After long, enduring journey together, Brenda Warner to present Kurt for the Hall of Fame

Josh Weinfuss

http://www.espn.com/blog/arizona-cardinals/post/_/id/26389/after-long-enduring-journey-together-brenda-warner-to-present-kurt-for-the-hall-of-fame

TEMPE, Ariz. — Brenda Warner heard the question for a while.

Who was going to present her husband, Kurt, for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday?

Brenda’s response was the same every time: “I don’t know.”

She wasn’t lying. It was just that she didn’t know who Kurt was going to ask. Brenda didn’t know what they were talking about. She finally had to ask her sister, who explained that every inductee to the Hall of Fame is introduced — or presented — by someone of their choosing. Brenda thought, for sure, that Kurt would ask former St. Louis Rams coach Dick Vermeil.

“He loves that man more than life itself,” Brenda told ESPN. “Every time they talk on the phone, it ends with both of them in tears and loving words and it’s just precious to watch. I just assumed he was waiting for the right time for that.”

Kurt was waiting for the right time, but not to ask Vermeil.

He asked his wife of 19 years if she’d be his presenter. Brenda was shocked.

“I said, ‘Did everyone say no?’” Brenda said with a laugh. “I just thought it was so odd that he asked me and then he went on to say all the beautiful things that you’ve heard him say, ‘that nobody has sacrificed as much as you have’ and all the wonderful things that a wife would want to hear, and it just touched my heart.”

Kurt had tears in his eyes when he asked Brenda.

“He’s the crier,” she said. “I’m not. Part of me was like, ‘C’mon, cry Brenda, cry. But nothing happened. It was just one of those moments that it feels like we’ve been through so much together and most people know about the good things and we obviously remember all the highs and lows because they brought us this point.”

Thinking she was going to stand on stage inside Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium on Saturday evening and introduce Kurt, Brenda tried to put their journey on the field — from the time they met during line-dancing lessons through his stints with the Green Bay Packers, the Iowa Barnstormers and the Amsterdam Admirals, then through his success with the St. Louis Rams and the Arizona Cardinals — into words. She wrote a speech but then found out her presentation would be taped and spliced with highlights for a video to be shown before Kurt takes the stage on Saturday. So she read it to him in private.

Brenda will be the fourth wife to introduce a Hall of Famer. Gene Jones, the wife of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, will be the third, and will present right before Brenda.

Once the magnitude of being one of four wives to present their husbands set in, Brenda was “thrilled” that Kurt recognized the private side of being an NFL player, the part not shown on highlights or in postgame interviews.

“I think the bottom line is, through this entire journey, all the ups and downs, all the good and bad, there’s been one person that’s been with me through it all, that’s sacrificed as much as I had and really allowed me, within our circumstances, to chase after my dream and may have put things on hold, took on different responsibilities that she may not have if we went in a different direction,” Kurt said. “I just really believe that being up on the stage, it’s a part of so many different people that helped me to get there, but she’s the one that I believe deserves to share that moment with me and share that stage with me.

“That is why I chose Brenda to present me.”

Brenda didn’t want to go out that night. Her mother, however, insisted.

It was 1992. Brenda was 25, divorced and living in Iowa with two children. She received a hardship discharge from the Marines two years earlier to care for her son, Zack, who was left blind and with brain damage when Brenda’s first husband dropped him as an infant. She was on food stamps and living in low-income housing.

Her mother believed Brenda needed to get out, meet people, start living life again. A country bar near Cedar Falls, Iowa, was hosting line-dancing lessons. To Brenda, that was about as innocent as a night out could get, and, anyway, what were the odds she would meet someone and get stuck talking to them all night?

Then Kurt walked in with his best friend.

During one of the dances — the barn dance, Brenda recalled — she and Kurt ended up paired together. At the end of the dance, he asked if she wanted to keep dancing. She said yes. He said his name was Kurt. She said her name was Brenda. That was all they said the rest of the night.

Throughout the dances, women came up to Kurt just to say hi or give him a hug. He was 21. A quarterback at the University of Northern Iowa. Tall. Dark. Handsome. To her, it was all an instant red flag. Yet they kept dancing and closed the bar at 2 a.m. Kurt walked Brenda to her car and went in for a kiss. She stopped him, and then gave him the Cliff’s Notes version of her life and what she thought would be the kiss of death to their brief flirtation. She ended it with this: “I understand if that freaks you out and if you never want to see me again, but that’s the way it is.”

Kurt never got his kiss. Brenda thought she’d never see that cute guy again.

But Kurt knocked on Brenda’s parents’ front door the next morning. He wanted to meet her children. Looking back, Brenda can’t believe she let in a man she met the night before, for just a few hours at a bar, but she did. Zack, who developed a love for music after going blind, showed Kurt all the radios in the house.

“I’m holding my 9-month-old daughter, thinking ‘What am I doing?’” Brenda said. “I honestly realized that moment that this guy’s special.”

As their relationship blossomed and Kurt’s courtship continued, there was still one part of Kurt’s life she couldn’t quite get over just yet. He kept telling Brenda he wanted to play in the NFL. He had been named the Gateway Conference’s offensive MVP as a senior and wanted to keep playing. That wasn’t a job, she kept thinking. She couldn’t wrap her head around what making the NFL even meant. Brenda had never watched an NFL game. She grew up in a NASCAR household. She was once given a Dallas Cowboys trash bin, but didn’t want it because she didn’t like how it looked.

But she stuck with him, through getting cut by the Packers, through three years in arena football, through a season in NFL Europe, always waiting for him to give up his dream and get a real job like her father, who spent his adult life making John Deere tractors.

Then Brenda started watching him play. That’s when she knew he’d never have another job, and it had nothing to do with his ability.

“I realized he was doing what he was created to do,” she said. “I couldn’t really explain the football side of it — and probably still couldn’t after all these years — but there’s moments you watch someone, whether it’s watching the Olympics or watching someone sing, and you realize they are completely in the moment they’re supposed to be in. And what a joy it is to watch someone be living what they were created to be doing, and that’s what I looked at football as. That was the NFL. Until he was ready to walk away, as long as we’re able to pay the bills and I don’t have to be on food stamps and live in low-income housing, like I did when I met him, let’s just keep seeing how long this can last.”

But Brenda didn’t want to be the one to end it, no matter how many times she watched Kurt pick himself up off the ground. She was never a football fan, so she kept her eyes trained on Kurt. That meant she saw every hit he took and how slow he was to get back up.

It was an internal battle for Brenda. She knew she couldn’t be the one to tell him to stop playing. She couldn’t trust that what she’d be doing was the right thing for Kurt. So she prayed, seeking a sign for Kurt to recognize that it was time to quit. It came on a hit on Jan. 16, 2010 at New Orleans.

“When he laid there, I was done,” Brenda said. “I knew I was done. And I think at that moment, when you realize a child that has a disability and has brain damage and I get to see him struggle every day and it’s not going to get better, that this is what life is, that always played a part with every hit that Kurt took, in my own mind.”

Brenda’s personal struggle was complicated. She wanted to see Kurt healthy but she enjoyed watching him play.

“So the Hall of Fame is just that moment where you realize all those struggles and all those times he was told he wasn’t good enough, or that I heard he was too slow or he was washed-up or when he was cut or he was benched, or whether he was benched again, it’s about that moment that he gets to be honored, and I think most people relate to that side of the journey rather than the Super Bowl trophies,” she said.

“Kurt reminds people of who they want to be. Not all of us have become who we really want to be, and he does that for people.”

Brenda was one of those people.

As football took them all over the country — and the world — they decided she’d stay home and take care of their family, which soon grew to seven children. She had become an RN after getting out of the Marines as a way to care for Zack. Brenda had loved being a nurse, specifically the part where she took care of other people. Instead of doting on patients, she became devoted to taking care of her family.

It wasn’t until she turned 50 last month that Brenda began trying new things, stuff she couldn’t do when her children were younger or her family was crisscrossing the map. Such as welding. She thought it’d be weird for someone to hear about, but Brenda had always wanted to learn to weld. So she took lessons, bought the equipment and now welds all day while the children are at school. She’s filled her house with her art and makes her own jewelry, which she’ll be wearing this weekend during the Hall of Fame festivities.

As football is Kurt’s outlet, welding has become Brenda’s way of being herself.

“Personally, it’s the first thing in my life that I didn’t need somebody to like my work or to give me compliments or affirmation,” she said. “I’m doing it because I love it and that’s freeing. In the NFL, I was that NFL wife that was judged a lot. No matter what I wore, no matter what I looked like, no matter what I said, expectations were not ever met and I didn’t fit in real well, so it was kind of a relief to be out of that and just be who I want to be.

“That’s what I believe I’ve been able to do these last couple years.”

Link: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170726-the-polygamous-town-facing-genetic-disaster

By Zaria Gorvett
26 July 2017
“We are to gird up our loins and fulfil this, just as we would any other duty…” said Brigham Young, who led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or Mormons, back in the mid-19th Century. It was a sweltering summer’s day in Provo City, Utah and as he spoke, high winds swirled dust around him.
The holy task Young was speaking of was, of course, polygyny, where one man takes many wives (also known by the gender neutral term polygamy). He was a passionate believer in the practice, which he announced as the official line of the church a few years earlier. Now he was set to work reassuring his flock that marrying multiple women was the right thing to do.
He liked to lead by example. Though Young began his adult life as a devoted spouse to a single wife, by the time he died his family had swelled to 55 wives and 59 children.

Fast-forward to 1990, a century after polygyny was abandoned, and the upshot was only just beginning to emerge. In an office several hundred miles from where Young gave his speech, a 10-year-old boy was presented to Theodore Tarby, a doctor specialising in rare childhood diseases.
The boy had unusual facial features, including a prominent forehead, low-set ears, widely spaced eyes and a small jaw. He was also severely physically and mentally disabled.
In every case, the child had the same distinctive facial features, the same delayed development
After performing all the usual tests, Tarby was stumped. He had never seen a case like it. Eventually he sent a urine sample to a lab that specialises in detecting rare diseases. They diagnosed “fumarase deficiency”, an inherited disorder of the metabolism. With just 13 cases known to medical science (translating into odds of one in 400 million), it was rare indeed. It looked like a case of plain bad luck.
But there was a twist. It turned out his sister, whom the couple believed was suffering from cerebral palsy, had it too. In fact, together with colleagues from the Barrow Neurological Institute, soon Tarby had diagnosed a total of eight new cases, in children ranging from 20 months to 12 years old.
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In every case, the child had the same distinctive facial features, the same delayed development – most couldn’t sit up, let alone walk – and, crucially, they were from the same region on the Arizona-Utah border, known as Short Creek.
Even more intriguingly, this region is polygynous. In this small, isolated community of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the likelihood of being born with fumarase deficiency is over a million times above the global average.
“When I moved to Arizona that’s when I realised that my colleagues here were probably the most familiar I’d ever met with this disease,” says Vinodh Narayanan, a neurologist at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Arizona, who has treated several patients with fumarase deficiency.

What’s going on?
The disease is caused by a hiccup in the process that provides energy to our cells. In particular, it’s caused by low levels of an enzyme – fumarase – that helps to drive it. Since it was perfected billions of years ago, the enzyme has become a staple of every living thing on the planet. It’s so important, today the instructions for making it are remarkably similar across all species, from owls to orchids.
For those who inherit a faulty version, the consequences are tragic. Though our brains account for just 2% of the body’s total weight, they are ravenously hungry – using up around 20% of its energy supply. Consequently, metabolic disorders such a fumarase deficiency are particularly devastating to the organ. “It results in structural abnormalities and a syndrome including seizures and delayed development,” says Narayanan.
Faith Bistline has five cousins with the disease, who she used to look after until she left the FLDS in 2011. “They are completely physically and mentally disabled,” she says. The oldest started learning to walk when he was two years old, but stopped after a long bout of seizures. Now that cousin is in his 30s and not even able to crawl.
Fumarase deficiency is rare because it’s recessive – it only develops if a person inherits two faulty copies of the gene
In fact, only one of her cousins can walk. “She can also make some vocalisations and sometimes you can understand a little bit of what she’s saying, but I wouldn’t call it speaking,” she says. They all have feeding tubes and need care 24 hours a day.
Fumarase deficiency is rare because it’s recessive – it only develops if a person inherits two faulty copies of the gene, one from each parent. To get to grips with why it’s plaguing Short Creek, first we need to back to the mid-19th Century.
Brigham Young was a busy man. In addition to leading the Mormon church, he also founded a city – Salt Lake City, Utah – which flourished from a sparsely populated desert valley into a full-blown polygynous utopia in the space of a few short decades.
Alas, it didn’t last. By the 1930s, the practice had been abandoned by the church and banned by the state of Utah, making it punishable by imprisonment and a hefty fine (equivalent to around $10,000 (£7,675) in today’s money). Followers needed somewhere to go.

Followers of polygamy fled here after the practice was banned in Utah (Credit; iStock)
They settled on the remote ranching town of Short Creek, which formed part of the Arizona Strip. This was an area larger than Belgium (14,000 sq miles, or 36,000 sq km) with only a handful of inhabitants – the perfect place to hide from the prying eyes of federal marshals.
Today it’s home to the twin towns of Hildale and Colorado City – either side of the Utah-Arizona border – and some 7,700 people. It’s the headquarters of the FLDS, which is famous for its conservative way of life and polygyny. “Most families include at least three wives, because that’s the number you need to enter heaven,” says Bistline, who has three mothers and 27 siblings.
In the end, the link to fumarase deficiency is a numbers game. Take Brigham Young. In all, his children begat 204 grandchildren, who, in turn, begat 745 great-grandchildren. By 1982, it was reported that he had at least 5,000 direct descendants.
This sudden explosion is down to exponential growth. Even with just one wife and three children, if every subsequent generation follows suit a man can have 243 descendants after just five generations. In polygynous families this is supercharged. If every generation includes three wives and 30 children, a man can – theoretically – flood a community with over 24 million of his descendants in the space of five generations, or little over 100 years. Of course this isn’t what actually happens. Instead, lineages begin to fold in on themselves as distant (and in the FLDS, not so distant) cousins marry. In polygynous societies, it doesn’t take long before everyone is related.
In Short Creek, just two surnames dominate the local records – Jessop and Barlow
This is thought to be how one-in-200 men (one in 12.5 in Asia) are descended directly from super-fertile Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, who died nearly eight centuries ago. As Brigham Young said himself: “It is obvious that I could not have been blessed with such a family, if I had been restricted to one wife…”
In Short Creek, just two surnames dominate the local records – Jessop and Barlow. According to local historian Benjamin Bistline, who spoke to news agency Reuters back in 2007, 75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.
This is all very well, but we now know that most people are walking around with at least one lethal recessive mutation (one that would kill us before we reach reproductive age) in their genome, around the same number as in fruit flies. Humans haven’t gone extinct because, being recessive, they’re only unmasked if we have children with someone who also just so happens to carry a copy of that exact same mutation too.

Mongol warrior Genghis Khan took so many wives that one-in-200 men may be related to him (Credit: iStock)
This is where the system starts to become unstuck. “With polygyny you’re decreasing the overall genetic diversity because a few men are having a disproportionate impact on the next generation,” says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. “Random genetic mutations become more important.”
In isolated communities, the problem is compounded by basic arithmetic: if some men take multiple wives, others can’t have any. In the FLDS, a large proportion of men must be kicked out as teenagers, shrinking the gene pool even further.
“They are driven to the highway by their mothers in the middle of the night and dumped by the side of the road,” says Amos Guiora, a legal expert at the University of Utah who has written a book about religious extremism. Some estimate that there may be up to a thousand so-called “lost boys”. “Often they spend years trying to repent, hoping to get back into the religion,” says Bistline, who has three brothers who were discarded.
Conservationists have known for years that a population’s “mating system” – the fancy word for sexual behaviour – can have a profound impact on its genetics. In wild deer and sage grouse, as in Mormon cults, polygyny is associated with high levels of inbreeding, because it shrinks the number of males contributing to the gene pool and increases the relatedness of the entire community.
Today polygyny is more widespread in Africa than any other continent
The fumarase deficiency gene has been traced to Joseph Jessop and his first wife, Martha Yeates (14 children). One of their daughters went on to marry co-founder John Barlow – and the rest is history. Today the number of people carrying the fumarase gene in Short Creek is thought to be in the thousands.
The FLDS are not alone. Today polygyny is more widespread in Africa than any other continent. In March 2014, Kenya’s Parliament passed a bill allowing men to marry multiple wives, while in many West African countries it’s been practised for thousands of years.

Intriguingly, it’s associated with rare disease here, too. In Cameroon, scientists recently reported a polygynous community with abnormally high levels of stuttering. By comparing local genomes with those from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and North African populations, the researchers identified “exceptionally rare” gene variants among this community, which appear to be responsible – though the authors do not speculate about whether this is a consequence of polygyny.
Which brings us to the good news. Since inbreeding tends to uncover “recessive” mutations that would normally remain in hiding, studying these communities has helped scientists to identify many disease-causing genes. That’s because genetic information is useless on its own. To be meaningful to medical research, it must be linked to information about disease. In fact, more human disease genes have been discovered in Utah – with its Mormon history – than any other place in the world.
It’s not the legacy Brigham Young expected, but in the end, it’s possible that the controversial practice might have some unintended positives.
—
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Still Unsure About Single-Payer Health Care? This Might Change Your Mind

Still Unsure About Single-Payer Health Care? This Might Change Your Mind

I recently had the privilege of doing some interviews and speaking at a north New Jersey Democratic Socialist of America meeting (it kicked ass) about universal single-payer health care. One question that came up several times is, “Well, how do I persuade people who are on the fence?”

It’s symptomatic of my bubble that this isn’t something I had a ready answer for! So I thought about it and I think I have something I can commit to. In short, it’s that we’re already spending the money, but profit-seeking corporations aren’t giving us our fair value for it.

To break it down further:

1) The same care costs much more in the United States than anywhere else.

I really like this Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) working paper on relative hospital costs, which shows that U.S. hospital costs, adjusted for GDP, are 42 percent greater than the average of the sample — or, basically, 40 percent more expensive than France.

MRIs are a great example — the procedure consists of “push button” (I’m exaggerating). There is no reason it should cost five times what it costs in Australia!

2) We’re already spending massive amounts of money on healthcare, but we’re spending it dumbly.

American public money pays for 64 percent of all healthcare costs in America. That’s fucking bonkers!

Total health spending in 2015 was $3.2 trillion, of which public money represented $2.1 trillion. A little less than half of that is actual Medicare, Medicaid, or Veterans Affairs spending. The rest is government spending on private insurance for government employees, about $190 billion, and government subsidies to insurance companies and individuals via tax subsidies for employer coverage, about $300 billion.

We know that Medicare can negotiate much better prices for treatment because it is a larger payer. Scale that idea up —imagine how much better things would be if we had a single payer to regulate costs more effectively across all healthcare spending!

3) Only a federal single payer bears the costs of providing care and the costs of not providing care.

Align our incentives appropriately!

Right now, your private insurer only bears the costs of you receiving care. Because you are likely to change insurers in the future and eventually go on Medicare, they don’t actually feel the pressure to provide you care that keeps you healthy in the distant (and near) future. Instead, we all do — we all suffer when our friends and family get sick; our public money is allocated to care for people when they get sick.

So it makes perfect sense that the same actor who suffers when people don’t get preventative care — all of us, united, represented by our federal government — should be the actor who also pays for that care in the first place. Because:

4) Once you have universal, single-payer health care, you can begin the work of actual health justice.

The actual goal of health reform isn’t just payer reform, universal expansion and cost coverage — those are just the beginning. The actual work is the social determinants of health. I’ve said this before and I believe every word of it:

Because the federal actor bears costs of providing care and not providing care, it can finally be a tool for realizing health justice. If your population is getting sick and dying because they don’t have a place to live, then housing is healthcare, and you build housing to bring healthcare costs down. If your population doesn’t have access to healthy food to eat, then food is healthcare, and you provide them with affordable food options to bring food costs down.

If you want to read more about social determinants of health care, it’s hard to go wrong reading about New York Medicaid director Jason Helgerson. Here’s the 2014 document summarizing his Medicaid Redesign Team’s approach to social determinants in New York. It’s interesting! Here’s some more good stuff on Helgerson and value-based payments.

Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.

Some other questions that come up

Someone needs to do the extremely sexy work of standardizing medical data feeds and outputs.

What about the jobs of people who currently work in the insurance industry?

The easy, callous answer is “Well, at least they’ll have healthcare if they lose their jobs.” I’m not satisfied with that (even though it’s true). I also think it’s shortsighted. Much of the infrastructure in the insurance industry is still necessary. So why not reallocate these workers to the federal sector, where their labor goes to the good of all, instead of private profit?

Someone needs to do the extremely sexy work of standardizing medical data feeds and outputs. Here is a great way for people with hyper-specialized skills to be paid fair wages to design and implement that standardization. And, hell, we’re trying to fix a three-trillion-dollar sector here. It’s peanuts to build a work program to help those who might otherwise be left behind. Solidarity for all workers, including those whose skills are an invention of the payer-provider labyrinth.

What about doctor salaries?

I believe that the reduction in per-service costs (and the adoption of smarter standards of payment, like “pay for treatment” instead of “pay for specific service”) will be more than matched by an increase in people seeking affordable preventative care, so most physicians will find their compensation to be fair.

But that might not be a perfect argument. Ultimately, some physicians will find their total compensation reduced— mostly specialists, who have been unfairly privileged in price increases over time. (Primary care physicians and rural medicine doctors, on the other hand, are due for a compensation increase relative to median American physician salaries — which are, it should be noted much, much, much higher than salaries in other countries…)

One of the reasons physicians need high salaries is because they graduate ten years of education with $300,000 in student debt and 7 percent of compounding interest. That’s two decades of paying off debt. How cruel!

So I think there is room in universal single-payer healthcare for tuition relief and/or free medical training for doctors, nurses and other essential health providers. Relieve their pressure to be locked into a career path and insurmountable education debt in exchange for fairer salaries. This should be a net better result for everyone.

