Swagger: Super Bowls, Brass Balls, and Footballs—A Memoir

1

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

The only road into the Florida Keys runs south out of Miami, the mainland releasing its grip over an unremarkable, twenty-mile stretch through the Everglades. The road is lined first by Australian pines, as tacky an outsider as some incoming tourists. Concrete telephone poles soon accompany the drive, mile after mile, dotted on occasion by an oversized osprey or eagle nest on top.

Wet landmarks like Jewfish Creek and Lake Surprise offer only a hint of the rare world ahead, the one I’ve made home, the one coaches, team executives, and franchise owners come to visit under the influence of ambition and obsession like I once had.

A bridge announces the entrance to Key Largo, the largest in the necklace of coral-floored islands. It’s here, just a few miles south, where I often meet a visitor at my restaurant, Jimmy Johnson’s Big Chill. Maybe it’s for lunch. Maybe a drink. There’s always a cold Heineken Light waiting there for me, ready to be poured over ice, just the way I like one.

If the conversation is good, if a coach or general manager has more questions, if I’m still in a mood for company, we’ll drive fifteen minutes down U.S. 1 to Islamorada and my six acres of paradise tucked against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s here that I’ve created the life I want in retirement—a boating and fishing playground where the ocean view ensures I’ll never miss the sight of a locker room. It’s also here, while throwing a pre-training-camp party for my Miami Dolphins years back, that Rhonda and I snuck upstairs and got married, both of us in bathing suits, the ceremony performed in the kitchen by the team’s director of security, Stu Weinstein. Rhonda and I wrestle with whether the date was July 17 or 19, though it hardly matters. We don’t celebrate the anniversary, just as I don’t celebrate birthdays, holidays, or just about any other calendar event. When we returned to the team party that day, I announced, By the way, Rhonda and I just got married… Let’s party!

These days, my home parties are quieter, more private affairs. Bill Belichick has visited most off-seasons for decades. It’s here at my home, sometimes in the cabana, sometimes in the boat, typically with a cold drink, that Bill and I have discussed the inner wiring of a football team. Drafts. Contracts. Handling success—and even more success, in his case. We once discussed how pushing assistant coaches to be better was a necessary step after a Super Bowl win. Another time we talked about drafting players with little chance of making his championship roster—a similar problem to one I had at the end of my coaching time in Dallas. Those players often made other teams’ rosters.

You don’t want to draft players for other teams, I said. Those picks are like money. Save them if you don’t need them. Trade them into the next year.

Bill continues to be a master at that.

Me? I enjoy life on the other side of the finish line. I’m out of the arena. I have no agenda. I don’t even have a schedule most days. Often, my big decision after I get up around 5 a.m. and check my computer bridge game is if the weather is good for fishing.

Maybe my having no dog in the fight is what brings these visitors to the Keys—that and the fact I once built what they’re trying to build now. I recognize the look, remember the chase, see in their eyes the cold clarity of a consumed life. That’s what brings them here. They’re hunting for a thought, an idea, anything new to take back home to help a decision in April win a fourth quarter in December.

Football is weekend fun for much of America, but for these visitors it’s blood. They arrive with the questions that once got me out of bed, full of energy, around four in the morning without an alarm clock. Each off-season brings new faces. Through the years, nearly a dozen team owners, from New Orleans’s Tom Benson to the Los Angeles Chargers’ Dean Spanos, have visited the Keys to discuss what to look for in a coach or general manager, how to structure an organization—how to essentially be as successful with their football teams as they are in business.

The Carolina Panthers’ Scott Fitterer and the Miami Dolphins’ Mike Tannenbaum were the most recent general managers to discuss building teams and analyzing talent. Countless college coaches have come. Sometimes I talked with a college coach on the way up to the NFL, like Chip Kelly, when he went from the University of Oregon to the Philadelphia Eagles, or Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech, before he went to the Arizona Cardinals. There was a regular list of subjects. Hiring a staff. Leading a team of men. The difference of college football versus the NFL.

