While the nation’s sports fans have passed their time this spring by watching North Carolina collect another NCAA tournament title, suffering through a seemingly endless Spring Training thanks to the recently created World Baseball Classic that has clearly captured the imagination of a nation, and starting to actually pay attention to NBA and NHL standings, the NFL may have provided the most drama of all without playing one game. We’ve seen one of the best of all time retire, Pro-Bowlers cut one after another or traded, and the Redskins hand out a record contract to another team’s aging star (on second thought, this might not be so groundbreaking). All this and we haven’t even mentioned Michael Vick! So, in order to be fair to past off-seasons and their notoriously fragile egos, I will run down my top five shocking off-season moves in history.
5. Deion Sanders signs with the Cowboys.
On September 9, 1995 Deion Sanders signed a 7-year, $25 million deal with the Cowboys including a $13 million signing bonus that was virtually unheard of at the time. And while this type of player movement is commonplace today and similar annual salaries are now being handed out to glorified waterboys, back in free agency’s formidable stages, Sanders’s deal was extremely rare.
It is not the size of the contract that puts this move on my list, however. Eight months prior to signing, Sanders was leading the hated San Francisco 49ers to a hard fought victory over the Cowboys in the NFC Championship game. The game marked the 3rd consecutive year the two teams met in that game but San Francisco’s first win. Rather than re-up with the Niners, however, Sanders decided to switch sidelines and join San Francisco’s fiercest rival who incidentally would go on to win the Super Bowl that season. Said Primetime about the move, “I’m glad to get it done. Now I won’t have to cover Michael Irvin anymore.”
4. Raiders trade John Gruden for draft picks
This one would have been #1 if not for Al Davis’s penchant for making curious decisions when it comes to his head coaches. But it takes an extra special brand of crazy to trade your head coach for draft picks following a season in which your team was one “tuck rule” away from the Super Bowl.
To be fair, the Raiders did pick up a king’s ransom from the Buccaneers in the deal, netting two first round picks and two second round picks. However, less than twelve months later it was Gruden’s Bucs demolishing Davis’s Raiders in the Super Bowl. That certainly had to be a bitter pill to swallow. Regardless of how that game turned out though, the coach-swap that took place earlier that year was a huge shock by any metric.
3. Bill Parcells retires/ Bill Belichick resigns
Following the 1999 season, Bill Parcells retired as head coach of the New York Jets but hand picked his defensive coordinator and friend, Bill Belichick to succeed him in that role. However, minutes before a press conference introducing Belichick, the new coach hastily left the post by writing on a piece of loose-leaf paper that he was quitting as, “the H.C. of the NYJ.” The eccentric team leader instead took the same position with the New England Patriots only days later citing a Jets front office in turmoil and a feeling that he was being pushed into their head coaching job.
This would leave the Jets in an unenviable position, and the team would go on to hire another Parcells disciple, Al Groh, to be his successor. After one forgettable season where his team went 9-7 but missed the playoffs, Groh left the Jets to coach at the University of Virginia where he remains today. Belichick has managed a bit more success than that during his now 9-year run at the helm of the Patriots. Three Super Bowl titles and another championship appearance following a perfect 16-0 regular season must have Jets fans wondering what could have been for Gang Green.
2. John Elway forces his way out of Baltimore
John Elway was selected #1 overall in the 1983 NFL draft by the Baltimore Colts. However, after playing two seasons of minor league baseball for the New York Yankees before the draft, Elway found himself in the unique position of having another lucrative alternative if he did not like the team that drafted him. So following the draft, Elway demanded a trade out of Baltimore because he didn’t think the organization would allow him to be successful. He threatened that he would play baseball if they did not accommodate him.
Painted into a corner, Baltimore finally caved and shipped Elway to the Denver Broncos for two players as well as a first round pick in the 1984 draft. None of the players that Baltimore received had an impact anywhere near the Hall of Fame career that Elway assembled in the NFL, but when you have no choice, you’ll take just about anything.
1. Jerry Jones buys the Dallas Cowboys
If you haven’t sensed my Dallas Cowboys bias yet while reading this blog, well then I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. In this case however, I think that I am wholly justified in thinking that Jerry Jones’s first season as owner of the Cowboys completely reshaped the next decade of the NFL. First of all, the man fired the only coach that the franchise had ever known, Tom Landry, on his first day, replacing him with his old college teammate Jimmy Johnson who, up to that point, had never coached in the NFL. As if this were not enough though, Jones and Johnson traded away the team’s only proven veteran at the time, Herschel Walker, to the Minnesota Vikings in a trade that eventually involved the exchange of 18 players or draft picks. For the Cowboys, the draft picks that they received would eventually lay the foundation for a dynasty, with Emmit Smith (NFL’s all-time leading rusher) and Darren Woodson (Dallas Cowboys all-time leading tackler) among those selected.
This move brought the Cowboys 3 Super Bowl titles in 4 years while the Vikings have played in just one NFC title game, which they lost, in the time since (1998 after Herschel Walker was long gone). This kind of player movement most likely also sparked the salary cap and free agency systems as they exist today with the consequence, whether intended or not, of restricting the kinds of player transactions that can be completed. Never will we see a trade of this magnitude go down again.
So, I will concede that these things, had they occurred in the same year, might comprise an off-season on par with 2009. However, when you look at the player movement discussed in the intro, along with the dismissal of a possible hall of fame coach in Mike Shanahan, a future hall of fame receiver asking to be released from the only team he’s ever played for in Marvin Harrison, and the tragic death of two NFL players lost out to sea, 2009 has no equal. With so much drama before we even have the draft, I cannot wait to see what the season has in store for us.