What about hospital revenues? Won’t they fall year over year?

That’s the wrong way to think about it. Consider “Roemer’s Law” — if a hospital builds a new bed, it will be filled. So much of hospital annual revenues are ER and inpatient admissions that don’t necessarily need to happen. Those admissions could have been prevented with preventive care or screening, or affordable care in clinics closer to home. Those procedures often could have been handled by a less specialized physician at home or in a local clinic. It’s not about cutting spending, it’s about reallocating spending to better places and making sure it ends up in the hands of people providing care.

WHAT HAPPENS TO REDSKINS OFFENSE IF SEAN MCVAY LEAVES?

JP Finlay
January 09, 2017

http://www.csnmidatlantic.com/washington-redskins/what-happens-redskins-offense-if-sean-mcvay-leaves

For months rumors swirled that Redskins offensive coordinator Sean McVay would draw interest for head coaching opportunities.

Those rumors came true this offseason, as McVay has already interviewed with the Rams for their vacant head coach position and will talk Monday with the 49ers about their top job.

It appears the talks with Los Angeles went well and the team is digging deep into the 30-year-old’s background for more information.

Of course, McVay has lived a football life. He began his coaching career with Tampa in 2008 at just 22 years old, landed with the Redskins in 2010, and took over at offensive coordinator in 2014. Redskins players have said they have ‘no doubt’ about McVay’s ability to coach a team, and it seems the question is more when than if he gets a head job.

And while that’s all great news for McVay, what does it mean for the Redskins?

Washington’s offense is the strength of the team, and one of the more effective units in the NFL. The team ranked 3rd in the NFL in yards gained and quarterback Kirk Cousins threw for more than 4,900 yards, both significant improvements from 2015.

Chris Thompson, a fourth-year running back that took advantage of his opportunities in the Redskins system, said that losing McVay would be tough but should not cause major changes as the offensive design comes from head coach Jay Gruden.

“As far as the offense goes if anybody’s worried, it’s Sean and Coach Gruden incorporating their ideas together. It would be big just because it might put a little bit more on Coach Gruden. He may be in a situation where he might have to go back to play calling again,” Thompson said. “It’s something that Coach Gruden is used to.”

Play calling will be one area that McVay’s absence could have a big impact. In 2014, Gruden called the Redskins plays despite being a rookie head coach. That task, along with running the whole team, proved to be somewhat of a burden and in 2015 Gruden shared play calling duties with McVay and offensive line coach Bill Callahan.

This past season, though Gruden, Callahan and QB Coach Matt Cavanugh had input, play calling was exclusively the domain of McVay. The young coordinator got the credit when things went well, and took the heat when the Redskins offense bogged down. At times last year, the Redskins had a bad habit of getting away from the running attack, and McVay owned that when the criticism inevitably came.

After a December loss to the Cardinals in Arizona that saw the Redskins run less than 20 times despite averaging more than 4-yards-per-carry, McVay took the blame.

“I definitely feel like I could’ve been more patient on some of those early down and distances where you get a little bit pass-heavy. And that’s something that as a decision-maker and as a coordinator, I have to do a better job,” he said.

It’s that level of honesty and accountability that likely appeals to NFL owners when they look at McVay as a head coaching candidate.

For the Redskins, McVay is undeniably an asset, but his departure should not set the offense back with Gruden still running the ship.

‘It’s pretty much his offense, so he’ll be comfortable with it I’m sure,” Thompson said.

Thu Jun. 8, 2017
24 Hours … With Sean McVay

He may be the youngest coach in NFL history, but the Rams’ new head man is in unquestioned command of his team. Word for the wise—no daydreaming in meetings!
by Andy Benoit

After seven years in Washington, the last three as Jay Gruden’s offensive coordinator, a soon-to-be 31-year-old Sean McVay took over the Los Angeles Rams in January, becoming the youngest head coach in NFL history (modern era). It’s been a whirlwind first off-season, though if you observe McVay running the team, you’d think he’s been at it for a decade. In May, during the Rams’ third OTA session (which meant full days with the players and live practices), McVay welcomed us behind the curtain.

* * *

Los Angeles, Calif.
May 24, 2017
9:43 p.m. PT

Sean McVay answers the door to his contemporary-style house in Encino Hills, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown L.A. He moved in a few weeks earlier. His mother, an interior designer in Atlanta, has been furnishing the place. She’s off to a strong—and, to McVay’s occasional astonishment, expensive—start. But her work is far from done. About half of the home’s 4,660 square feet remain bare. McVay lives here with his girlfriend, Veronica, who moved with him from Virginia.

After McVay, the former offensive coordinator in Washington, got the Rams job on Jan. 12, he planned on returning to his Reston, Va., townhouse to gather his things. But there was too much to do in California. So Veronica and a few friends took care of clearing the townhouse, and it sold in a day. McVay never made it back.

He’s wearing his usual: shorts, t-shirt and running shoes. “Come in, make yourself at home,” he says.

* * *

10:01 p.m.

McVay toured six houses when he got to L.A. The fourth felt like the winner. But then he saw this one. It overlooks Burbank and has an enormous open patio. The bells and whistles abound: a gas fire table near the edge of the balcony; a miniature balcony overlooking the pool; floodlights—remarkably powerful floodlights; surround sound inside and outside; an Alexa system that controls the lights on command. (“Alexa, turn all off.”) And a glass wall that slides open at the push of a button, converting the living room into essentially a fancy covered patio.

“Pretty cool, huh?” McVay says as he reveals each nook and cranny. He’s too earnestly impressed to be bragging. He grabs a beer and takes a seat near the gas fire table, only to discover that the cushions of his new patio furniture are damp. Oh well. He’s calling it a night soon anyway. The youngest head coach in NFL history explains that the consequence of waking up early is going to bed at the hour of an old man.

* * *

May 25
4:01 a.m.

The alarm was set for 3:45 a.m. And now he’s ready for work. The plan was to leave a little after 4:00. The camera crew following him today was to arrive at 4:10. They show up at 4:06. McVay is welcoming but clearly eager to go. The day is already slipping away.

* * *

4:17 a.m.

McVay winds his black BMW 750i through nearly two miles of his Encino Hills neighborhood to the freeway. His commute to the Rams’ temporary football offices at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks is 28 to 30 minutes at this hour, depending on how you hit the lights. Some mornings McVay will listen to an audiobook. (Lately it’s been Extreme Ownership: How Navy SEALs lead and win.) Other mornings he’ll call people back east. He can catch his parents at this hour. Today he just chats with the camera crew, as hip-hop plays quietly in the background.

* * *

4:37 a.m.

McVay’s office is sparse. There’s a large oak L-shaped desk and cabinet, and four screens: two computer monitors, a laptop and a large flat-screen, which displays the contents of McVay’s main computer. On the wall is a blowup picture of Rams linebacker Alec Ogletree leading a huddle. That’s it. There’s also a blowup of running back Todd Gurley and a painting of Eric Dickerson, but they’re yet to be hung. The room comfortably fits two large leather arm chairs, a small leather sofa and a round table with three chairs. On the table is a list of hour-by-hour daily schedules covering all the way through August. In the back is a one-man locker room equipped with a shower and toilet.

Photo: The MMQB

McVay, drinking black coffee and a sparkling water (Rams general manager Les Snead got him on it), is at his desk watching clips of plays from Atlanta and Washington that he’ll be installing today for his young Rams offense. It’s Day 3 of the third OTA session. Practice is from noon to 2:00, but players will arrive for meetings at 8:00 a.m. McVay wants to show examples of how these new designs play out against different defensive looks. “One thing about going through all these clips,” he says with a smile, “is you gain a real appreciation for how good some of your former players were.”

* * *

6:10 a.m.

He’s still watching clips. The only break is for a bowl of cereal, which he takes back to his desk. Today it’s Frosted Flakes; the cafeteria was out of Frosted Mini-Wheats. He eats with a plastic spoon out of a small paper bowl. Distractions keep popping up, and he winds up barely finishing half. It’s all McVay will consume for the next eight hours.

* * *

6:41 a.m.

Offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur pops into the office. McVay and LaFleur have been friends since 2011, when they worked together on Washington’s staff. They discuss a wide receiver screen play.

“I think it’s so hit-or-miss for a running back to block this defender when he’s offset,” McVay says, pointing to an example on the video.

“So you want me to switch it out?” LaFleur asks.

“Well, I’m asking your opinion here, too.”

“Yeah, I think it just depends. If you do have the running back aligned there, you have to have other plays off of that.”

The discussion continues for several minutes. They go over which plays to install today and which to hold until next week. There’s a fine line here, because in the NFL you don’t have plays per se; you have variations of concepts. It all must tie together.

* * *

7:03 a.m.

Tight ends coach Shane Waldron stops in. McVay also solicits his opinion as well on whether to put in the package he discussed with LaFleur. It directly affects Waldron’s players, and he’d prefer to wait until next week. “If you don’t mind,” Waldron says.

“Not at all,” McVay says. “That’s why I’m asking.”

* * *

7:08 a.m.

Now it’s Rams head trainer Reggie Scott who drops by. He has injury updates. McVay asks him which player so far has run the most total yards in OTAs. (The Rams track this data with a GPS program.) McVay guesses wide receiver Mike Thomas, and he’s correct. (Naturally; wide receivers run farther downfield on each snap than any other player, plus they must jog to and from the huddle.) McVay also guesses Todd Gurley is near the top because of the way he continues to run through the whistle. Scott’s polite tone suggests this guess is close but not spot on. “Yeah, he’s top third,” Scott says.

* * *

8:00 a.m.

Photo: The MMQB

Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips is in the defense meeting room, addressing his whole unit. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt but will later change into Rams gear. McVay stands in the back alongside cornerbacks coach Aubrey Pleasant. In a few minutes, Pleasant and safeties coach Ejiro Evero will take over, addressing the defensive backs. They’ll go back and forth, playing off one another and challenging safeties and corners to understand who is providing help in Los Angeles’s matchup coverages. McVay sits quietly in the back, taking notes.

* * *

8:55 a.m.

Now it’s McVay’s turn to run a meeting. He’s addressing the entire offense. He jumps right in, no intro. “Today we’re going to be exclusively in ‘11’ personnel (one back, one tight end), working against pressures.”

McVay calls on players at random throughout the meeting. Rams employees have come to fear this. Nothing is worse than the head coach catching your daydream in front of the entire room. From quarterback Jared Goff to the quality control assistants, many have learned the hard way to pay undivided attention. Some have even taken to keeping a cheat sheet at the front of their binder, listing all the Ram slogans and acronyms that McVay asks about. It’s not unusual for McVay to call on a potential victim and hear frantic page-turning.

A few weeks ago star defensive back Trumaine Johnson was asked to name one of the two C’s that define their culture. With abrupt certainty that only a corner can conjure, Johnson said commitment. Wrong. “But he was so confident about it,” McVay later recounts for Veronica and friends, “that I paused and thought, ‘son of a gun, am I wrong about the two C’s?” (For the record, it’s character and communication.)

Towards the end of the meeting, McVay goes through a tight red zone route combination. “Here we’d tell the F receiver on this stick route to tight-turn it.” The video shows a Washington receiver catching a short pass and turning upfield towards the end zone. The next clip shows the same play, only run a little crisper. “We tight-turn it, get a little further away from the nickelback.” On screen, the receiver pushes the ball down just a yard short of the goal-line. “And then we give Todd [Gurley] another TD.”

* * *

9:50 a.m.

Special teams coordinator John Fassel—known as “Bones” for his lanky build—is leading the next meeting. It’s in the same room as the offensive meeting and is slated to start at 9:50. The second the clock ticks over from 9:49, McVay calls out, “What time does this 9:50 meeting start?” He’s busting Fassel’s chops, but the veteran assistant hastens anyway. Fassel dives in, full energy, a few seconds before the clock ticks to 9:51.

* * *

10:10 a.m.

It’s time for the full team meeting. This is where today’s emotional tone is set. McVay explains that there will be a competitive session near the end of practice, offense vs. defense at full speed (no pads, so no tackling). Three drives, each valued at one point. The offense gets a point by either gaining three first downs or 40 yards. The defense gets a point by forcing a punt or turnover before then.

McVay reiterates some of the mantras that he wants his team to live by. He talks about the importance of operating with poise and tempo. Of communicating. Of pursuing daily excellence. “We expect to achieve and live our highest standards,” he bellows, pacing back and forth. “You know those three things we have. Coach Wade Phillips, what’s one of those three things?” McVay keeps pacing, knowing his renowned veteran defensive coordinator will answer quickly and get the ball rolling.

Except Phillips says nothing.

McVay stops and turns. “Our APP [slogan], what’s one of its three things?” McVay asks again. Saying the three letters—APP—is a disguised lifeline for Phillips; a few weeks earlier Phillips himself had come up with the acronym. He’d picked off three values McVay commonly preaches—approach, preparation and performance—and proudly announced, “I have an ‘app’ for that.” Now here’s Phillips sitting in Row 1, before the entire team, drawing a blank. He starts to blush. “Help him out!” McVay barks. “Approach, preparation and performance,” nearly 100 dumbfounded voices mutter. Giggles start to creep across the room. Purely by accident, McVay has caught his unlikeliest daydreaming victim yet. Phillips can only laugh.

* * *

10:25 a.m.

More meetings with the offense. McVay focuses on wide receivers, going over the nuances of spacing, blocking rules and how to set up routes that achieve separation. There also is discussion about Jared Goff’s progressions. The emphasis is not just on where the ball goes, but also why. This is for everyone to understand.

One player McVay calls on consistently is Robert Woods, a free-agent wide receiver formerly with the Bills. (And always by full name. What’s our rule for five-step timing on this play, Robert Woods? What do you do here against two high safeties, Robert Woods?)

Shortly after the meeting, on McVay’s way out, Woods, a diligent student with what’s planned to be a big role in Los Angeles’s passing attack, stops the head coach with a question. By the time he and McVay wrap up, five other players have gathered to listen.

* * *

Noon

Practice time. McVay recently tore a quad sprinting, so he’s not running from station to station as much as he normally would. Though an observer would never know. The coach traverses the Rams’ two fields, spending most of his time with the offense. It’s McVay’s prime area of expertise, plus the defensive staff is highly experienced, starting with Phillips, who has served as a head coach in Denver, Buffalo, Houston and Dallas. Those coaches can run much of their own show.

* * *

12:21 p.m.

The first of many offense vs. defense sessions is beginning. “Left hash, ‘11’ personnel!” McVay yells. “Let’s start this thing off right!” Then he turns his attention to his young quarterback. “Alright Jared, here we go buddy. Right tight, Y-left, draw left, 16-4 vice blaze. Hey, let’s set the tempo here. Let’s have a good day. If something bad happens, don’t blink.”

* * *

12:30 p.m.

The Rams are practicing a run alert play. That’s when the huddle call is a run but Goff has the option to throw a quick slant depending on the defense. McVay takes Robert Woods through it. “L 17-dancer, 13-slider. You get these corners, they play off just in no man’s land on you, when you get into a reduced split. We get it to you, right through that outside ’backer who’s up on the line of scrimmage. You catch that thing clean, man. Julio [Jones] caught a couple of balls for about 20 yards. It’s a great way to make people pay. And you throw the ball about four feet.”

* * *

12:41 p.m.

Photo: The MMQB

The receiver drills need more precision. “Hey, listen! Listen! Listen! Listen! Listen!” McVay yells. “When we do this, in routes on air, come on man, you’re too on top of this, be three yards inside the numbers, right? You’re selling this through to the hash. Give somebody room to feel this, know what I mean?”

* * *

12:54 p.m.

“Hey Robert Woods! Good finish, man.”

* * *

1:02 p.m.

Backup quarterback Sean Mannion is intercepted on a deep ball. A receiver ran the wrong route, bringing the free safety into play. Mannion watched it happen and threw anyway.

The defense, which has talked trash for much of the scrimmage, goes nuts. Someone yells, “Yes sir!”

“No, no that’s not ‘yes sir,’” McVay hollers. “That’s what happens when you do your own shit. I love that that just happened.” He walks over to Mannion. “Hey, don’t let [the receiver] screwing you cause you to make a bad decision. Because you’re going to bring the safety over there.”

“I just don’t want to throw from one side to the other,” Mannion says.

“And here’s what I would say to you: Throw it away,” McVay responds. “Because that’s the only play [available] when he screws you. Because when you stay on that side, that safety’s going to key over the top.”

McVay keeps Mannion on the field for the next snap.

“Alright buddy, let’s do this: right hash, ‘12’ group, 3-jet Y bird slice.”

Before the snap, LaFleur whispers something to McVay about the interception. “I know, you can’t do that,” McVay agrees. “Because you’re going to take the safety to the freaking play. That’s what I said to him.”

Mannion’s throw on the 12 group, 3-jet Y bird slice is complete. McVay perks up. “Good. There you go right there. Good job, Sean.”

* * *

1:17 p.m.

Mannion’s interception is one of several poor plays for the offense. McVay says for anyone in his vicinity, “Defense, you guys are kicking our ass on offense.”

* * *

Photo: The MMQB

1:26 p.m.

There’s a problem: Soon-to-be-32-year-old center John Sullivan, a former Viking in his first year with the Rams, is too smart. He’s reading the defense and immediately calling out perfect offensive adjustments. That’s great in live action but counterproductive in practice when you’re trying to develop your second-year quarterback. “Hey, John,” McVay barks. “Let him”—Goff—“make these calls!”

* * *

1:45 p.m.

The defense continues to defeat the offense. McVay gets frustrated at his second unit. At the end of a third-down play that, in an actual game, would have surely been measured by the chain gang, he yells “Two’s are off! [i.e., Second team, leave the field.] Point to the defense!” A little later, after the defense has won the drive-battle 3-0, left tackle Andrew Whitworth approaches McVay and tells him he got it wrong. The offense should have been granted a first down at the end of that second drive. The score should have been 2-1 defense.

* * *

2:05 p.m.

Practice is over. The entire team is gathered at midfield. “First of all,” McVay says, “it’s a good start for next week. What we know is this: We go through some of those situations, it’s a great test of our poise, for everybody. But our communication, getting in and out of the huddle, we’ve got to be better with that. It starts with me, okay? We’ve had three days of great work. Love your effort, love your intensity. Let’s see if we can start tightening up the screws. In the competitive period, give it up for the defense today, you guys got the best of us.” Muffled applause. “But we’ll come back, we’ll continue to compete, we’re all making each other better. Where’s Robert Quinn at? Give us a breakdown, Robert Quinn! Give us a breakdown, Big Rob!”

1-2-3 Rams!

* * *

2:16 p.m.

Drinking one of the dozens of smoothies that team nutritionist Joey Blake prepared for the team, McVay sits at his desk watching film of the practice, which ended seven minutes ago. In a few minutes the entire offensive staff will watch and analyze it together. Various staffers flow in and out, many catching snippets of McVay’s concerns. There were some time-related issues that hindered the practice’s flow. The passing game could have been sharper. A receiver got hurt. The offense got shorted some yards by unfavorable spots of the ball. That one isn’t a big deal, but still. Most maddening of all: The film reveals that defensive linemen consistently lined up offside. No one noticed.

* * *

2:53 p.m.

In the offensive meeting room, McVay sits at the head of a long table, opposite the projector screen. The other eight chairs are filled by assistant coaches. They’ll be there for the next three hours. McVay calls out every play beforehand, often analyzing from memory what’s about to happen. He runs the remote, which can be maddening. He’s known as a “remote tyrant”—someone who rewinds plays again and again. He used to drive Jay Gruden crazy in Washington.

* * *

3:02 p.m.

“They’re lined up offsides,” McVay says, pausing to examine the defensive line before the snap. “No shit,” deadpans offensive line coach Aaron Kromer. The helmets of three defensive linemen are clearly in the neutral zone. “Look at these guys,” McVay whispers.

* * *

Photo: The MMQB

3:17 p.m.

“This is not a good route,” McVay says. “Watch this. He’s been better than this.” The film shows Robert Woods getting absorbed by a press corner. “He’s not threatening anybody vertical on this play.” Woods already knows this. He’s the type who harps on his own mistakes. He had approached McVay after practice. Toward the end of the film meeting, when the position coaches each sum up their final thoughts, receivers coach Eric Yarber will admit that Woods is generally more consistent than he was today. Two bad routes were the difference. No one is worried.

* * *

4:41 p.m.

McVay wonders something: Is his presence on the field during the hurry-up drills hindering the offense? Does he need to let the players grow under fire a bit more? He honestly doesn’t know and asks the room what they think. Every coach assures him the current setup is fine.

* * *

4:49 p.m.

“Good progression by Todd, man,” McVay says, watching Gurley make a blitz pickup from his running back position. In the offensive meetings earlier, Gurley had worn an affable, subtly bemused smile, making you wonder if his mind wasn’t drifting toward topics a little more entertaining than the protection rules that were up on the whiteboard. But McVay called on Gurley several times, and each time his answer was quick and spot on. And now his actions on film verify his focus. McVay turns to running backs coach Skip Peete. “Gurley’s a smart guy, isn’t he coach?” Peete concurs.

* * *

5:11 p.m.

“This is where my blood really boiled,” McVay says. The film shows the second-team offense lining up incorrectly just before McVay called off their drive in the scrimmage. “I yelled ‘Two’s are off! Points for the defense!’” He laughs.

* * *

5:33 p.m.

One thing the film reveals: Whitworth was right. The offense had indeed gained three first downs on one of its drives. “I love that he cares so much, that he’s so competitive,” McVay says. This presents a golden opportunity: When practice resumes the following week, McVay will announce the mistake. The defense, which had been cocky and believed it won the scrimmage 3-0, will learn that the score had actually been 2-1. They’ll throw a fit and cry politics. (McVay, being so offense-minded, constantly worries about playing favorites.) And from that, the next scrimmage will be infused with competitive energy.

* * *

5:42 p.m.