In the days before the 2021 season, Carolina coach Matt Rhule and his son spent the day fishing on my thirty-nine-foot SeaVee boat, Three Rings, discussing the five characteristics that mattered to me in evaluating talent—a guideline, really, because judging players is more art form than measuring numbers.

After Carolina, Jacksonville coach Urban Meyer sent a plane to Marathon and flew me in before the 2021 season to talk with his new staff. This was before all the trouble to come for Urban that season. I’ve rarely left the Keys the past two decades except for my FOX NFL Sunday show in Los Angeles or some corporate speech—and then only grudgingly. Urban and I knew each other from working at FOX, with him first visiting me years ago as the Ohio State coach. Back then, we discussed balancing football and family, a subject we both struggled over with our addictive football DNA. I failed with that struggle at times. It contributed to some dark times. It’s also led to the happiest time of my life, this retirement in the Keys with Rhonda and my relationships with my sons, Brent and Chad, and their families.

Often my talks with these visiting coaches or sports executives cross over from football to any sport or business. New York Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau kept my ideas for evaluating talent on a whiteboard in his office for quick reference under the heading Can He Play? San Antonio Spurs general manager R. C. Buford visited Islamorada one year to hear how I created the Draft Value Chart, which helped us build our team in Dallas and has been used the past few decades by NFL front offices. R.C. wanted to create a similar chart for the NBA. It didn’t work in the NBA’s two-round draft, with exaggerated value in the first few picks and the league’s smaller team size. But we talked of building teams and managing personalities, and he returned in 2015 when his great Spurs team was aging. We discussed succession throughout an organization. It wasn’t just about the players. He wanted to be prepared, if needed, for when legendary coach Gregg Popovich retired. He asked about the issues surrounding my following NFL greats Tom Landry in Dallas and Don Shula in Miami.

I mentioned my three qualities for hiring coaches: intelligence, passion for the game, and a willingness to work beyond good reason at times. Simple concepts, right? The best answers often are. But apply those concepts to the assorted candidates. Hold fast to them when you’re criticized by fans, questioned by the media, or just tempted by someone different. Trust me. It’s not always so simple.

My door has been open for years to any coach or executive wanting to talk and willing to find their way to my world—well, almost anyone. Florida and Florida State people know better than to call. The University of Miami is the only stop on my career that was more than a stop. It was home. It still is in many ways. I’ve hosted the coaching staffs at my house. One of my players, Mario Cristobal, is now Miami’s coach. I recruited Mario and his older brother, Luis. I sat in their home. I talked with their parents. This spring, I talked with Mario’s players just as I once did him.

The visitors don’t migrate to the Keys for small talk or social gestures. It’s about nuts-and-bolts leadership, some tangible issue before them, or just to hear how I climbed the mountain—about the Pygmalion Theory and not playing with scared money, about good being the enemy of great, and why I ignored the traditional coach’s handbook on practices like using humble-speak in public.

I coached with a big attitude. I wanted it to rub off on my teams. That was my way. It’s not for everyone. I made mistakes, too. Maybe these visitors can learn from those as well. I don’t have secret shortcuts or a special formula for winning. No one comes looking for that anyway. They come instead for ideas formed over four decades that were mixed with the hard work and perseverance that built champions in Miami and Dallas.

These visitors don’t fly into Miami, drive through the Everglades, and visit the Keys just to see me.

They come to hear what I learned.

2

SWAGGER

We talked loud. We laughed hard. We danced across the end zone most Saturdays right into America’s living rooms, Michael Irvin punching both arms high in the air in his self-anointed Playmaker pose or defensive tackle Jerome Brown high-stepping out of a scrum after sacking a quarterback.

Old, frumpy college football never met anything like my University of Miami team in 1986. I hadn’t, either, to be honest. All the coaching philosophies that I developed over the previous two decades finally came together in a breakout crescendo.

