl together. Khan referred to Coughlin — who as his policy doesn’t do interviews during the season and wasn’t available for this story — as the Jaguars’ “Sherpa.’’ “If you want to climb Mount Everest, you want to find someone who’s done that,’’ Khan said. “We needed a veteran presence, someone who’d been there and done that. Tom Coughlin was the perfect guy. He founded the team and had success here. He went to two Super Bowls and won them. Jaguars blood runs through his veins. “Putting Tom and Doug together was not random putting two guys in a box and saying, ‘Be nice, play nice and win games.’ I asked Tom, ‘Tell me the coach you’d want,’ and he said, ‘I’ve got two, and No. 1 is Doug Marrone.’ I said, ‘OK, this is interesting you would say that Tom, because that’s our top choice. “They were absolutely aligned. Doug has done all the heavy lifting, but Tom has been very, very good about giving his input and then getting out of the way.’’ The perfect marriage.