McVay broaches an interesting topic with Peete and Kromer: Gurley needs to keep his shoulders squared downfield when running “duo,” which is an inside zone run with two double-team blocks. In the formation they’re watching now, Gurley knows the run will often bounce outside. That’s why he’s turning his shoulders outside. But if he stays square, defenders will react differently and, long story short, it’ll create better blocking angles for when the ball does bounce outside. McVay stands up to demonstrate. Peete and Kromer fully agree. “That’s why I think Matt Forte was so good for you guys in Chicago,” McVay says to Kromer, who was the Bears’ offensive coordinator under Marc Trestman. “He was patient to the line, and he could jump cut with his shoulders square. Who’s the other best duo runner in the league? Le’Veon Bell. Those guys are patient. They play with their shoulders square to the line of scrimmage. I think Todd’s going to be awesome at this play.”

* * *

6:16 p.m.

The meeting is over. The building is mostly empty. A three-day weekend is coming up, which McVay will parlay into a four-day break for everyone. After finishing some miscellaneous office work, he heads over to the trainers room to meet with Reggie Scott. There’s an update on the injured receiver. Scott also advises that the 35-year-old Whitworth and 30-year-old free-agent defensive end Connor Barwin should have their practice reps reduced. McVay agrees. Both veterans will hate it, but you have to save them from themselves. Before he goes, McVay gets instructions for healing his injured quad: light running over the next four days, but only on a treadmill, where he can regulate his speed.

* * *

Photo: The MMQB

6:37 p.m.

Time to head home. But first, a quick shower in the one-man locker room at the back of his office. Usually McVay does this right after practice, before the coaches watch the day’s film. Today there wasn’t time.

* * *

6:46 p.m.

On the drive home, McVay calls Robert Woods. “Hey, I was thinking about our conversation after practice. We can definitely clean up a couple of those routes—you can run them better—but don’t let that take away from all the good stuff that you’ve been doing, man.” McVay and Woods spend a few minutes discussing the specifics of those routes.

“But the main reason I was calling is because I could name about 25 good things you’ve done over last week and dating back to the minicamp, too. So, keep being hard on yourself because that’s why you are who you are, but don’t let it affect your weekend, man. You’re wired to separate, and you’ve done it consistently. And just watching how conscientious you are, and how you’re competing—showing the other guys how to compete, you’re making them better, too. And that’s what it’s about.”

* * *

7:08 p.m.

McVay gets a call from Mom. Just a quick check-in. Before hanging up, he remembers something. “Hey those cushions on the patio chairs—how are they at absorbing moisture? It didn’t rain last night but they were a little damp.”

* * *

8:15 p.m.

Veronica has just gotten back from the gym and isn’t sure that she’s presentable enough to be seen by The MMQB’s cameras, which have followed McVay inside. Her boyfriend chuckles at this.

Photo: The MMQB

Rams assistant linebackers coach Chris Shula (son of Dave, nephew of Mike, grandson of Don) comes downstairs. He and McVay were friends in college at Miami of Ohio, and now Shula lives in one of the six bedrooms at McVay’s a house. The two coaches have a beer by the fire on the balcony while Veronica and a friend visiting from back east get ready to go out. The group has a 9:30 reservation for sushi on Sunset Boulevard. The fireside conversation never veers from football.

* * *

9:04 p.m.

McVay trails the group out the door. “Alexa, lights off,” he says. Nothing happens. He tries again, this time with a more deliberate delivery, like how you talk to a dog that won’t sit. “Alexa, lights off.” Still nothing. “Alexa….lights…..off.” Finally, darkness.

“He loves that light-switching thing,” Veronica says.

* * *

9:17 p.m.

An Uber takes the group to sushi. Just one complication: The driver speaks zero English. McVay, in the van’s middle-row seat, pitches ideas to Shula (front seat) for how to explain that after the car reaches its first destination—Shula’s girlfriend’s house—it needs to continue on to the restaurant. That means a whole separate Uber ride. It’s only a matter of time until the ride ends and the gentleman behind the wheel is left wondering why no one is exiting his vehicle. Nothing Shula says to the driver gets through. Thankfully, at the girlfriend’s place, the driver produces a vocal translating device on his phone. McVay couldn’t be more impressed with the app.

* * *

9:42 p.m.

The group gets a table near the front of the restaurant. It’s a trendy place devoid of sports atmosphere. McVay goes unrecognized the entire dinner. He and Shula drift in and out of conversations about football. At one point they quiz Shula’s girlfriend: How many wide receivers are on the field in “12” personnel? She says three but then quickly remembers that you subtract both of the personnel digits, 1 and 2, from five, not six. “Two! Two!” she says. Even at dinner, you must be prepared to answer McVay’s pop quiz questions in front of everyone.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-rams-aaron-donald-20170629-story.html

Rams’ Aaron Donald, seeking a new contract, and is impressed by coach Sean McVay
By Lindsey Thiry

Five-year-old Cameron Winston waited patiently for his chance to take a picture with Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald at a football clinic at University High in Los Angeles on Thursday.

“You’re a defensive monster!” said Cameron, wearing Donald’s No. 99 jersey.

The youngster was right on the money.

The Rams, however, don’t seem to be quite there yet.

Donald, a three-time Pro Bowl selection, wants a new contract that reflects his 28 career sacks and matches his reputation as one of the most dominant defensive forces in the NFL.

Negotiations between the Rams and Donald’s representatives have been underway, general manager Les Snead has said, but as of Thursday no deal had been announced.

“I’m just doing my job and just keeping myself how I’m supposed to keep myself, and that will handle itself,” Donald said when asked if a deal had been reached. “It’s a fun game but a serious business at the end of the day.”

Donald is scheduled to earn about $3.2 million in salary and bonuses this season. The Rams have exercised a fifth-year option that would pay him about $6.9 million in 2018.

Donald participated in a voluntary workout and minicamp in April, but did not attend three weeks of voluntary organized team activities the following month.

Earlier this month, Donald attended a mandatory three-day minicamp, presumably to avoid $80,405 in fines if he were to skip it. At the minicamp he went through conditioning workouts on the sideline but did not participate in football drills.

Donald, who was not made available to reporters during minicamp, said Thursday that he was excited to be around new coach Sean McVay and defensive coordinator Wade Phillips.

“McVay is a great coach and I think that he’s smart,” Donald said. “I got to talk to him and I was itching my head about a play and he came to me, a defensive play, and he told me he was supposed to do this, this and this and I was like, ‘Wow!’ I ain’t never had a coach that knew what was going on on the offensive side of the ball and the defensive side of the ball.

“Everybody knows Wade. I’m just excited to have the opportunity to be around the guy and learn from him.”

Rams rookies report to training camp on July 26 and the veterans on July 28 at UC Irvine, and practices begin the next day.

Super Bowl-pedigreed Kayvon Webster must show he can handle starting role with the Rams

Gary Klein

http://www.latimes.com/sports/rams/la-sp-rams-kayvon-webster-20170609-story.html

Most of Kayvon Webster’s NFL snaps came on special teams, not in the secondary.

The cornerback sat behind multiple Pro Bowl players while contributing to Denver Broncos teams that played in two Super Bowls.

Now, for the first time, Webster is on track to start on defense.

The Rams, with a hearty endorsement from new defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, signed the fifth-year pro to play on the outside opposite franchise-tagged cornerback Trumaine Johnson.

Webster said his Super Bowl pedigree, and what he learned while earning it, helped prepare him for the opportunity with the Rams.

“I know what it took to get there,” he said of playing for an NFL championship, “and what it’s going to take to get there.”

The Rams, of course, have a long way to go to reach the playoffs, never mind the Super Bowl.

They finished 4-12 last season. They have not played in the postseason since 2004.

As an unrestricted free agent after last season, Webster received interest from the Broncos, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Miami Dolphins. But the Phillips connection was strong.

“He knows what kind of player I am and what kind of player I aspire to be,” Webster said. “So it goes hand in hand.”

In March, after signing a two-year, $7.75-million contract, Webster cited former Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning and former defensive back Champ Bailey — both destined for the Pro Football Hall of Fame — and Pro Bowl cornerbacks Aqib Talib and Chris Harris Jr. among the players whose influence “kind of rubbed off on me.”

The Rams pursued Webster with the belief that his experience and work ethic would similarly influence veteran and rookie teammates.

Webster, 26, was part of a Rams free agent class that included offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth and receiver Robert Woods.

The Rams targeted them mainly because of their performance but also for the example they might set for a team that has not had a winning season since 2003.

McVay, 31, has preached a “We Not Me” philosophy.

Webster embodies those traits, cornerbacks coach Aubrey Pleasant said.

“It’s different when you talk about it,” Pleasant said, “and you have living, breathing examples.”

In the months leading up to the start of free agency, Pleasant evaluated potential cornerback additions.

With Johnson’s status uncertain, the Rams were searching for players to possibly replace or complement a cornerback who earned nearly $14 million while playing under the franchise tag in 2016.

The Rams tagged Johnson again — at a cost of nearly $17 million guaranteed — and signed the 5-foot-11, 192-pound Webster.

As a rookie in 2013, the former South Florida standout had played extensively as a reserve. But with Talib’s arrival in Denver as a free agent in 2014 and the ascent of Harris and Bradley Roby, Webster’s defensive snaps decreased.

They fell from 479 in 2013, to 130 in 2014, and to 69 and 59 the next two seasons, respectively, according to profootballreference.com.

Pleasant, though, saw enough in the limited snaps.

“He’s not the biggest corner in the world, but he played very large and played good against bigger opponents,” Pleasant said. “And then, when there are guys in the NFL who are considered speedy receivers he had to go against, he didn’t blink.”

Webster, a special teams standout, also demonstrated another quality.

“Any time you can be patient and wait for your opportunity and be ready when your opportunity becomes available, that says something about you as a person,” Pleasant said. “And those are the types of people I want in this locker room.”

During an April minicamp, Webster and Johnson were “excellent off the edges,” McVay said. Johnson was absent from three of 10 organized team activity workouts, but he and Webster worked as starters in the others.

The two also developed a relationship off the field, with Webster inviting Johnson to workouts with his personal trainer.

“He’s a real-deal competitor,” Johnson said of Webster.

With Lamarcus Joyner moving to safety, Johnson and Webster are part of a cornerbacks group that includes E.J. Gaines, Nickell Robey-Coleman, Troy Hill and Michael Jordan.

The Rams will end offseason workouts with a three-day mandatory minicamp that begins Tuesday.

Webster is confident that he can handle the starting opportunity.

“The team counts on you,” he said, “and you have to put that on your back.”

24 Hours With … Sean McVay
He may be the youngest coach in NFL history, but the Rams’ new head man is in unquestioned command of his team. Word for the wise—no daydreaming in meetings!

https://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/06/sean-mcvay-los-angeles-rams-24-hours-nfl

THERE’S A VID–GO TO THE LINK FOR THAT. LENGTH: 6:01

After seven years in Washington, the last three as Jay Gruden’s offensive coordinator, a soon-to-be 31-year-old Sean McVay took over the Los Angeles Rams in January, becoming the youngest head coach in NFL history (modern era). It’s been a whirlwind first off-season, though if you observe McVay running the team, you’d think he’s been at it for a decade. In May, during the Rams’ third OTA session (which meant full days with the players and live practices), McVay welcomed us behind the curtain.
* * *
Los Angeles, Calif.
May 24, 2017
9:43 p.m. PT
Sean McVay answers the door to his contemporary-style house in Encino Hills, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown L.A. He moved in a few weeks earlier. His mother, an interior designer in Atlanta, has been furnishing the place. She’s off to a strong—and, to McVay’s occasional astonishment, expensive—start. But her work is far from done. About half of the home’s 4,660 square feet remain bare. McVay lives here with his girlfriend, Veronica, who moved with him from Virginia.
After McVay, the former offensive coordinator in Washington, got the Rams job on Jan. 12, he planned on returning to his Reston, Va., townhouse to gather his things. But there was too much to do in California. So Veronica and a few friends took care of clearing the townhouse, and it sold in a day. McVay never made it back.
He’s wearing his usual: shorts, t-shirt and running shoes. “Come in, make yourself at home,” he says.
* * *
10:01 p.m.
McVay toured six houses when he got to L.A. The fourth felt like the winner. But then he saw this one. It overlooks Burbank and has an enormous open patio. The bells and whistles abound: a gas fire table near the edge of the balcony; a miniature balcony overlooking the pool; floodlights—remarkably powerful floodlights; surround sound inside and outside; an Alexa system that controls the lights on command. (“Alexa, turn all off.”) And a glass wall that slides open at the push of a button, converting the living room into essentially a fancy covered patio.
“Pretty cool, huh?” McVay says as he reveals each nook and cranny. He’s too earnestly impressed to be bragging. He grabs a beer and takes a seat near the gas fire table, only to discover that the cushions of his new patio furniture are damp. Oh well. He’s calling it a night soon anyway. The youngest head coach in NFL history explains that the consequence of waking up early is going to bed at the hour of an old man.
* * *
May 25
4:01 a.m.
The alarm was set for 3:45 a.m. And now he’s ready for work. The plan was to leave a little after 4:00. The camera crew following him today was to arrive at 4:10. They show up at 4:06. McVay is welcoming but clearly eager to go. The day is already slipping away.
* * *
4:17 a.m.
McVay winds his black BMW 750i through nearly two miles of his Encino Hills neighborhood to the freeway. His commute to the Rams’ temporary football offices at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks is 28 to 30 minutes at this hour, depending on how you hit the lights. Some mornings McVay will listen to an audiobook. (Lately it’s been Extreme Ownership: How Navy SEALs lead and win.) Other mornings he’ll call people back east. He can catch his parents at this hour. Today he just chats with the camera crew, as hip-hop plays quietly in the background.

* * *
4:37 a.m.
McVay’s office is sparse. There’s a large oak L-shaped desk and cabinet, and four screens: two computer monitors, a laptop and a large flat-screen, which displays the contents of McVay’s main computer. On the wall is a blowup picture of Rams linebacker Alec Ogletree leading a huddle. That’s it. There’s also a blowup of running back Todd Gurley and a painting of Eric Dickerson, but they’re yet to be hung. The room comfortably fits two large leather arm chairs, a small leather sofa and a round table with three chairs. On the table is a list of hour-by-hour daily schedules covering all the way through August. In the back is a one-man locker room equipped with a shower and toilet.

McVay, drinking black coffee and a sparkling water (Rams general manager Les Snead got him on it), is at his desk watching clips of plays from Atlanta and Washington that he’ll be installing today for his young Rams offense. It’s Day 3 of the third OTA session. Practice is from noon to 2:00, but players will arrive for meetings at 8:00 a.m. McVay wants to show examples of how these new designs play out against different defensive looks. “One thing about going through all these clips,” he says with a smile, “is you gain a real appreciation for how good some of your former players were.”
* * *
6:10 a.m.
He’s still watching clips. The only break is for a bowl of cereal, which he takes back to his desk. Today it’s Frosted Flakes; the cafeteria was out of Frosted Mini-Wheats. He eats with a plastic spoon out of a small paper bowl. Distractions keep popping up, and he winds up barely finishing half. It’s all McVay will consume for the next eight hours.
* * *
6:41 a.m.
Offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur pops into the office. McVay and LaFleur have been friends since 2011, when they worked together on Washington’s staff. They discuss a wide receiver screen play.
“I think it’s so hit-or-miss for a running back to block this defender when he’s offset,” McVay says, pointing to an example on the video.
“So you want me to switch it out?” LaFleur asks.
“Well, I’m asking your opinion here, too.”
“Yeah, I think it just depends. If you do have the running back aligned there, you have to have other plays off of that.”
The discussion continues for several minutes. They go over which plays to install today and which to hold until next week. There’s a fine line here, because in the NFL you don’t have plays per se; you have variations of concepts. It all must tie together.
* * *
7:03 a.m.
Tight ends coach Shane Waldron stops in. McVay also solicits his opinion as well on whether to put in the package he discussed with LaFleur. It directly affects Waldron’s players, and he’d prefer to wait until next week. “If you don’t mind,” Waldron says.
“Not at all,” McVay says. “That’s why I’m asking.”
* * *
7:08 a.m.
Now it’s Rams head trainer Reggie Scott who drops by. He has injury updates. McVay asks him which player so far has run the most total yards in OTAs. (The Rams track this data with a GPS program.) McVay guesses wide receiver Mike Thomas, and he’s correct. (Naturally; wide receivers run farther downfield on each snap than any other player, plus they must jog to and from the huddle.) McVay also guesses Todd Gurley is near the top because of the way he continues to run through the whistle. Scott’s polite tone suggests this guess is close but not spot on. “Yeah, he’s top third,” Scott says.
* * *
8:00 a.m.

Photo: The MMQB
Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips is in the defense meeting room, addressing his whole unit. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt but will later change into Rams gear. McVay stands in the back alongside cornerbacks coach Aubrey Pleasant. In a few minutes, Pleasant and safeties coach Ejiro Evero will take over, addressing the defensive backs. They’ll go back and forth, playing off one another and challenging safeties and corners to understand who is providing help in Los Angeles’s matchup coverages. McVay sits quietly in the back, taking notes.
* * *
8:55 a.m.
Now it’s McVay’s turn to run a meeting. He’s addressing the entire offense. He jumps right in, no intro. “Today we’re going to be exclusively in ‘11’ personnel (one back, one tight end), working against pressures.”
McVay calls on players at random throughout the meeting. Rams employees have come to fear this. Nothing is worse than the head coach catching your daydream in front of the entire room. From quarterback Jared Goff to the quality control assistants, many have learned the hard way to pay undivided attention. Some have even taken to keeping a cheat sheet at the front of their binder, listing all the Ram slogans and acronyms that McVay asks about. It’s not unusual for McVay to call on a potential victim and hear frantic page-turning.
A few weeks ago star defensive back Trumaine Johnson was asked to name one of the two C’s that define their culture. With abrupt certainty that only a corner can conjure, Johnson said commitment. Wrong. “But he was so confident about it,” McVay later recounts for Veronica and friends, “that I paused and thought, ‘son of a gun, am I wrong about the two C’s?” (For the record, it’s character and communication.)

Towards the end of the meeting, McVay goes through a tight red zone route combination. “Here we’d tell the F receiver on this stick route to tight-turn it.” The video shows a Washington receiver catching a short pass and turning upfield towards the end zone. The next clip shows the same play, only run a little crisper. “We tight-turn it, get a little further away from the nickelback.” On screen, the receiver pushes the ball down just a yard short of the goal-line. “And then we give Todd [Gurley] another TD.”
* * *
9:50 a.m.
Special teams coordinator John Fassel—known as “Bones” for his lanky build—is leading the next meeting. It’s in the same room as the offensive meeting and is slated to start at 9:50. The second the clock ticks over from 9:49, McVay calls out, “What time does this 9:50 meeting start?” He’s busting Fassel’s chops, but the veteran assistant hastens anyway. Fassel dives in, full energy, a few seconds before the clock ticks to 9:51.
* * *
10:10 a.m.
It’s time for the full team meeting. This is where today’s emotional tone is set. McVay explains that there will be a competitive session near the end of practice, offense vs. defense at full speed (no pads, so no tackling). Three drives, each valued at one point. The offense gets a point by either gaining three first downs or 40 yards. The defense gets a point by forcing a punt or turnover before then.
McVay reiterates some of the mantras that he wants his team to live by. He talks about the importance of operating with poise and tempo. Of communicating. Of pursuing daily excellence. “We expect to achieve and live our highest standards,” he bellows, pacing back and forth. “You know those three things we have. Coach Wade Phillips, what’s one of those three things?” McVay keeps pacing, knowing his renowned veteran defensive coordinator will answer quickly and get the ball rolling.
Except Phillips says nothing.
McVay stops and turns. “Our APP [slogan], what’s one of its three things?” McVay asks again. Saying the three letters—APP—is a disguised lifeline for Phillips; a few weeks earlier Phillips himself had come up with the acronym. He’d picked off three values McVay commonly preaches—approach, preparation and performance—and proudly announced, “I have an ‘app’ for that.” Now here’s Phillips sitting in Row 1, before the entire team, drawing a blank. He starts to blush. “Help him out!” McVay barks. “Approach, preparation and performance,” nearly 100 dumbfounded voices mutter. Giggles start to creep across the room. Purely by accident, McVay has caught his unlikeliest daydreaming victim yet. Phillips can only laugh.
* * *

10:25 a.m.
More meetings with the offense. McVay focuses on wide receivers, going over the nuances of spacing, blocking rules and how to set up routes that achieve separation. There also is discussion about Jared Goff’s progressions. The emphasis is not just on where the ball goes, but also why. This is for everyone to understand.
One player McVay calls on consistently is Robert Woods, a free-agent wide receiver formerly with the Bills. (And always by full name. What’s our rule for five-step timing on this play, Robert Woods? What do you do here against two high safeties, Robert Woods?)
Shortly after the meeting, on McVay’s way out, Woods, a diligent student with what’s planned to be a big role in Los Angeles’s passing attack, stops the head coach with a question. By the time he and McVay wrap up, five other players have gathered to listen.
* * *
Noon
Practice time. McVay recently tore a quad sprinting, so he’s not running from station to station as much as he normally would. Though an observer would never know. The coach traverses the Rams’ two fields, spending most of his time with the offense. It’s McVay’s prime area of expertise, plus the defensive staff is highly experienced, starting with Phillips, who has served as a head coach in Denver, Buffalo, Houston and Dallas. Those coaches can run much of their own show.
* * *
12:21 p.m.
The first of many offense vs. defense sessions is beginning. “Left hash, ‘11’ personnel!” McVay yells. “Let’s start this thing off right!” Then he turns his attention to his young quarterback. “Alright Jared, here we go buddy. Right tight, Y-left, draw left, 16-4 vice blaze. Hey, let’s set the tempo here. Let’s have a good day. If something bad happens, don’t blink.”
* * *
12:30 p.m.
The Rams are practicing a run alert play. That’s when the huddle call is a run but Goff has the option to throw a quick slant depending on the defense. McVay takes Robert Woods through it. “L 17-dancer, 13-slider. You get these corners, they play off just in no man’s land on you, when you get into a reduced split. We get it to you, right through that outside ’backer who’s up on the line of scrimmage. You catch that thing clean, man. Julio [Jones] caught a couple of balls for about 20 yards. It’s a great way to make people pay. And you throw the ball about four feet.”