The full coming-out party was one of the season’s first home games at Miami’s Orange Bowl stadium, with all the proper dressings: No. 1 Oklahoma versus No. 2 Miami; me versus my old coach and colleague-turned-rival, Barry Switzer; a nationally televised event with the top broadcast team of Brent Musburger and Ara Parseghian; and poor-little-ol’-us cast as six-point underdogs to the defending national champions.

We’re the better team, I told my players that week. We’re going to kick the shit out of them.

That’s who I was, how I talked, and how I wanted my team to play, too. The first sign of our new style came during the pregame coin toss. The marketed rebel of college football, Oklahoma linebacker Brian Bosworth, with his trademark Mohawk haircut, stood at midfield opposite our raw and real rebels, Jerome Brown, Winston Moss, and Alonzo Highsmith. Our guys were upset that Bosworth’s mug had been splashed across our hometown paper, the Miami Herald, the previous day. It was disrespectful, they thought. But if it hadn’t been that picture irritating them, something else would get them going.

There they stood at midfield, angry and arms defiantly folded, sweat pouring off their scowls in the subtropical heat, as they stared flat-eyed at Bosworth.

Don’t be afraid, motherfucker, Moss said to him.

When Bosworth said something back, Highsmith said, I ain’t scared of you, bitch. National television picked up the sound enough that it’s a GIF all these years later. I see it on social media and chuckle.

Oklahoma won the coin toss, and Brown said to everyone standing there, Fuck ’em. Give ’em the ball at the fifty-yard line. I don’t care. We’ll kick their ass.

The ceremonial, have-a-good-game handshake between captains? Sorry, not here. Not as we rewrote college football’s unwritten rules. That midfield scene was the public sequel to a private episode that morning. Several of our offensive players called Bosworth’s hotel room and woke him up. Normally, you couldn’t find the room where a player stayed, much less call through to it. But this was my players’ town. Running back Melvin Bratton knew someone working the reception desk at the hotel Oklahoma was staying at. Bratton, Highsmith, and some other offensive players called Bosworth, woke him up, and shouted, We’re going to kick your ass! and other good-morning greetings.

When our defensive players heard about the offense’s wake-up call, they wanted in, too. They called Oklahoma quarterback Jamelle Holieway’s room. He picked up the phone to hear several players deliver a mocking rendition of a singsong line from The Warriors, a popular gang movie at the time.

Jam-e-l-l-e, come out to pla-a-ay! they said in the character’s falsetto voice.

When I walked into the team breakfast, these players came up to me, laughing and telling the story of the phone calls. We got ’em this morning, coach! they said. We told ’em we were going to kick their ass.

My reaction?

Okay, let’s go do it, I said.

My way wasn’t the old and ordered college way of coaches like Knute Rockne or Bud Wilkinson. Their quaint game grew out of small college towns on lush campuses and regimented behavior. The game I coached at Miami came right off the streets. Many of our players grew up in tough neighborhoods close to the Orange Bowl. We kept the game on those mean streets, too, with a style and substance much of America couldn’t grasp or didn’t bother to try. That loud style was evident in my nationally televised interview immediately after we dragged Oklahoma up and down the field to an easy, 28–16 win.

I made no bones about it before the game, I said to CBS’s Pat O’Brien on the field. I said we were the better team. And we were.

Yep, that was my kind of performance, saying you’re going to kick someone’s ass, doing it thoroughly, and then gloating about it afterward. What’s the point of winning if you can’t gloat a little? Or sometimes a lot. My style was never to act humbly in victory the way the old unspoken rules read. Nor were my players going to go quietly into the night. We changed the look and feel of college football right then like Muhammad Ali changed boxing with his fast mouth and faster fists.