* * *
12:41 p.m.

The receiver drills need more precision. “Hey, listen! Listen! Listen! Listen! Listen!” McVay yells. “When we do this, in routes on air, come on man, you’re too on top of this, be three yards inside the numbers, right? You’re selling this through to the hash. Give somebody room to feel this, know what I mean?”
* * *
12:54 p.m.
“Hey Robert Woods! Good finish, man.”
* * *
1:02 p.m.
Backup quarterback Sean Mannion is intercepted on a deep ball. A receiver ran the wrong route, bringing the free safety into play. Mannion watched it happen and threw anyway.
The defense, which has talked trash for much of the scrimmage, goes nuts. Someone yells, “Yes sir!”
“No, no that’s not ‘yes sir,’” McVay hollers. “That’s what happens when you do your own shit. I love that that just happened.” He walks over to Mannion. “Hey, don’t let [the receiver] screwing you cause you to make a bad decision. Because you’re going to bring the safety over there.”
“I just don’t want to throw from one side to the other,” Mannion says.
“And here’s what I would say to you: Throw it away,” McVay responds. “Because that’s the only play [available] when he screws you. Because when you stay on that side, that safety’s going to key over the top.”
McVay keeps Mannion on the field for the next snap.
“Alright buddy, let’s do this: right hash, ‘12’ group, 3-jet Y bird slice.”
Before the snap, LaFleur whispers something to McVay about the interception. “I know, you can’t do that,” McVay agrees. “Because you’re going to take the safety to the freaking play. That’s what I said to him.”
Mannion’s throw on the 12 group, 3-jet Y bird slice is complete. McVay perks up. “Good. There you go right there. Good job, Sean.”
* * *
1:17 p.m.
Mannion’s interception is one of several poor plays for the offense. McVay says for anyone in his vicinity, “Defense, you guys are kicking our ass on offense.”
* * *

1:26 p.m.
There’s a problem: Soon-to-be-32-year-old center John Sullivan, a former Viking in his first year with the Rams, is too smart. He’s reading the defense and immediately calling out perfect offensive adjustments. That’s great in live action but counterproductive in practice when you’re trying to develop your second-year quarterback. “Hey, John,” McVay barks. “Let him”—Goff—“make these calls!”
* * *
1:45 p.m.
The defense continues to defeat the offense. McVay gets frustrated at his second unit. At the end of a third-down play that, in an actual game, would have surely been measured by the chain gang, he yells “Two’s are off! [i.e., Second team, leave the field.] Point to the defense!” A little later, after the defense has won the drive-battle 3-0, left tackle Andrew Whitworth approaches McVay and tells him he got it wrong. The offense should have been granted a first down at the end of that second drive. The score should have been 2-1 defense.

* * *
2:05 p.m.
Practice is over. The entire team is gathered at midfield. “First of all,” McVay says, “it’s a good start for next week. What we know is this: We go through some of those situations, it’s a great test of our poise, for everybody. But our communication, getting in and out of the huddle, we’ve got to be better with that. It starts with me, okay? We’ve had three days of great work. Love your effort, love your intensity. Let’s see if we can start tightening up the screws. In the competitive period, give it up for the defense today, you guys got the best of us.” Muffled applause. “But we’ll come back, we’ll continue to compete, we’re all making each other better. Where’s Robert Quinn at? Give us a breakdown, Robert Quinn! Give us a breakdown, Big Rob!”
1-2-3 Rams!
* * *
2:16 p.m.
Drinking one of the dozens of smoothies that team nutritionist Joey Blake prepared for the team, McVay sits at his desk watching film of the practice, which ended seven minutes ago. In a few minutes the entire offensive staff will watch and analyze it together. Various staffers flow in and out, many catching snippets of McVay’s concerns. There were some time-related issues that hindered the practice’s flow. The passing game could have been sharper. A receiver got hurt. The offense got shorted some yards by unfavorable spots of the ball. That one isn’t a big deal, but still. Most maddening of all: The film reveals that defensive linemen consistently lined up offside. No one noticed.
* * *
2:53 p.m.
In the offensive meeting room, McVay sits at the head of a long table, opposite the projector screen. The other eight chairs are filled by assistant coaches. They’ll be there for the next three hours. McVay calls out every play beforehand, often analyzing from memory what’s about to happen. He runs the remote, which can be maddening. He’s known as a “remote tyrant”—someone who rewinds plays again and again. He used to drive Jay Gruden crazy in Washington.
* * *
3:02 p.m.
“They’re lined up offsides,” McVay says, pausing to examine the defensive line before the snap. “No shit,” deadpans offensive line coach Aaron Kromer. The helmets of three defensive linemen are clearly in the neutral zone. “Look at these guys,” McVay whispers.
* * *

3:17 p.m.
“This is not a good route,” McVay says. “Watch this. He’s been better than this.” The film shows Robert Woods getting absorbed by a press corner. “He’s not threatening anybody vertical on this play.” Woods already knows this. He’s the type who harps on his own mistakes. He had approached McVay after practice. Toward the end of the film meeting, when the position coaches each sum up their final thoughts, receivers coach Eric Yarber will admit that Woods is generally more consistent than he was today. Two bad routes were the difference. No one is worried.

* * *
4:41 p.m.
McVay wonders something: Is his presence on the field during the hurry-up drills hindering the offense? Does he need to let the players grow under fire a bit more? He honestly doesn’t know and asks the room what they think. Every coach assures him the current setup is fine.
* * *
4:49 p.m.
“Good progression by Todd, man,” McVay says, watching Gurley make a blitz pickup from his running back position. In the offensive meetings earlier, Gurley had worn an affable, subtly bemused smile, making you wonder if his mind wasn’t drifting toward topics a little more entertaining than the protection rules that were up on the whiteboard. But McVay called on Gurley several times, and each time his answer was quick and spot on. And now his actions on film verify his focus. McVay turns to running backs coach Skip Peete. “Gurley’s a smart guy, isn’t he coach?” Peete concurs.
* * *
5:11 p.m.
“This is where my blood really boiled,” McVay says. The film shows the second-team offense lining up incorrectly just before McVay called off their drive in the scrimmage. “I yelled ‘Two’s are off! Points for the defense!’” He laughs.
* * *
5:33 p.m.
One thing the film reveals: Whitworth was right. The offense had indeed gained three first downs on one of its drives. “I love that he cares so much, that he’s so competitive,” McVay says. This presents a golden opportunity: When practice resumes the following week, McVay will announce the mistake. The defense, which had been cocky and believed it won the scrimmage 3-0, will learn that the score had actually been 2-1. They’ll throw a fit and cry politics. (McVay, being so offense-minded, constantly worries about playing favorites.) And from that, the next scrimmage will be infused with competitive energy.
* * *
5:42 p.m.
McVay broaches an interesting topic with Peete and Kromer: Gurley needs to keep his shoulders squared downfield when running “duo,” which is an inside zone run with two double-team blocks. In the formation they’re watching now, Gurley knows the run will often bounce outside. That’s why he’s turning his shoulders outside. But if he stays square, defenders will react differently and, long story short, it’ll create better blocking angles for when the ball does bounce outside. McVay stands up to demonstrate. Peete and Kromer fully agree. “That’s why I think Matt Forte was so good for you guys in Chicago,” McVay says to Kromer, who was the Bears’ offensive coordinator under Marc Trestman. “He was patient to the line, and he could jump cut with his shoulders square. Who’s the other best duo runner in the league? Le’Veon Bell. Those guys are patient. They play with their shoulders square to the line of scrimmage. I think Todd’s going to be awesome at this play.”

* * *
6:16 p.m.
The meeting is over. The building is mostly empty. A three-day weekend is coming up, which McVay will parlay into a four-day break for everyone. After finishing some miscellaneous office work, he heads over to the trainers room to meet with Reggie Scott. There’s an update on the injured receiver. Scott also advises that the 35-year-old Whitworth and 30-year-old free-agent defensive end Connor Barwin should have their practice reps reduced. McVay agrees. Both veterans will hate it, but you have to save them from themselves. Before he goes, McVay gets instructions for healing his injured quad: light running over the next four days, but only on a treadmill, where he can regulate his speed.
* * *

6:37 p.m.
Time to head home. But first, a quick shower in the one-man locker room at the back of his office. Usually McVay does this right after practice, before the coaches watch the day’s film. Today there wasn’t time.
* * *
6:46 p.m.
On the drive home, McVay calls Robert Woods. “Hey, I was thinking about our conversation after practice. We can definitely clean up a couple of those routes—you can run them better—but don’t let that take away from all the good stuff that you’ve been doing, man.” McVay and Woods spend a few minutes discussing the specifics of those routes.
“But the main reason I was calling is because I could name about 25 good things you’ve done over last week and dating back to the minicamp, too. So, keep being hard on yourself because that’s why you are who you are, but don’t let it affect your weekend, man. You’re wired to separate, and you’ve done it consistently. And just watching how conscientious you are, and how you’re competing—showing the other guys how to compete, you’re making them better, too. And that’s what it’s about.”
* * *
7:08 p.m.
McVay gets a call from Mom. Just a quick check-in. Before hanging up, he remembers something. “Hey those cushions on the patio chairs—how are they at absorbing moisture? It didn’t rain last night but they were a little damp.”
* * *
8:15 p.m.
Veronica has just gotten back from the gym and isn’t sure that she’s presentable enough to be seen by The MMQB’s cameras, which have followed McVay inside. Her boyfriend chuckles at this.

Rams assistant linebackers coach Chris Shula (son of Dave, nephew of Mike, grandson of Don) comes downstairs. He and McVay were friends in college at Miami of Ohio, and now Shula lives in one of the six bedrooms at McVay’s a house. The two coaches have a beer by the fire on the balcony while Veronica and a friend visiting from back east get ready to go out. The group has a 9:30 reservation for sushi on Sunset Boulevard. The fireside conversation never veers from football.
* * *
9:04 p.m.
McVay trails the group out the door. “Alexa, lights off,” he says. Nothing happens. He tries again, this time with a more deliberate delivery, like how you talk to a dog that won’t sit. “Alexa, lights off.” Still nothing. “Alexa….lights…..off.” Finally, darkness.
“He loves that light-switching thing,” Veronica says.
* * *
9:17 p.m.
An Uber takes the group to sushi. Just one complication: The driver speaks zero English. McVay, in the van’s middle-row seat, pitches ideas to Shula (front seat) for how to explain that after the car reaches its first destination—Shula’s girlfriend’s house—it needs to continue on to the restaurant. That means a whole separate Uber ride. It’s only a matter of time until the ride ends and the gentleman behind the wheel is left wondering why no one is exiting his vehicle. Nothing Shula says to the driver gets through. Thankfully, at the girlfriend’s place, the driver produces a vocal translating device on his phone. McVay couldn’t be more impressed with the app.
* * *
9:42 p.m.
The group gets a table near the front of the restaurant. It’s a trendy place devoid of sports atmosphere. McVay goes unrecognized the entire dinner. He and Shula drift in and out of conversations about football. At one point they quiz Shula’s girlfriend: How many wide receivers are on the field in “12” personnel? She says three but then quickly remembers that you subtract both of the personnel digits, 1 and 2, from five, not six. “Two! Two!” she says. Even at dinner, you must be prepared to answer McVay’s pop quiz questions in front of everyone.

9 of the Most Staggeringly Awful Statements Republicans Have Made About Health Care Just This Year

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/9-staggeringly-awful-statements-republicans-have-made-about-health-care-just-year

In 2009, Rep. Alan Grayson characterized the Republican approach to health care as “don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly.” Eight years later, the Florida Democrat’s words ring truer than ever, especially in light of the House’s passage of the American Health Care Act.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would deprive 23 million of health insurance by 2026, resulting in substantial premium hikes and out-of-pocket expenses for older Americans and people with preexisting conditions. And the more Republicans are confronted with the devastating consequences of Trumpcare, the more evident it becomes how clueless they are on the Affordable Care Act specifically and health care more generally.

Here are nine of their most ignorant, uninformed comments from 2017.

1. Raul Labrador Claims That No One Dies From Lack of Health Insurance in the U.S.

Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador, who voted for the AHCA on May 4, was booed at a recent town hall when he claimed that in the U.S., “nobody dies because they don’t have access to healthcare.” But according to a pre-Obamacare Harvard University study from 2009, lack of health insurance among Americans was leading to roughly 45,000 deaths annually—and the uninsured’s chance of dying from illness was 40 percent higher than Americans who were insured.

Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris (formerly California’s attorney general) was quick to call Labrador out, saying it is well-documented that Americans do indeed die from lack of health insurance and that Labrador’s comment was akin to claiming that “people don’t starve because they don’t have food.”

2. Rep. Jason Chaffetz Compares Cost of Health Care to Cost of iPhones

If Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, were not enjoying top-of-the-line health insurance at the taxpayers’ expense, he might have an idea how much health care costs in the U.S. But judging from his comments during an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota in March, the Utah Republican hasn’t a clue. “Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice,” Chaffetz told Camerota. “And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.”

The notion that Americans would be better able to afford health care if only they would buy fewer iPhones is asinine: a high-end iPhone 7 sells for $769 total or $37.41 per month on a payment plan at Apple.com, while the average cost of individual health insurance in the U.S. was $6,435 per year in 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In other words, the cost of even Apple’s priciest smartphones pales in comparison to what individual health insurance cost on average last year (although the ACA’s subsidies made it much easier for lower income Americans to afford those premiums). iPhone prices are also a fraction of the type of out-of-pocket costs millions of Americans could be facing if they are rendered uninsured by Trumpcare. In the International Federation of Health Plans’ 2013 Comparative Price Report, bypass surgery costs $75,345, hip replacement surgery costs $26,489, and a C-section goes for $15,240.

3. Warren Davidson’s Message to the Sick and Dying: Get a Better Job

After Chaffetz’ embarrassing interview with Camerota, one would think Republicans would avoid ludicrous analogies. But in April, Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson showed his cluelessness at a town hall when a woman voiced concern that Republicans’ desire to kill Medicaid expansion would leave her son, who works in the service sector, dangerously underinsured. Davidson’s callous response: her son should get a better job.

“If he doesn’t want a catastrophic care plan, don’t buy a catastrophic care plan,” Davidson told her. “If you don’t want a flip-phone, don’t buy a flip-phone.” The woman responded, “I’m sorry, health care is much different than a cell phone—and I’m tired of people using cell phone analogies with health care.”

4. Mo Brooks Equates Illness with Immorality

Prosperity theology is an odious strain of Christian fundamentalism that equates affluence with morality and poverty with immorality. Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks’ comments in support of Trumpcare during an April interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper were right out of the prosperity theology school of demonizing the poor. Brooks told Tapper he has no problem with Trumpcare charging Americans with preexisting conditions much higher premiums, “thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives. They’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”

In essence, Brooks was saying that illness is god’s way of punishing the poor for their sinful ways—an idiotic statement considering millions of people are born with preexisting conditions such as Type 1 diabetes, asthma, hemophilia or severe allergies, through no fault of their own.

5. Mick Mulvaney Vilifies Diabetics as Lazy and Irresponsible

Mick Mulvaney, director of management and budget under President Trump, recently came under fire for attacking diabetics during a speech at Stanford University. Explaining why he is fine with insurance companies punishing Americans for preexisting conditions, Mulvaney insisted that the U.S. is under no obligation to “take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.”

The American Diabetics Association didn’t hesitate to call Mulvaney out, saying, “All of the scientific evidence indicates that diabetes develops from a diverse set of risk factors, genetics being a primary cause. People with diabetes need access to affordable health care in order to effectively manage their disease and prevent dangerous and costly complications. Nobody should be denied coverage or charged more based on their health status.”

6. Roger Marshall Claims That America’s Poor ‘Just Don’t Want Health Care’

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, aka Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance has reached an all-time low. Millions of Americans who could not afford health insurance or were denied it because of a preexisting condition gained insurance. But according to Kansas Rep. Roger Marshall, Medicaid expansion under the ACA should end because “there is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”

Marshall, in a March interview with STAT News, claimed, “The Medicaid population, which is (on) a free credit card as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising.” If Marshall bothered to do some research, he would know that low-income adults in states where Medicaid was expanded under the ACA became quite proactive about their health, seeking preventative care and making fewer trips to emergency wards.

So yes, the poor do want health care, and the more Republicans they vote out of office, the healthier they will be.

7. President Trump Praises Australian Health Care System, Failing to Understand Why It’s Superior

When President Trump met with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on May 4, he praised Australia for having “better health care than we do”—ironic considering Australia has taxpayer-funded universal healthcare. The Australian health care system, as Sen. Bernie Sanders pointed out in response to Trump, is the polar opposite of what House Republicans voted for on May 4.

If Australia implemented something along the lines of Trumpcare, there would be mass protests in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney. And while Trump is absolutely correct in stating that Australia has a better health care system than the U.S., his comment was—as Sanders pointed out—painfully devoid of context.

8. Steve Scalise Falsely Claims That Trumpcare Does Not Discriminate Against Preexisting Conditions

After the House of Representatives passed the AHCA on May 4, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise claimed that under Trumpcare, “nobody can be charged more than anybody else” for a preexisting condition. It was a brazen lie. Trumpcare, unlike Obamacare, would most certainly give states the option of letting insurance companies charge much higher premiums to anyone with a preexisting condition. The guaranteed issue plans of Obamacare, for example, make no distinction between a 55-year-old cancer or diabetes patient and a 55-year-old who has never had cancer or diabetes; the cost of the plan is the same. Trumpcare does allow insurance companies to make such a distinction, and Scalise is being totally disingenuous when he claims otherwise.

9. Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan Claim Canadians Are Coming to U.S. in Droves for Health Care, Without a Shred of Evidence

For decades, Republicans have been repeating the bogus talking point that Canadians are coming to the U.S. in droves for treatment because they detest Canada’s universal healthcare system—and that lie persists in 2017. Sen. Ted Cruz repeated it during a debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders on CNN earlier this year, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan repeated it when he was being interviewed by MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.

Canadians visiting the U.S. for healthcare is the exception rather than the rule, and the myth that Canadians are invading U.S. hospitals in huge numbers has long since been debunked. In 2002, the National Population Health Survey took a comprehensive, in-depth look at Canadian health care and found that out of 18,000 Canadians surveyed, only 90 had received healthcare in the U.S.—in other words, less than 1 percent. Steven Katz, lead author of the survey, recently told Vox that even if huge numbers of Canadians did prefer the U.S. healthcare system, they could not afford it because U.S. prices for treatment are “extraordinarily high” compared to Canada and other countries.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news­gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”

To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-­October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. “He was the premier guy in the business,” says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. “He was our Michelangelo.”

In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. “I quit politics,” he has claimed, “because I hated it.” But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W. Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last fall, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26 million in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential GOP contenders on the Fox News payroll– including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012. “Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he’s now doing 24/7 with his network,” says a former News Corp. executive. “It’s come full circle.”

Take it from Rush Limbaugh, a “dear friend” of Ailes. “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it,” Limbaugh once declared. “Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.”

The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and “slap your mama funny.” But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: “I only understand friendship or scorched earth,” he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles and Don Corleone. “What’s fun for Roger is the destruction,” says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. “When the light bulb goes on and he’s got the trick to outmaneuver the enemy – that’s his passion.” Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the “college boys” who managed the line. Ailes has called his father a “Taft Republican,” and the description is instructive: Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio led a GOP uprising to block the expansion of the New Deal in the late 1930s, and spearheaded passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which beat back the power of labor unions.

Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – hemophilia forced him to sit out recess at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car at age eight. His mother worked out of the house, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. “Television and I grew up together,” he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – “I was hammered all the time” – Ailes said he “went to state school because they told me I could drink.” There was another reason: His father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. “I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone,” he recalled. “I never found my shit!” The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.

In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force ROTC but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in a bevy of collegiate productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured aging stars like Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, “like you’re talking to someone who’s been under a rock for a couple of decades.”

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise from gofer to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F. Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. “The camera doesn’t like you,” he said. Nixon wasn’t pleased. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected,” he grumbled. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes said. “And if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”

The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Westinghouse’s biggest hit and signed on as Nixon’s “executive producer for television.” For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. “I don’t know anyone else around that I would have done it for,” Ailes has said, “other than Nixon.”

It was while working for Nixon that Ailes first experimented with blurring the distinction between journalism and politics, developing a knack for manipulating political imagery that would find its ultimate expression in Fox News. He knew his candidate was a disaster on TV. “You put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away,” Ailes told reporter Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. “He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight, and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’ ”But the real problem, as Ailes saw it, was a media establishment that he viewed as hostile to Republicans. The “only hope,” he recalled, “was to go around the press and go directly to the people” – letting the campaign itself shape the candidate’s image for the average voter, “without it being interpreted for him by a middleman.”

To bypass journalists, Ailes made Nixon the star of his own traveling roadshow – a series of contrived, newslike events that the campaign paid to broadcast in local markets across the country. Nixon would appear on camera in theaters packed with GOP partisans – “an applause machine,” Ailes said, “that’s all that they are.” Then he would field questions from six voters, hand-­selected by the campaign, who could be counted on to lob softball queries that played to Nixon’s talking points. At the time, Nixon was consciously stoking the anger of white voters aggrieved by the advances of the civil rights movement, and Ailes proved eager to play the race card. To balance an obligatory “Negro” on a panel in Philadelphia, Ailes dreamed of adding a “good, mean Wallacite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'”

Ailes had essentially replaced professional journalists with every­day voters he could manipulate at will. “The events were not staged, they were fixed,” says Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. “People were supposed to ask tough questions. But asking a tough question – let alone knowing how to follow up – is a skill. Taking that task out of the hands of reporters and putting it into the hands of inexperienced amateurs was brilliant in itself.”

As for actual journalists? “Fuck ’em,” Ailes said. “It’s not a press conference – it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set.” The young producer forced reporters to watch the events backstage on a TV monitor – just like the rest of America. “Ailes figured out a way to bring reporters to heel,” Perlstein says.

After Nixon was elected, Ailes was soon fired by the White House. He had brazenly insulted his boss in the McGinniss book while playing up his own talent as an image-maker, and Nixon, as always, took the snub personally. “In the television field, we have made the move that we should have made long ago,” the president sniffed to his chief of staff in a memo uncovered by Rolling Stone, adding that Ailes was not among “the first-rate men that we could have in this field.”

Out on his own, Ailes briefly returned to the passion for the theater he discovered during his college days. In perhaps the oddest chapter of his professional life, he formed a partnership with Kermit Bloomgarden – the famed producer of Death of a Salesman – and set out to conquer Broadway. Their first production: an environmental-themed musical called Mother Earth. When the show flopped, folding after just a dozen performances in 1972, it nearly bankrupted Ailes. The next year, though, he was back in the game, scoring an edgy off-Broadway hit with The Hot L Baltimore, which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named Best American Play of 1973. He was later nominated for an Emmy for a documentary on Federico Fellini, and produced a TV special from the Fantasy Suite at Caesars Palace for Liberace, whom Ailes knew fondly as “Lee.”

But Ailes couldn’t stay away from the theater of politics. In 1974, his notoriety from the Nixon campaign won him a job at Television News Incorporated, a new right-wing TV network that had launched under a deliberately misleading motto that Ailes would one day adopt as his own: “fair and balanced.” TVN made no sense as a business. The project of archconservative brewing magnate Joseph Coors, the news service was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without credit – and for a fraction of the true costs of production. Once the affiliates got hooked on the discounted clips, its president explained, TVN would “gradually, subtly, slowly” inject “our philosophy in the news.” The network was, in the words of a news director who quit in protest, a “propaganda machine.”

But TVN’s staff of professional journalists revolted over the ideo­logical pressure by top management. So the fledgling operation purged 16 staffers and brought in Ailes to command the newsroom. “He was involved in the creation of the effort,” recalled Paul Weyrich, a leading figure in the New Right who had close ties to Coors. “He was sort of the godfather behind the scenes.”

During the time he spent at TVN, Ailes began to plot the growth of a right-wing network that looked very much like the future Fox News. The network planned to invest millions in satellite distribution that would enable TVN to not just distribute news clips but provide a full newscast with its own anchors – a business model that was also employed by an upstart network called CNN. For Ailes, it was a way to extend the kind of fake news that he was regularly using as a political strategist. “I know certain techniques, such as a press release that looks like a newscast,” he told The Washington Post in 1972. “So you use it because you want your man to win.”

Under Ailes, TVN even signed an open-ended contract to produce propaganda for the federal government, providing news clips and scripts to the U.S. Information Agency – a hand-in-glove relationship with the Ford administration that Ailes insisted created no conflict of interest. But TVN collapsed in 1975, depriving Ailes of the chance to implement his vision for a right-wing news network. “They were losing money and they weren’t able to control their journalists,” says Kerwin Swint, author of the Ailes biography, Dark Genius. Ailes would have to wait two decades to launch another “fair and balanced” propaganda machine – and when he did, he would make sure that the journalists he employed were prepared to toe the party line.

Following the failure of TVN, Ailes re­dedicated himself to political consulting. Over the next decade, drawing on the tactics he honed working for Nixon, he helped elect two more conservative presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1984, after the 73-year-old Reagan stumbled badly in his first debate with Walter Mondale, the campaign tapped Ailes to prep the president for the next showdown. At the time, Reagan was beginning to exhibit what his son Ron now describes as early signs of Alzheimer’s, and his age and acuity were becoming a central issue in the campaign. Ailes – a veteran of Reagan’s media team in 1980 who was overseeing the creation of the legendary “Morning in America” campaign – knew that framing one good shot in a debate could make the difference come Election Day. “Roger had the presence to be a director,” says Ed Rollins, who managed the ’84 campaign. “And Reagan, who had always been around directors, would listen to Roger.”

Ailes – known on the Reagan team as “Dr. Feelgood” – told the Gipper to ditch the facts and figures. “You didn’t get elected on details,” he told the president. “You got elected on themes.” For Ailes, the advice reflected a core belief: People watch TV emotionally. He armed Reagan with a one-liner to beat back any question about his mental agility – and the president’s delivery was pitch-perfect. “I want you to understand that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan winked. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Four years later, Ailes was in such high demand that the entire GOP field, with the exception of Pat Robertson, paid court. After hearing all the pitches, Ailes agreed to work for Bush – an effete New Englander who even Richard Nixon said “comes through as a weak individual on television.” Worse still, Bush had baggage: He was neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal that had secretly sent arms to Tehran and used the profits to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. Ailes saw an opportunity to address both shortcomings in a single, familiar strategy – attack the media.

In January 1988, Ailes rigged an interview about the scandal with Dan Rather of CBS News by insisting on an odd caveat: that the interview be conducted live. That not only gave the confrontation the air of a prizefight – it enabled Ailes himself to sit just off-camera in Bush’s office, prompting his candidate with cue cards. As soon as Rather, who was in the CBS studio in New York, began his questioning, Bush came out swinging, claiming that he had been misled about the interview’s focus on Iran-­Contra. When the exchange got tricky for Bush, Ailes flashed a card: walked off the air. A few months earlier, Rather had stormed off camera upon learning his newscast had been pre-empted by a women’s tennis match. Clenching his fist, Ailes mouthed: Go! Go! Just kick his ass!

Bush proceeded to hit Rather below the belt. “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” he said. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?” It was the mother of all false equivalencies: the fleeting petulance of a news anchor pitted against the high crimes of a sitting vice president. But it worked as TV. “That bite of Bush telling Rather off played over and over and over again,” says Roger Stone, an infamous political operative who worked with Ailes on the Nixon campaign. “It was a perfect example of Roger understanding the news cycle, the dynamics of the situation and the power of television.”

Ailes became the go-to man on the Bush campaign, especially when it came to taking down the opposition. “On any campaign you have a small table of inside advisers,” says Mary Matalin, the GOP consultant. “Roger always had the clearest vision. The most robust, synthesized, advanced thinking on things political. When you came to a strategy impasse, he’d be the first among equals. I can’t remember a single incident where he lost a fight.” As usual, Ailes knew how to use television to skew public perception. His dirtiest move came during the general election – a TV ad centering on Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Massachusetts prison during a weekend furlough when Michael Dukakis was governor and later assaulted a couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman. “The only question,” Ailes bragged to a reporter, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand – or without it.”

Knowing that such an overt move could backfire on the campaign, Ailes instead opted to evoke Horton by showing a line of convicts entering and exiting a prison through a revolving door of prison bars. An early take of the ad used actual prisoners. “Roger and I looked at it, and we worried there were too many blacks in the prison scene,” campaign manager Lee Atwater later admitted. So Ailes reshot the ad to zero in on a single black prisoner – sporting an unmistakably Horton-esque Afro. The campaign also benefited from a supposedly “independent” ad that exuberantly paraded Horton’s mug shot. The ad was crafted by Larry McCarthy – a former senior vice president at Ailes Communications Inc.

After the ’88 campaign, ailes kept on playing the Willie Horton card against Democrats. Working for Rudy Giuliani in 1989, he even tried the tactic against David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, running ads that exploited the criminal record of a Dinkins staffer who had served time for kidnapping. But this time, the tactic backfired. Dinkins made Ailes himself the issue, labeling him “the master of mud.” Giuliani lost the race, and Ailes went into a deep political slump. In 1990, he tried to take out bow-tied Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and whiffed. The following year, he blew a special election in Pennsylvania. One political observer at the time declared that Ailes was becoming “an albatross.”

A few months later, Ailes made a show of exiting the political arena. “I’ve been in politics for 25 years,” he told The New York Times in 1991. “It’s always been a detour. Now my business has taken a turn back to my entertainment and corporate clients.” But instead of giving up his work as a political consultant, Ailes simply went underground. Keenly aware that his post-Horton reputation would be a drag on President Bush, Ailes took no formal role with the re-election campaign. But he continued to loom so large behind the scenes that campaign allies referred to him as “our Deep Throat.”

He quietly prepped the president for his State of the Union address in 1992, and he served as an attack dog for the campaign, once more blasting what he saw as the media’s liberal bias. “Bill Clinton has 15,000 press secretaries,” Ailes blared. “At some point, even you guys will have to get embarrassed.” (Last November, Ailes deployed the same line against President Obama, reducing the number of press secretaries to only 3,000.)

Ailes also pushed Bush campaign manager James Baker to “get on the fucking offensive” and “go for the red meat.” From his office in Manhattan, Ailes advised the campaign to spin Clinton’s graduate-school train trip to Moscow into a tale of a Manchurian candidacy. “This guy’s hiding something,” Ailes barked over a speakerphone in Baker’s office. Clinton’s public fuzziness about the trip was proof enough, insisted Ailes: “Nobody’s that forgetful.” President Bush soon appeared on Larry King Live, following the redbaiting advice to the letter. “I don’t have the facts,” the president insinuated, “but to go to Moscow one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, and not remember who you saw – I think the answer is, level with the American people.”

In advance of the final debate of 1992, Bush called in his two closest confidants, Baker and Ailes, to help him prepare at Camp David. The advice Ailes offered could serve as a mission statement for Fox News. “Forget all the facts and figures,” he said, “and move to the offense as quickly as possible.”

After Bush lost to Clinton, Ailes kept right on claiming that he was through with politics. In 2001, as part of a House hearing into election night news coverage, Ailes submitted biographical materials to Congress under oath that made the break explicit: “In 1992, Ailes retired completely from political and corporate consulting to return full-time to television.”

That is a lie. At the time, Ailes was certainly becoming a force in tabloid TV. He had helped launch The Maury Povich Show in 1991, and – in his first brush with the News Corp. empire – he consulted on A Current Affair. But in 1993 – the year after he claimed he had retired from corporate consulting – Ailes inked a secret deal with tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds to go full-force after the Clinton administration on its central policy objective: health care reform. Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.”

According to internal memos, Ailes also explored how Philip Morris could create a phony front group called the “Coalition for Fair Funding of Health Care” to deploy the same kind of “independent” ads that produced Willie Horton. In a precursor to the modern Tea Party, Ailes conspired with the tobacco companies to unleash angry phone calls on Congress – cold-calling smokers and patching them through to the switchboards on Capitol Hill – and to gin up the appearance of a grassroots uprising, busing 17,000 tobacco employees to the White House for a mass demonstration.

But Ailes’ most important contribution to the covert campaign involved his new specialty: right-wing media. The tobacco giants hired Ailes, in part, because he had just brought Rush Limbaugh to the small screen, serving as executive producer of Rush’s syndicated, late-night TV show. Now they wanted Ailes to get Limbaugh onboard to crush health care reform. “RJR has trained 200 people to call in to shows,” a March 1993 memo revealed. “A packet has gone to Limbaugh. We need to brief Ailes.”

Ailes and Limbaugh were more than co-workers. The two jocular, balding right-wingers had met carousing in Manhattan a few years earlier and had become fast friends: Both were reviled for the virulence of their politics, and both saw themselves as victims of what Ailes would call “liberal bigots.” In a 2009 speech, Limbaugh credited Ailes for teaching him “how to take being hated as a measure of success.” Ailes, in fact, would become a father figure to the king of right-wing talk. “The things I’ve learned from him about being a man, about the country, about how to be a professional, nobody else taught me,” Limbaugh said. “When Roger Ailes is on your team, you do not lose.”

In August 1993, Ailes made his biggest foray into television since his days as a producer for Mike Douglas: He became the head of CNBC, America’s top business network. In his three years as boss, he more than quintupled profits and minted stars like Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. He also helped launch a new cable network called America’s Talking, an odd mash-up of television and talk radio. “The lineup really comes out of my head,” Ailes said. Shows on the new network included Bugged! (about things that irritate people), Pork (a takedown of pork-barrel spending) and Am I Nuts? (a call-in psychiatry hour).

Then in his early fifties, Ailes had shed 40 pounds by curbing his Häagen-Dazs habit, and he had shaved off the salt-and-pepper goatee he sported during his days as a GOP operative. But what he refused to give up was politics. As head of CNBC, he continued to produce Limbaugh’s TV show on the side – and he remained on the take from Big Tobacco, pocketing a $5,000 monthly retainer from Philip Morris “to be available.” In 1994, when the tobacco giant tried to stave off harsher regulation by unveiling a voluntary initiative to curb youth smoking, it once again called on Roger to activate Rush: “Ask Ailes to try to prime Limbaugh to go after the antis for complaining.”

But despite his success at CNBC, Ailes wasn’t being given the power he craved to shape public opinion. In a move that took him by surprise, his bosses at NBC decided to shut down America’s Talking and hand its channel over to an all-news venture called MSNBC. Ailes felt that his creation had been hijacked. The man who imagined himself the king of political infighters had been cut off at the knees.

Ailes responded as he always did to setbacks: by throwing himself into another political battle. This time, though, he would do things on his own terms. Securing release from his NBC contract without a noncompete agreement, he immediately joined forces with a media giant who was equally unabashed in using his news operations as instruments of political power. As Jack Welch – then the CEO of NBC’s parent company GE – put it at the time, “We’ll rue the day we let Roger and Rupert team up.”

Rupert Murdoch had long been obsessed with gaining a foothold in the TV news business. He made a failed run at buying CNN, only to see Time Warner scoop up the prize. Even before he hired Ailes, Murdoch had several teams at work on a germinal version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp. affiliates. The false starts included a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program. “The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving,” says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Like Joseph Coors before him at TVN, Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the “left-wing bias” of CNN. “There’s your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda,” says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. “That’s its original sin.”

Murdoch found Ailes captivating: powerful, politically connected, funny as hell. Both men had been married twice, and both shared an open contempt for the traditional rules of journalism. Murdoch also had a direct self-interest in targeting regulation-­minded liberals, whose policies threatened to interfere with his plans for expansion. “Rupert is driven by a twofold dynamic: power and money,” says a former deputy. “He had a lot of business reasons to shake up Washington, and he found in Roger the perfect guy to do it.”

But Ailes was determined not to repeat what he saw as the mistakes of TVN, the ideological forerunner of Fox News. Before signing on to run the new network, he demanded that Murdoch get “carriage” – distribution on cable systems nationwide. In the normal course of business, cable outfits like Time Warner pay content providers like CNN or MTV for the right to air their programs. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn’t just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25 million homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry,” writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. “He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch’s “nerve,” adding, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.”

Ailes was also determined not to let the professional ethics of journalism get in the way of his political agenda, as they had at TVN. To secure a pliable news staff, he led what he called a “jailbreak” from NBC, bringing dozens of top staffers with him to Fox News, including business anchor Neil Cavuto and morning host Steve Doocy – loyalists who owed their careers to Ailes. Rounding out his senior news team, Ailes tapped trusted Republicans like veteran ABC correspondent Brit Hume and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Tony Snow.

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn’t far enough to the right for his tastes, he’d spring an accusation: “Why are you a liberal?” If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. As recounted by journalist Scott Collins in Crazy Like a Fox, the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom,” says a former anchor. “But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color – and that your color was red.” Red state, that is.

Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes also housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and an endless cube farm along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the “brain room” – that requires special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” says Cooper, who helped design its specs. “It’s where the evil resides.”

If that sounds paranoid, consider the man Ailes brought in to run the brain room: Scott Ehrlich, a top lieutenant from his political-­consulting firm. Ehrlich – referred to by some as “Baby Rush” – had taken over the lead on Big Tobacco’s campaign to crush health care reform when Ailes signed on with CNBC. According to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Ehrlich gravitated to the dark side: In a strategy labeled “Underground Attack,” he advised the tobacco giants to “hit hard” at key lawmakers “through their soft underbelly” by quietly influencing local media – a tactic that would help the firms “stay under the radar of the national news media.”

At Fox News, Ehrlich kept up a relentless drumbeat against the Clinton administration. A reporter who joined the network from ABC promptly left in horror after a producer approached him, rubbing her hands together and saying, “Let’s have something on Whitewater today.” Ailes mined the Monica Lewinsky scandal for ratings gold, bringing Matt Drudge aboard as a host, and heaped rumor on top of the smears. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard – the News Corp. property with the most direct crossover on Fox News – trafficked in gossip “that there’s a second intern who was sexually involved with the president. If there is, that will certainly be dynamite.”

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn’t leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network’s “decision desk” on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin. As a columnist at The Boston Globe, Ellis had recused himself from covering the campaign. “There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign,” he told his readers, “because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you.”

In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. “We at Fox News,” he would later tell a House hearing, “do not discriminate against people because of their family connections.” On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox’s call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers.

“We’ll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not,” says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. “But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election.”

Dwell on this for a moment: A “news” network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate’s father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts. “Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact,” Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. “It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people’s minds that he was the man who won the election.”

After Bush took office, Ailes stayed in frequent touch with the new Republican president. “The senior-level editorial people believe that Roger was on the phone every day with Bush,” a source close to Fox News tells Rolling Stone. “He gave Bush the same kind of pointers he used to give George H.W. Bush – delivery, effectiveness, political coaching.” In the aftermath of 9/11, Ailes sent a back-channel memo to the president through Karl Rove, advising Bush to ramp up the War on Terror. As reported by Bob Woodward, Ailes advised Bush that “the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible.”

Fox News did its part to make sure that viewers lined up behind those harsh measures. The network plastered an American flag in the corner of the screen, dolled up one female anchor in a camouflaged silk blouse, and featured Geraldo Rivera threatening to hunt down Osama bin Laden with a pistol. The militarism even seemed to infect the culture of Fox News. “Roger Ailes is the general,” declared Bill O’Reilly. “And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll.”

Ailes likes to boast that Fox News maintains a bright, clear line between its news shows, which he touts as balanced, and prime-time hosts like O’Reilly and Hannity, who are given free rein to voice their opinions. “We police those lines very carefully,” Ailes has said. But after Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office – often joined by Hume from the Washington bureau on speakerphone – and provided his spin on the day’s news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day’s news coverage according to the agenda of those on “the Second Floor,” as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice presidents are known. “There’s a chain of command, and it’s followed,” says a former news anchor. “Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down.”

When the 9/11 Commission began investigating Bush’s negligence in the lead-up to the terrorist attacks, Moody issued a stark warning: “This is not ‘What did he know and when did he know it?’ stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate. Remember the fleeting sense of national unity that emerged from this tragedy. Let’s not desecrate that.” In a 2003 memo on Bush’s overtures for Middle East peace, Moody again ordered the staff to champion the president: “His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting throughout the day.” During the 2004 campaign, Moody highlighted John Kerry’s “flip-flop voting record” – a line that dovetailed with the attacks coming out of the White House. In fact, Fox News was working ­directly with the Bush administration to coordinate each day’s agenda – as Bush’s own press secretary, Scott McClellan, later conceded. “We at the White House,” McClellan said, “were getting them talking points.” (Ailes and Fox News declined repeated requests from Rolling Stone for an interview.)

When Bush was re-elected, Murdoch and Ailes toasted the victory together in the control room of Fox News, celebrating until three in the morning. The network’s relentless GOP boosterism had not only been good for ratings, it also appeared to have paid dividends for the network’s corporate parent. Acting nakedly in Murdoch’s interests, the FCC blocked satellite-TV provider EchoStar’s $27 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2002 as being anti-competitive. That cleared the way for News Corp. – which had originally been outbid – to buy control of DirecTV for a mere $6.6 billion.

But despite their commercial and political triumphs, the relationship between Murdoch and Ailes has grown rocky. The more profits soared at Fox News, the more Ailes expanded his power and independence. In 2005, he staged a brazen coup within the company, conspiring to depose Murdoch’s son Lachlan as the anointed heir of News Corp. Ailes not only took over Lachlan’s portfolio – becoming chair of Fox Television – he even claimed Lachlan’s office on the eighth floor. In 2009, Ailes earned a pay package of $24 million – a deal slightly larger than the one enjoyed by Murdoch himself. He brags privately that his contract also forbids Murdoch – infamous for micromanaging his newspapers – from interfering with editorial decisions at Fox News.

In recent years, Ailes has increasingly become a headache for News Corp. In 2004, to protect his pal Rudy Giuliani, Ailes apparently interceded in the case of Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who had been nominated on Giuliani’s recommendation to head the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik proved to be a train wreck: In the most offensive of his indiscretions, he had commandeered an apartment overlooking Ground Zero – intended for rescue and recovery workers – as a love shack for trysts with his book editor, News Corp.’s own Judith Regan. Acting more like a political consultant than a news executive, Ailes appears to have resorted to Watergate-style obstruction of justice. According to court documents, the Fox News chairman “told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign.” The records reveal that Ailes “advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” The allegation featured prominently in a wrongful-termination lawsuit brought by Regan, which reportedly cost News Corp. more than $10 million to settle.

Many within Murdoch’s family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband’s politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law and a top PR executive in Britain, recently told reporters, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

“Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is,” says Wolff, the Murdoch biographer. “Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert’s children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself.”

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist and a 1960s radical. In early 2007, Ailes joked about the similarity of Obama’s name to a certain terrorist’s. “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said in a speech to news executives. “I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’” References to Obama’s middle name were soon being bandied about on Fox & Friends, the morning happy-talk show that Ailes uses as one of his primary vehicles to inject his venom into the media bloodstream. According to insiders, the morning show’s anchors, who appear to be chatting ad-lib, are actually working from daily, structured talking points that come straight from the top. “Prior to broadcast, Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson – that gang – they meet with Roger,” says a former Fox deputy. “And Roger gives them the spin.”

Fox & Friends is where the smear about Obama having attended a madrassa was first broadcast, with Doocy – an Ailes lackey from his days at America’s Talking – stating unequivocally that Obama was “raised as a Muslim.” And during the campaign, the show’s anchors flogged Obama’s reference to his own grandmother as a “typical white person” so relentlessly that it even gave Fox News host Chris Wallace pause. When Wallace appeared on the show that morning, he launched a rebuke that seemed targeted at Ailes as much as Doocy. “I have been watching the show since six o’clock this morning,” Wallace bristled. “I feel like two hours of Obama-bashing may be enough.”