It wasn’t always popular, being bold and brash and so damned dominant that we won 40 of our final 44 games at Miami. That afternoon against Oklahoma cemented the national narrative that began a few games earlier, at the end of the previous season, when we hammered Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust in his final game, 58–7. That was a day. Michael Irvin shouted on the sideline to me, Pour it on! Pour it on! Parseghian, the former Notre Dame coach who poured it on opponents for years, tut-tutted from the broadcast booth how we should show some compassion after our reserve quarterback threw a touchdown to a reserve receiver to make it 50–7. When we had ten men on the field and still blocked a Notre Dame punt, Musburger sermonized about why I’d humiliate another coach. Humiliation wasn’t my idea. But let’s be clear: I sure wasn’t apologizing then or now for that score. It was fun kicking their ass. It’s fun thinking about it now.

The funny thing is, I grew up a Notre Dame fan, admiring how they won stomping lesser teams like we crushed Notre Dame that day. Who knows? Maybe that’s where I learned that pour-it-on style.

It always interested me how the big-school bully changed the subject once he got punched in the mouth. Bosworth, who lost to us a second time that day in the Orange Bowl, told Sports Illustrated we were the University of San Quentin, referring to the infamous California prison. Notre Dame’s great receiver Tim Brown lost all three games against us and fumed, If they can taunt you and talk about your mama, well, that’s the way they play. They play with no class, definitely no class.

So some hated the manner my Miami teams played. So what? Some loved it, too. We were that type of new idea to college football—just as my Dallas Cowboys were on deck to be in the NFL. When Sports Illustrated ranked the twenty-five most hated teams in history, our 1986 Miami team was No. 1 and our 1992 Dallas Cowboys team was No. 3. I’m not sure how the 1988–89 Detroit Pistons slipped in there at No. 2. All I know is it takes rare achievement and a different style to be disliked as much as my teams were.

Michael Irvin came into my office one day during that 1986 season when the outside noise about our program was especially loud and asked if I was okay.

You just keep winning and I’ll be fine, I said.

I didn’t mind us being branded as villains. It was disappointing and disparaging, the manner it was done at times. But I knew what kind of people we had. I also knew that in every great story there’s a good guy and a bad guy. The only thing I demanded in our story was for the bad guy to win. And keep winning.

Something being said did bother me, though, especially as we became a national conversation. It was a developing story line around this team—around me, actually. It accused me of allowing players to act like the uncontrolled renegades the Parseghians, Bosworths, and Browns claimed we were. The story line said I just sat there, doing nothing, as all these on-field celebrations and loud proclamations changed the look of college football.

That’s not how it worked at all.

I didn’t sit there passively, looking the other way, as players danced and pointed to the skies.

I encouraged them to act that way.

I wanted them to play to their personalities.

That’s the same mind-set I had as a coach, too. Why follow someone else’s rules? Why not unleash who you really are, and by doing so, become the best version of yourself? Step over a player? Talk some trash? Redefine how college football was going to be played?

I coached everyone to play freely under my rules.

That’s not a contradiction. I thought if players talked loud and celebrated, they’d have to back it up. Their energy would run like an electric current through the team if you had similar-minded players, too. But my players were also coached that there’s a line out there, even as they played freely, and that line stopped at taunting the opponent, or committing dumb penalties.

That meant we needed a certain kind of player on my team. South Florida was full of them, too. We just had to find the right ones. Later, with the Dallas Cowboys, I’d ask a shorthanded question about draft prospects that my longtime assistants understood: "Is he a Miami guy?"

Did he have that open attitude to accompany his talent? Would he work hard, think big, and behave with the discipline our teams needed? Yes, discipline. That was a crucial component to our success. People looked at Irvin throwing his hands in the air after scoring, or Brown cursing at Bosworth, who claimed we had no discipline. What is discipline? Just winning the right way? Forever following an old-school ideal of acting like you’d been there when scoring a touchdown?

Listen: Discipline is your mind demanding you run that final 110-yard sprint in practice when your body refuses. Discipline is getting up for that early class to keep grades in line for football. Discipline, as Michael Irvin put it about my teams, was when the Orange Bowl sits on you like a blowtorch—no breeze, humidity off the charts, the crowd going crazy—and it’s fourth-and-one with two minutes left, everyone exhausted, and the opponent’s quarterback comes to the line and gives our defense a hard count. Hut-HUT!