The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. “Obama’s election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic.“Things shifted,” agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. “There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable.” Sean Hannity was no longer flanked by Alan Colmes, long the network’s fig-leaf liberal. Bill Sammon, author of At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, was brought in to replace Moody as the top political enforcer. And Brit Hume was replaced on the anchor desk by Bret Baier, one of the young guns Ailes hired more than a decade ago to inject right-wing fervor into Fox News.

Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. “I see this as the Alamo,” Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on April 15th, 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” Veteran journalists were taken aback. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a news network throw its weight behind a protest like we are seeing in the past few weeks,” said Howard Kurtz, the then-media critic for The Washington Post. The following August, when the Tea Party launched its town-hall protests against health care reform, Fox & Friends urged viewers to confront their congressmen face to face. “Are you gonna call?” Gretchen Carlson demanded on-air, “or are you gonna go to one of these receptions where they’re actually there?” The onscreen Chyron instructed viewers: HOLD CONGRESS ACCOUNTABLE! NOW IS THE TIME TO SPEAK YOUR MIND.

Fox News also hyped Sarah Palin’s lies about “death panels” and took the smear a step further, airing a report claiming that the Department of Veterans Affairs was using a “death book” to encourage soldiers to “hurry up and die.” (Missing from the report was any indication that the end-of-life counseling materials in question had been promoted by the Bush administration.) At the height of the health care debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obama­care would lead to a “government takeover,” provide health care to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. As always, the Chairman’s enforcer made sure that producers down in the Fox News basement were toeing the party line. In October 2009, as Congress weighed adding a public option to the health care law, Sammon let everyone know how Ailes expected them to cover the story. “Let’s not slip back into calling it the ‘public option,’” he warned in an e-mail. “Please use the term ‘government-run health insurance’ … when­ever possible.” Sammon neglected to mention that the phrase he was pushing had been carefully crafted by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s largest lobbying organization, which had determined that the wording was “the most negative language to use when describing a ‘public plan.’”

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”

During his days as an overt political consultant, Roger Ailes reshaped Republican politics for the era of network television. Now, as chairman of Fox News, he has reshaped a television network as a force for Republican politics. “It’s a political campaign – a 24/7 political campaign,” says a former Ailes deputy. “Nobody has been able to issue talking points to the American public morning after morning, day after day, night after night.” Perhaps the only media figure in history with a greater sway over the American electorate was Father Charles Coughlin, the redbaiting Catholic ideologue whose corrosive radio sermons – laced with anti-Semitism and economic populism – reached nearly a third of the country during the Great Depression.

“Ailes is actually much more sophisticated than Coughlin,” says Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and author of The Age of Reagan. “Coughlin was only on the air once a week, and it was clear that what he presented was his opinion. Fox News is totalized: It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news.’ That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way – one that blurs the distinction between the two.”

The phenomenal political power and economic prowess of Fox News has inspired imitation. In recent years, MSNBC has tried to refashion itself as the anti-Fox, with a prime-time lineup stacked with liberal commentators. Such contortions, say media veterans, only strengthen Fox News, emboldening Ailes to tack even further to the right. “He can say, ‘I’m not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing – I’m just doing it on the other side of the fence,’ ” says Dan Rather.

But Ailes has not simply been content to shift the nature of journalism and direct the GOP’s message war. He has also turned Fox News into a political fundraising juggernaut. During her Senate race in Delaware, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell bragged, “I’ve got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money.” Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who tried to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, praised Fox for letting her say on-air, “I need $25 from a million people – go to SharronAngle.com and send money.” Completing the Fox-GOP axis, Karl Rove has used his pulpit as a Fox News commentator to promote American Crossroads, a shadowy political group he founded, promising that the money it raised would be put “to good use to defeat Democrats who have supported the president’s agenda.”

But the clearest demonstration of how Ailes has seamlessly merged both money and message lies in the election of John Kasich, a longtime Fox News contributor who eked out a two-point victory over Democrat Ted Strickland last November to become governor of Ohio. While technically a Republican, Kasich might better be understood as the first candidate of the Fox News Party. “The question is no longer whether Fox News is an arm of the GOP,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic, “but whether it’s becoming the torso instead.”

The host of a weekend show called Heartland, Kasich made 42 appearances as a contributor on Fox after he announced his interest in running, frequently guest-hosting on The O’Reilly Factor. He also appeared 16 times as an active candidate, using the network as a platform to make naked fundraising appeals. Most striking of all, News Corp. itself chipped in $1.26 million to the Republican Governors Association, making it one of the largest single contributors to the club Kasich was seeking to join. Murdoch made no bones about why he made such a generous donation to the GOP cause: It was driven, he said, by “my friendship with John Kasich.” Since becoming governor, Kasich has repealed collective-­bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers and killed a stimulus-­funded project to develop high-speed rail for the state.

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypass­ing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as “matadors” who want to “tear down the social order” with their “elitist, horse-dung, social­ist thinking.” Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. “I’m not in politics,” Ailes recently boasted. “I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1 billion in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-­employees. Either way, he has put the Republican Party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,” said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. “Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.”

I heard the middle of this interview last night, and read the transcript this morning. This is a serious conversation about impeachment, and contains some interesting insights. If you prefer to listen to it, the link takes you to the transcript, and in the upper left hand corner is the podcast.

Trump’s Fitness To Serve Is ‘Officially Part Of The Discussion In Congress’

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/04/526857048/trump-s-fitness-to-serve-is-officially-part-of-the-discussion-in-congress

May 4, 20171:22 PM ET

Heard on Fresh Air
Fresh Air
New Yorker writer Evan Osnos discusses the likelihood that impeachment or the 25th Amendment will be used to remove Donald Trump from office.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. One of the many things that makes the Trump presidency unprecedented is that some members of Congress, as well as some ethicists, legal experts, psychiatrists and scholars, are already talking about possible paths to impeachment or how to remove the President from office through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. My guest, Evan Osnos, has written an article in the current edition of The New Yorker titled “How Trump Could Get Fired.” It examines these efforts and considers the feasibility of ending Trump’s presidency.

During the past few months, Osnos interviewed several dozen people about the subject, including some of the president’s friends and advisers, lawmakers and attorneys who have conducted impeachments, physicians and historians and current members of the Senate, House and intelligence services. Osnos has been writing about Trump since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.

Evan Osnos, welcome back to FRESH AIR. How seriously are President Trump’s opponents pursuing impeachment or removal from office through the 25th Amendment?

EVAN OSNOS: At the moment they’re not pursuing it. And I use that term advisedly because they would use that term carefully. And what I mean is that at this point, they are aware – both Democrats and others who are talking about the possibility of Donald Trump’s removal from office – they’re aware that there is a perilous element to talking about it publicly and actively because in some sense that can become a rallying cry for Donald Trump’s supporters.

So what they’re being is judicious. And what they’re saying is, we don’t believe right now that there are firm grounds for impeachment. If we did, then we’d be introducing that in Congress. What we believe is that there are the precursors or the indicators of types of behavior and standards in the White House that expose him to extraordinary risks legally and politically.

So there are members of Congress now who have begun to talk about in private the fact that they believe that some of Donald Trump’s actions, both in terms of how he talks about other branches of government, how he talks about the courts, the ways in which he has sought to de-legitimize the decisions of federal courts, that those could become the basis for a serious critique and ultimately a charge that he is undermining the norms of democracy or abusing the powers of his office.

But at this point, they are not prepared to go public in a formal sense. And – but it was pretty clear. You know, I work in Washington. I am talking to a lot of people who are involved in politics day-to-day, either as office holders or as, you know, the people around those office holders who in many ways hold a lot of power, deciding where the future of politics is headed.

And what became clear to me over the course of the last three months of the Trump administration was that this was not just water cooler conversation at the office or sort of late night monologue jokes about whether this president is fit for office, that there was, in fact, a much more formal conversation going on that doesn’t really make the newspapers on a day-to-day basis but is in fact very serious and scholarly. And people are beginning to try to understand what are the legal boundaries for a president who is in so many obvious ways unlike any president we’ve had before?

GROSS: Well, some people have been challenging President Trump’s mental fitness to serve in office. And that’s where the 25th Amendment comes in. Let’s start there. First of all, what does the 25th Amendment say?

OSNOS: The 25th Amendment was created after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when people in government realized that the Constitution was pretty good at dealing with the possibility of the death of a president. That’s what vice presidents are for. But the Constitution was not well-equipped for another scenario, which was a president who, in Kennedy’s case, had he lived from a gunshot wound, was comatose perhaps. There was no legal way for the duties of the office to be discharged by anybody else, so the government would be paralyzed.

And so in 1967, they introduced this amendment which created under Section 4 a pretty remarkable set of legal capabilities. And what it says is that if a president is determined to be mentally or physically unfit, unable to discharge the duties of the office, then he or she can be removed. And the determination about whether or not the president is unfit, that can be made by the vice president and the Cabinet.

So if a majority of the Cabinet secretaries – and a majority eight people – if they decide that the president is showing the signs of instability, is really not able to do the job, all they do is write down on a piece of paper, and they give it to the leaders of the Senate and the House. And at that point, the president is no longer legally endowed with the same rights and legal authority, particularly over the nuclear arsenal, that he or she had before. But a president can object.

It’s a scenario – a sort of nightmare scenario that scholars describe as contested removal, in which a president would object to the idea that he’s been determined to be unwell. And at that point, then Congress has three weeks to decide the issue. And you can just sort of imagine. It’s kind of amazing to step back and think about what that would actually be like in practice, that you would have Congress actively, openly, publicly discussing the question of whether or not the president of the United States was mentally fit to return to the presidency.

During that three-week period, the vice president would be what’s known as acting president. And it would be up to the Senate and the House to decide by a two-thirds majority to remove the President. And if they don’t meet that two-thirds threshold – which is artificially high, it’s designed to make it very, very hard to do – well, then the president goes back to the job.

But I’ll mention one other piece of this which is important and has become, in some ways, the sort of leading official edge of this discussion about mental health. And that’s that under the 25th Amendment, the Congress is legally allowed to create another body beyond the vice president and the Cabinet to make the determination of the president’s mental health. That body could be, for instance, a set of medical professionals, doctors, or it could be former presidents or vice presidents. That’s never actually been created.

But since the beginning of the Trump administration, at least two members of Congress – Democrats from Maryland and from Oregon – have introduced bills explicitly, they say, in response to their concerns about Donald Trump’s mental health. And those bills would create this legal body which would have a greater say in assessing the president’s stability.

So in that sense, the question of whether or not Donald Trump is, you know, mentally stable is now a matter of public policy. It is now officially part of the discussion in Congress. And I think it’s there to stay.

GROSS: Do you know if anybody in Congress or in Trump’s inner circle has questioned his mental health?

OSNOS: In Congress, they certainly have. Look. I’ve talked to – I’ve talked to a lot of members of Congress over the course of the last few weeks. And most – let’s be clear, mostly it’s Democrats who, say, well, six months ago, this was a joke. This was a late night monologue matter, the question of whether or not Donald Trump’s – you know, is delusional when he says things like that there were 3 to 5 million illegal votes against him. Of course, there’s no basis to support that. Or when he says that he had the largest Electoral College victory in history, things like that which are quite easily and verifiably false.

You know, that is no longer – it’s no longer a joke. And what they say is that this is now a very serious matter. And, look. A number of Democrats who I spoke to, including Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, Jamie Raskin of Maryland who is a constitutional law professor, as well as a member of Congress, you know, what they told me is that they have had long conversations with Republican colleagues about their concern and some of their colleagues’ concern about the president’s behavior.

But their Republican colleagues, at this point, none of them have gone public or gone on record as saying anything more than, you know, what might be a kind of rhetorical critique, people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham who will say things like this president doesn’t seem normal to me. But they are not at the point of talking about the president’s mental health as a matter of public policy the way that some Democrats have begun to.

GROSS: If you’re just joining us, my guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker who has been writing a lot about President Trump dating back to the campaign. And his new article is called “How Trump Could Get Fired.” And it explores the different paths that his opponents are taking to use the process of impeachment or the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office. We’re going to take a short break here, and then we’ll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you’re just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos, who has been following President Trump and, before that, candidate Trump. His new article is called “How Trump Could Get Fired.” And it looks at the path that his critics are taking to use the process of impeachment or the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.

The president’s health records have ranged between totally opaque and incredibly vague and prone to generalizations (laughter) very positive generalizations. But a group of 35 psychiatrists sent a letter to The New York Times questioning President Trump’s mental fitness to serve. What did that letter say?

OSNOS: You know, that letter was extraordinary, partly because there are a lot of reasons why mental health professionals do not go public with their concerns about the mental health of politicians. You know, for a long time, this has been a taboo. They really do not talk about it.

GROSS: Well, actually violated a kind of ethical standard within the psychiatric profession…

OSNOS: Exactly.

GROSS: …That’s been the rule since 1973. Do you want to describe that?

OSNOS: Yeah. Yeah, well – so in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for president, a magazine called Fact asked psychiatrists, psychologists and others whether they believed that he was fit for the presidency. And more than a thousand of them came forward and said they did not. Goldwater, who lost the race, ended up suing for libel. He won, and as a result, the American Psychiatric Association created this ethical taboo against publicly diagnosing people who you have not directly examined and have not received their permission to talk about publicly. And that’s known as the Goldwater Rule.

And for years, it really was – it obtained without question. You just did not see psychiatrists opining in the press about whether or not a political persona was – suffered some sort of psychiatric problem. Donald Trump has changed that completely. There have been more than 50,000 mental health professionals who have come forward and signed a petition using their names, exposing themselves professionally to some sort of, you know, potential sanction, to say that they believe that he is – poses a risk to the public because, in their view, he demonstrates many of the characteristics of psychiatric disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder or what’s known as malignant narcissism, which is a combination of grandiosity, sort of hypersensitivity to criticism, an aggressive personality, sadism of one kind or another.

And so you have this really fierce debate going on right now in the psychiatric community, in the mental health community, about whether or not it’s appropriate to be talking about Donald Trump’s mental health. But what you hear from the people, like the 35 mental health professionals who wrote to The New York Times, is that they believe that above and beyond the Goldwater Rule that they have a more urgent ethical commitment. And that’s what’s known as the duty to warn. What that means is that if they in their practice come to believe that somebody, either a patient or somebody that they’ve encountered, poses an urgent risk to others, to the public, well, they have a responsibility to talk about that.

And that goes beyond their other commitments because they have to protect the public. And so what they say is that they believe that Donald Trump, because he is so impulsive and so sensitive to criticism and is now in possession of such extraordinary power, both in national security terms and in legal terms, they’re concerned that he could use that either in national security to start a war or in some ways to harm Americans. And that’s why thousands of them have come forward. And for that, we are really in an unusual territory because that doesn’t – we haven’t seen that before.

GROSS: So in response to this letter that was signed by 35 health professionals and published in The New York Times questioning the president’s mental fitness to serve, the psychiatrist who wrote the entry for narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which kind of defines all the psychiatric disorders, he challenged that. He said that President Trump does not have the kind of problems associated with a mental illness.

OSNOS: Yeah, yeah. Allen Frances, exactly as you say, he wrote in response and said that he did not believe that Donald Trump showed the level of impairment, meaning that basically how do you become president if you’re suffering from a psychiatric disorder? That you just – he does not seem incapacitated to the degree that you would typically expect from somebody who was diagnosable. The response to that has been forceful. They have said no, we see high-functioning people with psychiatric problems a lot. And so, you know, that debate is going to continue.

One of the interesting points that I think this brings up is if you look back over the course of the presidency historically, the fact that somebody is suffering terribly from something has never prevented them from becoming president. There was a study done by psychiatrists at Duke University that was published a few years ago which looked back at the medical records for presidents reaching back decades. And what they concluded was that 49 percent of United States presidents have suffered from an illness that would satisfy the standards of a psychiatric disorder. That includes depression, anxiety, substance abuse. Many of them abused alcohol at one point or another. And this was – you know, some of these are well-known. Abraham Lincoln, of course, as many people know, was depressed for much of his life. But there were others that it was not known at the time. It was largely hidden.

Lyndon Johnson, for instance – we don’t often talk about Lyndon Johnson’s mental health, but since his death, it’s emerged that two of his aides were so concerned about his own paranoia in the midst of the Vietnam War, as he felt growing political opposition around him, that they actually consulted psychiatrists to try to figure out what they could do to help him. And Lyndon Johnson had begun to carry statistics in his jacket pocket, which he knew were false. But these were statistics that he would use to recite to people to try to defend his policy choices, defend his positions. He was convinced that there were enemies, as he put it, around him who were trying to encircle and prevent his presidency from succeeding.

So what this says is that there are both reasons why presidents are able to get into office. They’re possessed with these extraordinary political gifts. But there is almost a unique level of stress associated with that job that means that they may not, in fact – that they may satisfy some of the characteristics of a psychiatric disorder while still at the same time succeeding in some obvious ways by simply being in the presidency.

GROSS: But the ways that President Trump is being challenged in terms of his mental health are different in the sense that some of the kind of grandiosity and narcissism that some people have attributed to him precede the campaign, let alone assuming office.

And, you know, for example, in terms of defining what some of his critics see as the problem, Laurence Tribe, who’s a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said – and you quote this in your piece – he thinks that the inability to discharge the powers and duties of office should include an inability that can be manifested by gross and pathological inattention to or indifference to or failure to understand the limits of presidential powers or the mandatory nature of those duties.

OSNOS: Yeah, this is one of the things that’s really interesting about the 25th Amendment and Trump’s mental health. I think, you know, if you ask most people what they imagine about what would be required for a president to be relieved of duty for mental health, they think, well, you know, he has to be essentially incapacitated. We have to be talking about somebody who’s really just – who’s had a break with reality in all obvious ways.

And what Laurence Tribe – who is a constitutional scholar, as you say, at Harvard – what he points out is that actually no, the framers of the 25th Amendment were very clear about their intent. They said this is not a medical strict standard. This is a combination of medical and political characteristics, meaning that at any given moment, you have to be able to take in the full totality of whatever the challenges are the president is facing and decide whether or not that president is really capable of discharging their duties.

And if they show that they are simply so incapable of maintaining a reasonable command of the facts or understanding or reading the material that’s presented to them, well, then that can qualify as what professor Tribe calls pathological inattention. And he cites as an example the fact that just recently in the midst of this growing tension with North Korea over its nuclear arsenal, Donald Trump said publicly that the United States had, as he put it, an armada that was steaming towards North Korea.

At the time, that armada, as he put it, an aircraft carrier and the vessels around it were not. They were actually going the other direction. And what professor Tribe says is that that kind of casual disregard for the responsibility and capability the office, which, you know, that that constitutes in and of itself a level of concern that would – that qualifies consideration under the 25th Amendment. Because if the president is not able to understand the consequences of making a statement like that which could inflame North Korea, could lead it reasonably to assume that it is facing imminent attack, well, then that’s not discharging the offices of the presidency in the legal way.

GROSS: My guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His article, “How Trump Could Get Fired,” is in the current issue of The New Yorker. After we take a short break, we’ll talk about whether the president might be at risk of impeachment. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross, back with Evan Osnos. We’re talking about his article in the current edition of The New Yorker titled “How Trump Could Get Fired.” It’s about the fears being expressed by some members of Congress, as well as some psychiatrists, legal experts and scholars that President Trump is unfit to serve. The article examines the two constitutional paths by which a president can be removed from office – impeachment and the 25th Amendment.

Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has been writing about Trump since the start of his presidential campaign in 2015. When we left off, we were talking about Osnos’s interviews with people who are questioning the president’s fitness to serve.

Of course, one of the president’s most powerful powers is to order a nuclear a attack. And somebody’s always accompanying the president with the nuclear football that has, like, a nuclear plan attached to it and the ability to start a nuclear war. You spoke with Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. And he told you that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force with any connection to nuclear weapons, he’d need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program. What is that?

OSNOS: The Personnel Reliability Program is administered to anybody in the chain of command up to a certain level, which is to ensure that if they have their hands anywhere in the process of firing a nuclear weapon – so meaning if they’re a launch officer at a silo in the – you know, deep underground in the Midwest, or if they’re somebody in the Pentagon who’s involved in the process of considering and relaying nuclear orders – that they have to be assessed for their emotional stability, their financial profile so that the Pentagon knows that they are not in debt to anybody, so that the Pentagon knows that they do not have serious financial risks that might shade or guide their judgment.

So they answer a set of questions. And on that list of questions are things like have you ever been close to bankruptcy? How well do you sleep at night? Are you prone at all to losing your temper? And what Bruce Blair – who is a scholar at Princeton now and was for many years an ICBM launch officer in the Air Force, he’s a scholar who looks at the intersection of national security and science – what he says is that everything that he knows from his own Air Force career makes it quite clear that Donald Trump would not pass that Personnel Reliability Program test because he has not released his tax returns.

We don’t know what his financial commitments are and also because he has not released the health information that most presidential candidates have released. We don’t know, for instance, whether or not he has had emotional instability in the past. We don’t know a lot of details about his overall health. So for that reason, the irony here, of course, is that in order to be president, you don’t have to pass that test. But if Donald Trump was lower in the chain of command, he – as Bruce Blair puts it – would have almost certainly not been allowed to be involved in the nuclear chain of command.

GROSS: So let’s talk about what you’re hearing about impeachment. Let’s first define what impeachment means, what the standard for impeachment is.

OSNOS: Yeah. Impeachment is one of the very first things that was written into the Constitution. And it is the legal right of the public through Congress to remove a federal officer. Of course, the president is who we’re talking about. And in order to do that, the president would have to be found to have committed treason, bribery or what’s known as other high crimes and misdemeanors. That’s a term that came out of English law.

And what’s important about that is that it’s not the same as an ordinary legal standard. It’s not as if you have to violate the U.S. criminal code. It is a very specific thing. High crimes and misdemeanors was defined by the framers of the Constitution as being a violation of the public trust. So it’s not, you know, it’s not that it has to be that you, you know, did some very specific crime that would land you in an ordinary court. It’s that you have essentially committed a crime against the country – a crime against your own office.

And, you know, we sometimes think of an impeachment as a prosecution. It has in some ways the aroma of a court about it. You know, it uses terms like charges and verdict, but that’s not what it is. It does not put somebody in jail, obviously. What it does is it removes them from office. So it is a – it’s a tool of political accountability. It’s a way of holding the office of the president to account when there is no other way of holding the office of the president to account.

GROSS: OK, so it’s not a criminal trial. It’s not about violating the criminal code.

OSNOS: Exactly.

GROSS: But on the other hand, President Trump faces dozens of civil proceedings. And if he’s found guilty in civil court, does that affect the possibility of impeachment? Does that come into play? Is that taken into consideration?

OSNOS: It is. And actually, even before you reach the question of a ruling in civil court, you know, that Donald Trump is right now, as you say, facing a vast range of different kinds of civil proceedings. He’s been sued by somebody who was thrown out of a rally in Louisville, Ky., who accuses him of inciting violence. He’s been accused of sexual harassment, is facing a proceeding in state court in New York and a whole range of other cases.

The reason why these are enormously risky for Donald Trump is that when a president is deposed, meaning that when they give a deposition or when they ever appear under oath, then they are at risk of perjury. And we know from the experience of Bill Clinton, who was ultimately impeached for two charges – perjury and obstruction of justice – that any time a president is under oath, that is a very, very risky moment.

This is one of the reasons why just before the Trump administration came into office, he and his lawyers settled cases, including the Trump University case in New York which was a fraud investigation, in which he agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to his accusers. This is designed, in part, because they’re trying to make sure that Donald Trump does not need to go under oath.

GROSS: You write that many scholars believe that the most plausible path for a Trump impeachment is based on corruption and abuse of power. For example?

OSNOS: Traditionally when we think of abuse of power, we think of, for instance, Richard Nixon, who used the IRS or the CIA to target his opponents. But abuse of power is actually much broader than that. And Donald Trump has exposed himself to that accusation in a couple of very specific ways. Number one, when Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned immigration from Muslim majority countries, that order was stalled by a judge in Seattle, a federal judge.

And Donald Trump went public, as you remember, and he said that a, quote, “so-called judge,” unquote, has now put the country at risk because he said if there is an attack on Americans, you should blame that judge. I’m paraphrasing there. But this is what he said publicly. And, you know, some of us, I think we just sort of chalk it up to Donald Trump’s speech, that that’s the sort of things that he says.

But actually, if you’re somebody who is involved in the federal government and in the basic architecture of a democracy, that’s deeply concerning because what he’s doing is fundamentally seeking to discredit a co-equal branch of government. The judiciary, after all, is no less or more powerful than the presidency. But what he’s doing is using the exclusive power of the president, this bully pulpit, this power to be able to speak to 310 million Americans, and he is seeking to say that that judge is illegitimate and in furthermore, that if Americans are harmed, that that judge is responsible. That kind of statement in and of itself could be used as the basis for an abuse of office accusation.

GROSS: Is there another example that’s been cited of President Trump denigrating or defying an equal branch of government?

OSNOS: There is, and I think this is the one that is probably the most acutely vulnerable to him. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, former attorney general of the state of Connecticut – so somebody who is deeply fluent in the law of the land – said to me that he sees on the horizon a constitutional crisis. That’s his term, and he means it very specifically. He’s referring to the possibility that the Trump administration will resist the efforts of other parts of the government to obtain information.

So if they issue a subpoena in the Russia investigation, if the FBI or if the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House ask the White House for information and if the White House refuses to provide that information, that right there is exactly what a constitutional crisis is. And it’s worth remembering that that’s the moment in Richard Nixon’s presidency when things began to unravel. In October of 1973, the appellate court ordered Richard Nixon to provide secret tapes that he had made of his own conversations to the special prosecutor. And he resisted. And as a result of resisting the court’s order and of trying to fire the special prosecutor, he began the process of his own undoing.

And Richard Blumenthal, who is, after all, a very measured, careful communicator on the subject of the law – doesn’t talk about this stuff casually – said to us on the record in this story that he believes that we’re heading towards a similar scenario because the White House has already started to resist the disclosure of documents. You saw just recently that Republicans and Democrats overseeing the House Oversight Committee have said that the White House has rejected their requests for documents related to the hiring and firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. It’s one of those moments that sounds incredibly bureaucratic and esoteric but is in fact a very significant landmark because it represents the White House stonewalling efforts of an equal branch of government to do its job.

GROSS: Let’s take a short break here, and then we’ll talk more about paths some people in Washington are pursuing toward trying to impeach President Trump. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his new article is called “How Trump Could Get Fired.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you’re just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. He’s been writing about Donald Trump since Donald Trump was a presidential candidate. His latest article about the president is called “How Trump Could Get Fired,” and it’s about Washington insiders, including people in Congress, who are considering pursuing the path of impeachment or using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump from office.

Well, Sally Yates is going to testify before a Senate panel on Monday, and she was the acting attorney general who was removed from office by President Trump after she refused to enforce his travel ban. She apparently warned White House Counsel Don McGahn that Michael Flynn, who was the brief national security adviser to President Trump, that Flynn lied when he said he hadn’t discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia in conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the campaign. And Yates apparently told McGahn that Flynn spoke with Russians and could be compromised and that this was a very serious issue. And she apparently implied that as a result Flynn should be fired. It took three weeks for Flynn to be fired from that position, and the reason that was officially given was that he lied to Vice President Pence about the nature of his conversations.

So if Michael Flynn is found to have colluded with the Russians, does that reflect on President Trump in a way that might be impeachable?

OSNOS: Yeah. This is a classic demonstration of the principle you hear very often when it comes to presidential scandal or investigation, and that is what did the president know and when did he know it? So the question that the – that will be under consideration when Sally speaks to Congress is, how high did her information reach into the White House? Were others aware of the fact that Michael Flynn was potentially exposed to compromise, was potentially exposed to blackmail by the Russians? And were actions taken either to cover that up or to defer action to remove him?

What this gets to is, I think, one of the most powerful lessons of the history of impeachment, and that is that investigations lead to investigations. And what I mean is that Donald Trump came into office in the already very unusual position of having an FBI – active FBI – investigation around his associates into the – whether or not they colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. But that may ultimately not be his biggest problem. His biggest problem may be that that investigation produces other probes of other things. And we’ve really already begun to see that process.

So Devin Nunes, who was the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, was forced to remove himself from the investigation of the Russia case because it had become clear that he had acted inappropriately to look at classified information with the White House and then went public with that information in a way that was certainly not appropriate. And he’s now under an ethics investigation by the House.

So, you know, one of the things that’s so interesting here is that all of this may have begun with an investigation into how and why Russia interfered in the U.S. election. But by the time this is over, you are going to see that there have been all of these additional side processes, additional investigations, that spin off of that main process. And it’s impossible to know at the outset which one of those is the one that is most potentially damaging to a president.

GROSS: Well, you know, continuing with the kinds of investigations that are going on, there’s an investigation into Paul Manafort, the former campaign chair for Trump who received millions of dollars in cash from pro-Russian groups in Ukraine, Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Investigations into his connection to Russian agents are ongoing now. So there’s – as you said, there’s all these investigations that could lead to more investigations of things we don’t even know about.

OSNOS: Yeah. That’s the lesson of really the Clinton impeachment, which is if you remember, that began with an investigation into a failed real estate deal in Arkansas called Whitewater. And nobody would have guessed in 1994 when that investigation began, that it would have ultimately led more than four years later to the impeachment of a president for covering up an affair with a White House intern.

That’s the dynamic that is worth paying attention to now because it’s really difficult to know which one of these different strands is going to be the most relevant. But he is already just within his first three months in office facing a scale of ethical skepticism and formal investigation that he’s really unlike any president that we’ve seen before.

GROSS: Because impeachment has to be passed through the House and the Senate, you need to be politically unpopular with people in Congress. Republicans control the House and the Senate. And so it seems unlikely that they would impeach a member of their own party. Republicans are also in the majority of the Supreme Court. So does that lower the odds that the impeachment process would ever succeed because what are the odds that Republicans would impeach one of their own?

OSNOS: You’re absolutely right that a Republican president is unlikely to be subject to an impeachment proceeding initiated by Republican leadership in the House and the Senate. But a president needs his own party to survive impeachment in a couple of very specific ways. Number one, if the Republican House goes into Democratic hands in 2018, then it is really – this becomes not a theoretical question, but becomes an immediate political question.

So Democrats have already indicated in one form or another that they would be prepared to move ahead with a serious consideration of impeachment of this president, if not yet prepared to say formal resolutions to that effect. So what that means then is that for Donald Trump to defend himself against a Democratic-led process pursuing impeachment, he would need Republicans because the Republicans in the House would have to stay on-side and support him in a vote. It’s a simple majority meaning that if 51 percent of the House votes for impeachment, then the president is impeached. And so he needs every Republican he can get to stay with him in that case. Then it would go to the Senate.

And in order for a president to be removed from office, two-thirds of the members of the Senate would have to side against him. And in order to meet that two-thirds threshold, that means that a number of Republicans would have to vote against Trump. So for that reason, he needs Republicans on his team.

And in some ways, that’s one of the things that is – that’s one of the indicators that suggests that he is at risk in ways that the public doesn’t fully appreciate yet because Republicans in Congress are at this moment less privately satisfied with Donald Trump than they publicly admit.

GROSS: My guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His article in the current issue is titled “How Trump Could Get Fired.” We’ll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Evan Osnos about his article in the current issue of The New Yorker titled “How Trump Could Get Fired.” So looking historically, two presidents have been impeached – Andrew Johnson who took over as president after Lincoln was assassinated and Bill Clinton who was impeached in the House, but the Senate did not convict. So, you know, he remained in office. So if we look historically at those two examples, are there lessons to extract from the past that might be relevant to the impeachment process?

OSNOS: Yeah. There are lessons, actually very important ones in some ways. The number one most important lesson is that, you know, the single greatest most important ingredient in figuring out who gets impeached and who doesn’t is popularity. The simple fact is that Congress tends to not impeach popular presidents, and that’s because this is – you know, it goes back to the very, very most important point about impeachment, which is it is not a prosecution. It is a political process. It’s designed to try to remove somebody from office who has been determined to be both, you know, through this kind of an ineffable process of divining the public’s support. It’s about trying to decide whether that person is no longer capable of doing the job.

So if you lose political popularity, then you are acutely vulnerable. That’s point number one. Point number two is that Congress itself is very powerful in curtailing the powers of a president, either by, you know, by hobbling them through impeachment, even if they don’t remove them from office by subjecting them to that level of investigation, humiliation. It is a way of holding them to account. And in both of those cases – in Andrew Johnson’s case, in Bill Clinton’s case and also in Richard Nixon’s case – though he was not ultimately impeached because he resigned, he is very much a sort of object lesson in the process of impeachment. All three of them lost the support of their own party in Congress to some degree. And as a result, that made them vulnerable.

And, you know, strangely enough when we talk about impeachment, we often think, well, the most important thing is the, quote, unquote, “smoking gun.” You know, it’s this piece of evidence that you have to have that shows that they did something that breaks the law. And, you know, it certainly is helpful. It may in fact be necessary. But everybody who has studied this process closely agrees it’s not the most important thing.

You know, the most important thing is who controls the House of Representatives? If the opposing party controls the House of Representatives, then a president can be investigated. And through that process, they begin to chip away at a president’s public approval. They begin to expose potential acts of wrongdoing that have been concealed. Therefore, you know, the single most important thing in Donald Trump’s political survival right now is the 2018 midterm elections.

GROSS: So because impeachment is a political process that requires passage in the House and then conviction in the Senate – Republicans control both the House and the Senate now, but in the midterm elections in 2018, there is the possibility that Democrats will win a majority in the House. That might be a remote possibility, but it is a possibility. So if Democrats won a majority in the House, how would that affect the likelihood of impeaching the president?

OSNOS: I think there’s no question if Democrats control the House of Representatives as a result of the 2018 midterms, that significantly raises the likelihood of an impeachment process because all of a sudden they would have subpoena power. They would have the ability to convene hearings and subcommittees and special committees dedicated to investigating ethical conflicts or abuses of office or civil complaints against the president. All of those would suddenly become active, live political issues.

And then on top of that, there is the problem of whether or not the White House would cooperate. And if the White House did not cooperate, then that’s an additional risk. So really there is just a tremendous amount riding on the 2018 midterm elections when it comes to this president’s political future.

GROSS: So Democrats are only 23 members away from having the majority. Like, what do you think the odds are that they would take over the House?

OSNOS: Well, I assumed at the outset of this project that Republicans are in very firm territory and control the House. Because of gerrymandering, they’ve basically created a lot of very safe seats for themselves. And there’s some truth to that. But actually Republicans told me – these are people who look at long-term trends in electoral results – they said actually that the party needs to be much more concerned than it is because historically if one party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, they tend to lose 35 seats in the next midterm election.

Right now, that would be a big enough loss to give control of the House to Democrats. Republicans control it by 23 seats. And so, you know, from a member of Congress Republican named Tom Davis who ran the Republican congressional election operation on multiple elections told me of his former colleagues very bluntly. He said they are living in la-la land right now. They don’t fully appreciate the risks that they’re facing. If Democrats take the House – and he thinks that they stand a good chance of doing so – this president is exposed immediately to investigation.

GROSS: Well, Evan Osnos, thank you so much for talking with us.

OSNOS: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Terry.

GROSS: Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His article “How Trump Could Get Fired” is in the current issue. If you’d like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week’s interviews with comic W. Kamau Bell, writer Richard Ford and Richard Rothstein who wrote a new book about policies that mandated housing segregation, even in the north, check out our podcast.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
To Build a Winning Team: An Interview with Head Coach Bill Walsh

Richard Rapaport

https://hbr.org/1993/01/to-build-a-winning-team-an-interview-with-head-coach-bill-walsh

Joining the august company of Knute Rockne, Paul Brown, and Vince Lombardi, former San Francisco 49ers and current Stanford University football coach Bill Walsh is recognized as one of the most important figures in football history. Walsh, like other coaching legends, has done far more than produce consistently winning teams: in his case, three Super Bowl championships for the 49ers in eight years and an organization enshrined in the press as “The Team of the ’80s.” During his ten-year career with the 49ers and as a coach at the high school, college, and professional levels, Walsh developed a uniquely thoughtful style of play and a successful system of team management that has become one of the most respected in the modern game.

Less of a psychologist than Rockne, and never a disciplinarian like Lombardi, Walsh nevertheless produces winners through a businesslike approach to maximizing the potential of players and coaches. His ability to coolly analyze opponents, matching their weaknesses with his teams’ strengths, has made come-from-behind wins a Walsh football hallmark.

Believed to be too cerebral for a top position for which extreme macho was long considered an ineluctable quality, for years Walsh was forced to content himself with assistant coaching positions. Prized nonetheless for his skills on offense, Walsh was honored for honing All-Pro quarterbacks Dan Fouts, Kenny Anderson, and Greg Cook.

In 1977, at age 47, Walsh became Stanford’s head football coach. That year, he took a moderately talented Stanford team to a national ranking and a win in the Bluebonnet Bowl. In 1979, Walsh was named head coach and general manager of a dreadful 49ers team that had been virtually dismembered in the late 1970s by mismanagement and horrendous personnel decisions.

Walsh immediately began to develop long-range strategic and personnel plans for the 49ers. He also focused on what other coaches had considered the minutiae of the game: minute-by-minute choreographing of practices, breaking down individual and group tactics into parts, and defining responsibilities and setting objectives for both players and coaches.

This season, Walsh has been paid the ultimate accolade for a coach: former Walsh assistants are NFL head coaches in Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Green Bay, New York (Jets), and San Francisco.

Retiring after his third Super Bowl victory in January 1989, Walsh signed on as a football analyst for NBC Sports, eschewing numerous bids to coach professionally before stunning the football world in 1992 by returning as head coach at Stanford.

This interview was conducted by Richard Rapaport, who is a San Francisco-based writer and a contributing editor to San Francisco Focus and Forbes/ASAP. His political commentary appears frequently in Knight-Ridder and other newspaper chains around the United States.

HBR: Do you see a link between managing and coaching?

Bill Walsh: I see coaches and executives who have more similar skills today than ever before. When I was with the 49ers, I was both head coach and general manager, so my duties were more business oriented than those of a lot of NFL head coaches. Today’s NFL is a very complex world, and great football knowledge alone won’t get your team to the Super Bowl.

Historically in sports, there has been one central figure in the organization whose presence dominates everything and whose judgments people identify with. That one person is the dictator, and everyone else simply does whatever he says. In a lot of ways, the old system was much easier for all involved. The dictator gave orders and everyone else just followed them.

Now working successfully with the people in the organization demands more from the coach or the executive. In coaching, I think of it as the coach’s ability to condition the athletes’ minds and to train them to think as a unit, while at the same time, making sure each athlete approaches his own game with total concentration, intensity, and skill. There should never be a moment on the football field when a player doesn’t feel challenged both physically and intellectually. That is why the old bludgeon approach is leaving football the same way it is leaving business.

What is replacing the old approach?

Management today recognizes that to have a winning organization, it has to be more knowledgeable and competent in dealing with and developing people. That is the most fundamental change. The real task in sports is to bring together groups of people to accomplish something. In the old days, the approach was rather crude. The organization would simply discard a player who did not fit a specific, predefined mold. If a player did not conform to the way management wanted him to behave, or if he made the organization uncomfortable, it got rid of him. That was the typical response.

Today, in sports as elsewhere, individualism is the general rule. Some of the most talented people are the ones who are the most independent. That has required from management a fundamental change in the art and skill of communication and in organizational development. Most important, there has been much more recognition and acknowledgment of the uniqueness of each individual and the need that people have for some degree of security.

How does that translate into winning teams?

Those teams that have been most successful are the ones that have demonstrated the greatest commitment to their people. They are the ones that have created the greatest sense of belonging. And they are the ones that have done the most in-house to develop their people. That commitment has come through in the personality of the organizations. It is true of the Redskins, the Raiders, and, of course, the 49ers.

What is the biggest obstacle to creating this kind of organization?

The coach must account for his ego. He has to drop or sidestep the ego barrier so that people can communicate without fear. They have to be comfortable that they will not be ridiculed if they turn out to be mistaken or if their ideas are not directly in line with their superior’s. That is where the breakthrough comes. That is what it takes to build a successful, winning organization.

That approach was certainly critical to the success of the 49ers. It contributed to an environment where our team could be more flexible and adaptable in responding to the unexpected moves of our opponents.

I tried to remove the fear factor from people’s minds so they could feel comfortable opening their mouths. They knew they could be wrong one time and then, when they got a little more information, change their opinion and not be demeaned for it. In fact, I made a point of reminding our coaching staff that I expected them to change their opinions and impressions over time. It’s quite natural: the more information you develop, the faster things can change.

But having enormous self-confidence seems essential for a leader—especially in pro sports. What is the role of healthy versus unhealthy ego in a competitive organization like a football team?

English is a marvelous language until it comes to the word “ego.” We Americans throw that around, using that one word to cover a broad spectrum of meanings: self-confidence, self-assurance, and assertiveness—attributes that most people think of as positive.

But there is another side that can wreck a team or an organization. That is being distracted by your own importance. It can come from your insecurity in working with others. It can be the need to draw attention to yourself in the public arena. It can be a feeling that others are a threat to your own territory. These are all negative manifestations of ego, and if you are not alert to them, you get diverted and your work becomes diffused. Ego in these cases makes people insensitive to how they work with others and ends up interfering with the real goal of any group efforts.

The Turnaround CEO

What do you think are the essential management skills of a successful head coach?

The role of the head coach begins with setting a standard of competence. You have to exhibit a strong working knowledge of the game. The head coach must be able to function effectively and decisively in the most stressful situations. And the head coach must demonstrate resourcefulness—in particular, he is responsible for designing a system of football that is not simplistic. The head coach’s system should never reduce the game to the point where he can blame his players for success or failure simply because they did not physically overwhelm the opponents.

Successful coaches realize that winning teams are not run by single individuals who dominate the scene and reduce the rest of the group to marionettes. Winning teams are more like open forums in which everyone participates in the decision-making process, coaches and players alike, until the decision is made. Others must know who is in command, but a head coach must behave democratically. Then, once a decision is made, the team must be motivated to go ahead and execute it.

What does it take to create a decision-making process in which people feel they can participate?

It starts with the expectations the head coach sets. It is part of the job to expect everyone in the organization to be an expert in his or her particular area of responsibility, to refine their skills continually, and to be physically and intellectually committed to the team. The head coach has to make it clear that he expects everyone to participate and volunteer his or her thoughts, impressions, and ideas. The goal is to create a communication channel that allows important information to get from the bottom to the top.

On Organized Labor

During 49ers games, my coaches and I always tried to respond to what the players said. We knew that we needed their input. And it often made a difference. For example, in a game against New Orleans in 1987, I told the team at halftime that we would call one particular pass play when we got inside the Saints 30-yard line. In the stress of the moment, when we got there, I simply didn’t think of sending in the play. But on the sideline, Steve Young, our backup quarterback, immediately reminded me of it. He wasn’t a bit hesitant. I called it, and we scored.

I couldn’t worry about being embarrassed because I had forgotten what I said in the locker room. We were after results. We all wanted to win.

If that is what it takes to be a successful coach, what are the qualities that define the modern football player?

The key to being a modern football player is the ability to respond quicker, both mentally and physically, than the other player. Some people are naturally quicker physically. But to win, you need to be quicker as a team. You must beat your opposition to the punch every time.

Physical strength and speed are important advantages, but even more advantageous is having the training that permits you to respond intelligently to whatever confronts you. That means more precision, better execution, and quicker response than your opponents. Under the extreme stress of game conditions, a player must condense his intellect and focus it on thinking more quickly and clearly than the opposition.

How do you achieve that quickness and responsiveness in your teams?

It is all in the way you prepare. Preparation allows us to overcome the fact that we might not be the most physically talented team. During the 1980s, the 49ers may not have been as talented as the New York Giants or Chicago Bears, who had measurable advantages in speed or strength. But we were able to compensate in the way we prepared for a game.