And we don’t jump offsides.

And we stop them on fourth down.

That’s discipline: mental, physical, emotional discipline. It’s needed to compete year after year for championships like we did at Miami. There’s a fine line, too, from what can happen if you lose control while coaching this way. A few years after I left for Dallas, Miami beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl, 46–3. The score wasn’t memorable. Miami’s ridiculous behavior was. That’s the word for it, too: Ridiculous. Taunting. Flaunting. Making a spectacle at midfield. Miami broke the Cotton Bowl’s ninety-year record for penalties—in the first half. A good coach, Dennis Erickson, lost control of his team that day. That was never my way.

At Dallas, too, some of the crazier antics like The White House, a party house bought by players, came after my time. That wasn’t my way, either. Discipline, you see, was the everyday guardrail of any team I ran, even if it wasn’t the traditional yes-sir-no-sir brand people recognized. I never felt the need to follow convention. That went for hiring coaches, building game plans, and especially the substance of my coaching strategies, which was sometimes overshadowed by our playing style.

That substance can be reduced to one idea that no one quickly grasped in college or later, in the pros: speed beats size. We took slower safeties at Miami and converted them to fast linebackers, slower linebackers and made them into fast defensive ends, and bigger defensive ends and made them quick tackles.

That made for tired conversations the week before we whipped Oklahoma in our 1986 coming-out party. Their offensive line averaged 280 pounds. Our two defensive ends, Bill Hawkins and Dan Stubbs, weighed 241 and 245 pounds, respectively, but were quick and strong.

How will they hold up against Oklahoma’s power game? a reporter asked before that game.

You’ll have to watch, I said.

I started answering that question at Oklahoma, of all places, as defensive line coach in 1970. The conventional college defense waited at the line back then and reacted to the offense. I wanted my linemen to attack. Shoot the gap. Cause havoc. Make the offense react to us. It’s how I succeeded enough as a 195-pound nose guard at Arkansas to be named all-conference and, later, to the school’s All-1960s Team.

Upfield pressure, I called this style.

It’s how I built teams all the way to winning a national championship and two Super Bowls, meeting conventional resistance all along the way.

Committing kamikaze, Oklahoma defensive coordinator Larry Lacewell called it my first summer there.

The previous year’s defense surrendered the most points in school history. Now, as he saw it, this kid coach whose five whole years of experience were at Iowa State, Wichita State, Louisiana Tech, and Picayune High School wanted to… what? Change how defense was played? We didn’t win a game at Picayune High that 1966 season, either.

Larry let me try it my way and, as he said, it saved that staff’s jobs. By 1972, our defense held nine of twelve opponents to a touchdown or less and Oklahoma was ranked No. 2 in the country.

It helped advance me to Arkansas’s defensive coordinator, then to Pitt’s assistant head coach, Oklahoma State’s head coach, and then to the big time at Miami. I collected ideas all along the way. Schemes. Strategies. Philosophies. I tucked big and small thoughts in my pocket—literally in my pocket sometimes. I kept an index card there about the referees. That came from how my boss at Pitt, Jackie Sherrill, interacted with the officials during games.

Hey, motherfucker, come here! he would yell at one. Or, for variety: Hey, asshole, get over here!

I went a more diplomatic way. My secretary put the names of the referees and their pictures on a card with their children’s names, where they went to school, and any other relevant personal detail.

Hey, Clemson played pretty good yesterday, I might say to an official who attended there before the game. Or simply, Jim, watch the holding on that play.

So, by that 1986 Oklahoma game, all my ideas were on display, whether college football was ready for them or not. Everything mattered. Nothing was too small. That day against Oklahoma, for instance, just before kickoff, Miami’s public address announcer gave the day’s temperature and made up the humidity at something over 90 percent—just like I had him announce every game. That planted a seed in the opponent. Some said a few shoulders on the other sideline sagged at that announcement.

My plans were meticulous that way. I also had our band director play an inspirational song linked to the trendy television series Miami Vice at the