Some coaches rely on relatively simplistic plans. When their plans don’t work, they say that it was the players who did not block hard enough, did not run hard enough, or just were not tough enough. We have gone beyond that pattern of failure and finger-pointing. The responsibility for the success of the team starts with the coach, who develops the plan that is then executed by the players—who are extremely well-prepared.

Being prepared starts with identifying the essential skills our team needs to compete effectively. The next step is to create a format to teach those skills. Here at Stanford, our practices and game plans are far more detailed than those used by most of our opponents. There is more to learn with our schemes, so we demand more mental commitment and concentration from the players.

How do you approach the job of structuring practices so your players will be prepared?

I believe in extremely precise, minute-by-minute, tightly structured practices. We focus far more intellect and put far more thought into what we do in practice than other teams do. We have five or six skills or techniques that we want each of our players to be able to use in carrying out his assignment, where our opponents usually will have only one or two.

Take an offensive lineman, for example. Before the ball is snapped, that guard or tackle might have only three or four seconds to decide what kind of blocking technique to use on the man in front of him. Say there are four blocking techniques he can use. By the way his man is positioned, by the situation in the game, by what he has learned to expect from his opponent, he will be able to select one of those techniques.

Many other teams take a more simplistic approach. They teach their players one approach, one technique. Our approach gives our players more dimension. When we are playing powerhouses like Notre Dame, Texas A&M, or Washington, we have to use our extra dimensions to compensate for being physically outmanned. That is the intellectual part of the game. That is the area in which we ask more of our players than our opponents are asking of theirs.

How do you teach those skills?

The most important tool for getting things done is the drill. For example, we work on drills to teach running backs about pass protection against blitzing linebackers. You have to identify the 6 different situations that can occur. Then you have to allocate the time to work on those 6 situations and also the 20 techniques that you want your running backs to be able to apply. In teaching those skills, sometimes you want to have your guards and tight ends participate, or even the entire offensive unit. All of that requires preparation, discipline, and focus from both coaches and players.

The way I coach, I know ahead of time how I am going to run the whole season’s worth of practices. I have established the priorities for what we need to accomplish and allocated the time in which to teach the necessary skills.

I establish the program long before we take the field so I can use most efficiently the time available for learning and so the players do not get bored or distracted. The players must know clearly and at all times exactly what it is that they have to get out of any given drill. After 35 years of coaching, I have found that you can’t do anything in less than 10 minutes or in more than 20 minutes.

Another distinction in drills is between those skills and techniques that can be taught individually and those that require groups. It is also critical to allocate time for team play and to build in practice segments that focus on the execution of particular plays and particular game situations that you want to be ready for.

Why is it important to prepare so many skills for so many contingencies?

Making judgments under severe stress is the most difficult thing there is. The more preparation you have prior to the conflict, the more you can do in a clinical situation, the better off you will be. For that reason, in practice I want to make certain that we have accounted for every critical situation, including the desperate ones at the end of a game when we may have only one chance to pull out a victory. Even in that circumstance, I want us to have a play prepared and rehearsed. Say it is the last 20 seconds of a game and we’re losing. We have already practiced 6 plays that we can apply in that situation. That way, we know what to do, and we can calmly execute the plays. We’ll have no doubt in our minds, we will have more poise, and we can concentrate without falling prey to desperation.

Can you recall a specific instance where this actually paid off for one of your teams?

In 1987, we were down 26–20 against Cincinnati. We got the ball back on their 25-yard line with two seconds left in the game. It could have been a hopeless situation. We put three receivers to the left and Jerry Rice to the right. Joe Montana got the ball, looked left, pump faked, and then threw right, where Rice was covered man-to-man in the end zone. It was a touchdown, and it won an important game for us. But it would not have happened if we had not been prepared.

You need to have a plan even for the worst scenario. It doesn’t mean that it will always work; it doesn’t mean that you will always be successful. But you will always be prepared and at your best.

“You need to have a plan even for the worst scenario. It doesn’t mean that it will always work.”

But the same applies to virtually every situation at every point in the game. Say you are on the defense and inside your own 25-yard line. The situation can vary, so there are a number of particulars you need to prepare for. You have third down and inches. Third down and feet. Third down and yards. Inside the 15-yard line, all that changes, and inside the 5 it changes again. Each situation is different, and for each you might have 15 different game situations to practice. You have to allocate time for all of them, you have to practice plays, and you have to work with individuals. And then all of the separate situations have to be pulled together to give a continuity to the team’s play.

One of the most impressive attributes of your 49ers teams was their ability to take what some people might consider a disadvantage and use it to their advantage. Did you work on developing this skill?

I can think of several cases where we consciously tried to work on the players to reverse what in football are usually crippling disadvantages. One was playing on the road. In football, the home-field advantage is often decisive. But we were able to bond together, play in enemy territory, and feed on the emotions of the situation, without being intimidated by the other teams or their fans.

To accomplish that, I would condition the 49ers to adversity. We would talk about how it feels to fly into enemy territory. We would discuss what crosses your mind when you take the field. It allowed us to turn our status as outsiders into our advantage. When I talked with the team, I would use examples from the early days of World War II as illustrations of the desperate and heroic fights we could emulate. By talking about what could be a disadvantage, we turned our people on. We made it an advantage.

The other example is the injury factor. Some teams come unraveled when a star player gets injured. With the 49ers, an injury often served to arouse the team to play harder. Again, my approach was to talk about it openly. I would make the point that reserve players always had to be prepared, and that when they got the chance, they should actually improve on the performance of the injured player. Again, I used historical examples from warfare. For instance, in the Civil War, the best trained people, the front line and even generals, were often the first to fall. Often it was the reserves who would achieve victory. So when our reserves took the field, they were conditioned to feel this way and they knew what was expected. They would feel much more positive about going into the game.

In teaching skills to your players, how do you organize your own thinking about the players you are trying to reach?

Take a group of ten players. The top two will be supermotivated. Superstars will usually take care of themselves. Anybody can coach them. The next four, with the right motivation and direction, will learn to perform up to their potential. The next two will be marginal. With constant attention, they will be able to accomplish something of value to the team. The last two will waste your time. They won’t be with you for long. Our goal is to focus our organizational detail and coaching on the middle six. They are the ones who most need and benefit from your direction, monitoring, and counsel.

How do you achieve a balance between group skills and discipline on the one hand and player individuality on the other?

They go together in defining the two directions you need to pursue at the same time. First, you develop within the organization and the players an appreciation for the role each athlete plays on the team. You talk to each player and let each one know that, at some point, he will be in a position to win or lose a game. It may be one play in an entire career for a certain player or many plays each game for a Joe Montana. But the point is that everyone’s job is essential. Everyone has a specific role and specific responsibilities. And each player has to be prepared both mentally and physically to the utmost to play that role.

“At some point, each player will be in a position to win or lose a game.”

Second, you talk to each player and indicate the importance of everyone’s participation in the process—that it is important for everyone to express himself, to offer ideas, explanations, solutions, formulas. You want everyone to enter into the flow of ideas, even ideas that may seem extreme in their creativity.

You are actually striving for two things at the same time: an organization where people understand the importance of their jobs and are committed to living within the confines of those jobs and to taking direction; and an organization where people feel creative and adaptive and are willing to change their minds without feeling threatened. It is a tough combination to achieve. But it’s also the ultimate in management.

Is there a situation with a player that exemplifies this balance between giving explicit direction and permitting individual creativity?

Take Joe Montana, for example. He is a perfect combination of the two vital aspects that are necessary for developing greatness as a quarterback.

The formula for the success of the 49ers offense was a highly disciplined, very structured form of utilizing the forward pass. To make our system work, Joe had to master the disciplines to know which receiver to throw to, when, and why. The success of the team depended on Joe’s ability to work within that framework. Consequently, the job of the coach was to use drills and repetition so that Joe developed almost automatic moves and decision-making ability.

But there is an extra quality that it takes for a quarterback to become a world champion—or, in Joe’s case, the best ever. And that is an instinctive, spontaneous, natural response to situations that arise in games. Part of Montana’s greatness was that 10% to 15% of the time his spontaneous instincts would break loose and make a phenomenal difference in the outcome of a game.

It is the job of the coach to find the best of both sides. We had to have a very structured system of football, and we also wanted instinctive and spontaneous play.

How do you go about the job of coaching a player like Montana to develop that kind of balance?

Early on, we had to encourage Joe to trust his spontaneous instincts. We were careful not to criticize him when he used his creative abilities and things did not work out. In practice, we worked with Joe repeatedly on specific plays. When he was placed in a game, we called only those plays because we knew that he should be confident that he could execute them. But we didn’t jump him the minute he would break the pattern. Instead, we nurtured him to use his instincts. We had to allow him to be wrong on occasion and to live with it.

Of course, with different players the problem takes on a different look. In the case of quarterback Steve Young, it was almost the opposite. We had to work with him to be disciplined enough to live within the strict framework of what we were doing. Steve is a great spontaneous athlete and a terrific runner. But we found that we had to reduce the number of times he would use his instincts and increase his willingness to stay within the confines of the team concept.

For example, we would be at a point in a game where we had designed a special play to break the defense wide open and score a touchdown. In his early days, Steve might not have had the discipline to wait for that play to develop. Instead, he would see an opening and run with the ball for a five-yard gain. He would let his instincts and emotions affect his patience with the play and his confidence that the entire team could execute.

As a coach, how do you know what it takes to bring out the best in a young player’s abilities?

Unfortunately, there is nothing exact about it. Experience is really the only teacher. I was 47 years old when I became an NFL head coach. Typically, that job comes to people when they are between the ages of 35 and 40. I was in a subordinate role as an assistant coach for a longer period of time than most, so I was forced to analyze, evaluate, and learn to appreciate the roles that other people play more than I might have. In retrospect, I was lucky.

College Football: The Professional Approach

But if developing your players is an inexact art, there are bound to be mistakes. How do you deal with them?

Again and again in the development and selection of personnel, you have to account for miscalculation. In professional sports, the person who is best at dealing with personnel is the person who recognizes his or her errors and deals with them the quickest and most effectively. That could mean adopting a long-term approach, or it could mean the release of a player.

Take our drafting of John Taylor in 1986. John came to the 49ers as a wide receiver from Delaware State. He had great physical talent, but not a lot of background in playing sophisticated football. We simply miscalculated how long it would take John to be ready to play in the NFL. Consequently, we were disappointed in him. John was not adapting well to the competition, he appeared confused and frustrated, and he had lost his enthusiasm.

But instead of giving up on him, we took a longer term, more patient approach. We waited an extra year to allow him to mature and grow into this level of competition and into the role we wanted him to play. Now he is an All-Pro and one of the great receivers in the game.

The other side to that would be the decision I made with Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson. He was a very bright, articulate, charming person, but he also had an uncontrollable drug habit. I made a calculated choice that involved a high risk when we acquired him from Dallas—that I could personally nurture and rehab and influence Thomas into once again becoming a great linebacker. It was a miscalculation on my part. I gave it every chance to work, but finally I had to decide that it simply was not going to.

When you reach that point, you have to make a controlled and well-planned retreat. You regret the decision that you made, but you have to live with it, and you have to work yourself out of it. That is one important facet of good management: deciding how to acknowledge your mistakes.

Do you simply gloss over them? Do you blame someone else? Are you so insecure that your ego will not let you do anything but maintain that your original decision was correct? I could have kept Thomas Henderson on the team, but then the 49ers would not have become world champs. Or I could have had the public blaming Thomas or blaming an assistant coach. But none of those approaches would have helped the team.

In this case, I did not want to publicly embarrass Thomas, but I did want to show the team that I was still in control and that drug abuse would not be tolerated. We simply had to move as smoothly as possible to release Thomas for any number of reasons, remove him from the picture. I made a mistake, acknowledged it, and decided what to do about it.

If the personnel issue is so overriding, do you have a methodology for the way you evaluate players?

We use a five-bracket ranking system to categorize people we are looking at. The first is the star player who cannot miss. The second is a player who will someday be a starter and play for a number of years. The third will make the team, and the fourth has an isolated specialty—covering kickoffs or fielding punts. The fifth is someone who will make the squad and help you by playing solidly in a backup role.

You want as many superstars as you can get. The more stars, the better. But the difference between winning and losing is the bottom 25% of your people. Most coaches can deliver the top 75%. But the last 25% only blossoms in the details, in the orchestration of skills, in the way you prepare.

When you go into a draft, what are the particulars you are looking for in a player?

It is always a combination of factors that add up to the right person. It’s his level of natural ability. It’s his competitive instincts. It’s also the history of that athlete; his ability to learn, retain, and apply what he has learned; and his ability to work under stress with other people.

Then you have to be able to project those qualities into the slot or role that athlete would play for your team. And you have to do that over time, thinking about the short, middle, and long term. For example, a player could come in and play a certain role in his first year, and then in his second year that role could develop or be enhanced. After a number of years, that player might end up in a feature role, and then revert back to the role in which he started as the wear and tear of the game begins to take its toll.

You have said that one of the most important attributes of any organization is the way it treats its people. In pro football, with frequent trading and the yearly competition from rookies for veterans’ jobs, cutting a veteran player or convincing him to retire is a big part of your job. How do you handle that part of the personnel issue?

Any good coach or manager has got to be responsible for phasing his people through the organization. It may be the most emotionally difficult part of the job. When you do it, you often end up as the most unpopular person in the organization. Yet it is part of the role that the leader must play. It has to be done and done continually. You have to be prepared to use your own professional judgment as to when and why it is time for one of your players to call it quits.

As the head coach, I forced myself to deal with this process rather than turn my back on it or hand it off to the assistant coaches. In fact, in this area you can only listen to the assistant coaches so much because, typically, they would rather have veteran players on the team. It makes their coaching job easier. Subconsciously, I think assistant coaches feel much more comfortable with ten-year players than with the rookies. The coaches have become friends with the veterans, they have great faith in them, they understand each other. And the veterans already know what the coaches want done out on the field.

In sports, there is an arc of utilization that describes most athletes’ careers. By that I mean a curve that a coach can use to project what a player can do now, next year, and ten years from now. A player may be a superstar this year, but with minor injuries nicking at him and starting to add up, he won’t be a superstar three years from now. And then in the next phase you have to begin thinking about replacing him.

Most people don’t realize it, but the players who get all the attention are usually the ones on the downside of their careers. Ironically, the organization is often paying the most money to the team members who are on the descending curve as players. When players are starting to wind down their careers but are still playing effectively, you have to remind yourself how to use them. You have to gauge how they practice, what you ask them to do on the field, what kinds of situations you use them in, how much playing time they get. These are all factors that ultimately lead to the point where you judge that a younger player could do the job as well. That younger player is on an ascending curve on the arc. That is when you have to make your move.

How do you go about making that move without dealing the veteran player a crushing blow?

There will be some suffering, and there is no way to avoid it. It’s simply part of the process. There will be agonizing, frustration, and anger. But the coach has to make the decision to improve the team. The real danger is if the decision aimed at improving the team leads to so much bitterness that the fallout causes other players to take sides. When the team becomes divided, the decision has done more harm than good.

That is why managing people’s emotions is such an important part of the coach’s job. You begin by acknowledging that your decision will cause some suffering. Then you do whatever you can to soften the edges, to reduce the anguish and frustration, to communicate your own sensitivity, and, in a sense, even to manipulate the player.

You recommend manipulating people rather than being honest?

The easiest thing is to be truly honest and direct. In fact, it sounds just great to say that you are going to be honest and direct. But insensitive, hammer-like shots that are delivered in the name of honesty and openness usually do the greatest damage to people. The damage ends up reverberating throughout the entire organization. Over time, people will lose the bonding factor they need for success. And over time, that directness will isolate you from the people with whom you work.

The real task is to lead people through the troubled times, when they are demoted or find themselves at the end of their playing days, and to help them maintain as much of their self-esteem as possible. These are the tasks that really define the job of the manager. A manager’s job is not simply having a desk filled with family pictures and a wall covered by plaques for good behavior. It’s developing the skills to understand and deal with people.

You have described a variety of tasks that the coach has to be sensitive to, including the ability to make tough decisions and the need to soften the edges when it comes to dealing with people. What has made your system so successful?

The bottom line in professional sports is winning. Everything has to focus on that product: winning football games. Other offshoots—the public relations, the merchandising, the high-sounding philosophical approach—mean little compared with being successful on the playing field.

But winning does not necessarily mean being a victor in every game. It’s not winning every game at any cost. We have to remind ourselves that it’s not just a single game that we are trying to win. It is a season and a series of seasons in which the team wins more games than it loses and each team member plays up to his potential. If you are continually developing your skills and refining your approach, then winning will be the final result.

But I have seen coaches who are simply too sentimental, who allow themselves to be too maudlin about “breaking up the old family.” They are going to lose sight of the bottom line. And there is another kind who are severe, tough, and hard-hitting. But they sacrifice the loyalty of the people around them. In that situation, people are always afraid that they are going to be the next to go. These coaches rarely have sustained success.

Somewhere in the middle are the coaches who know that the job is to win, who know that they must be decisive, that they must phase people through their organizations, and at the same time they are sensitive to the feelings, loyalties, and emotions that people have toward one another. If you don’t have these feelings, I do not know how you can lead anyone.

I have spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out how I was going to phase out certain players for whom I had a strong feelings, but that was my job. I wasn’t hired to do anything but win.

Ranking every NFL head coach, from Bill Belichick to the Class of 2017
You know Bill Belichick sits at the top of the coaching profession, but who slots in at No. 2?

Pete Prisco

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking-every-nfl-head-coach-from-bill-belichick-to-the-class-of-2017/

Call it the great coaching divide. That ís what we have in the NFL today. There ís New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and the rest — no matter how you stack them — are way, way, way behind.
Belichick is arguably the greatest coach of all time, a sentiment bolstered by continued success in the era of free agency and roster turnover. Of course, Tom Brady cures almost any ills and allows Belichick to be bold with his roster, but even so he is a detail freak who gets the most out of his players and is unreal when it comes to game planning.
Add all that to his five Super Bowl rings and Belichick is the obvious No. 1 on my list ranking current coaches from 1-32. Nobody else is in the conversation and it’s not because there aren’t plenty of good coaches in this league.
Belichick drives fantasy players nuts because they never can tell what the Patriots will do on offense from week to week. And on defense, Belichick’s hybrid unit is as unpredictable as they come. It’s all testament to his greatness: You never know what ís coming.
He ís not afraid to take chances. Those Super Bowl rings — including the latest, the epic comeback vs. Atlanta after trailing 28-3 in the second half — are his skins on the wall. They allow him freedom to gamble, though any risk is always calculated.
I can’t read enough about Belichick and his philosophy. Books or stories about him are textbooks on coaching and team building. This might sound like I am slobbering about the guy, but he has made some bonehead decisions late in games — which I am quick to point out, much to the chagrin of Patriots nation — though none of them diminish his football genius; it just shows that even the best can screw up situational coaching.
Even though he got lucky getting Brady in the sixth round — that’s the only way to describe drafting the greatest of all time that late — Belichick also has helped mold Brady into the player we see today.
It’s always a treat to log onto Patriots.com and watch Belichick break down tape of players and plays. I recommend it to anybody who wants to take a look behind the curtain at this football savant.
For this list, I’m ranking 27 coaches who have experience, with the five first-time coaches tied at No. 28. It wouldn’t be fair to rank them since they have yet to coach a game. They have a long way to go to sniff Belichick territory. Then again, so does everybody else.
1. Bill Belichick, Patriots
Five Super Bowl victories solidifies this spot. It’s hard to consider any conversation about the best ever without his name coming up. How much longer will he do it is the question. He has a winning percentage of .673, which is 11th all time, one spot behind Don Shula. He has 237 regular-season victories, which is fourth all time, and he can tie Tom Landry for third if he wins 13 next season. Shula appears to be out of reach with 328, but he did it in 33 seasons. Belichick has done it in 22, although 14 of Shulaís seasons came with a 14-game schedule and one shortened to nine because of a strike. The guy is legend, and it ís a treat to watch him work — even when he blows the end of games. Yes, that’s another dig.

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2. Mike McCarthy, Packers
There were some who wanted him fired the past two seasons. That was purely absurd. He has the second-best winning percentage (.651) of any active coach, behind Belichick. He has had double-digit victories in eight of his 11 seasons with the Packers, with only one losing season. He also has a Super Bowl win, but gets dinged some for his 10-8 playoff record. With Aaron Rodgers, some expect more. Maybe one more ring ends the debate.

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3. Andy Reid, Chiefs
He has had three losing seasons in 18 as a head coach, one of those in his first with the Eagles in 1999. He has had 11 seasons of 10 or more victories, including the past two seasons with the Chiefs. He has been to the playoffs 12 times, but reached the Super Bowl only once and has an 11-12 postseason record, which hurts. Even so, he’s a damn good coach. I know he doesn’t have a ring, but he has done some amazing things, which is why he’s in this third spot, above some guys who have won rings.

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4. Pete Carroll, Seahawks
He has been an NFL coach in three different spots, totaling 11 seasons. His has a .588 career winning percentage, but he has a .629 percentage in his seven seasons in Seattle, with one Super Bowl victory and was a yard away from a second. He has at least 10 victories in each of the past five seasons. His easy-going approach with players has paid off big. It’s hard to believe he turns 66 this September, but there is a lot of good coaching left in him.

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5. Mike Tomlin, Steelers
In his 10 seasons with the Steelers, he has never had a losing record. That’s impressive. He has seven seasons of double-digit victories and is 1-1 in Super Bowls and 8-6 overall in postseason play. There are some who question whether he’s just a guy who oversees everything rather than a hands-on coach. I don’t buy that. He knows what it takes to win, no matter how he gets it done.

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6. Sean Payton, Saints
There are some who will say three consecutive 7-9 seasons should drop him, but I don’t buy it. Take a look at the roster. Yes, he’s responsible for some of it, but I think the blame goes above him. The defense has lacked play-makers. Payton is still one of the league’s best offensive minds. If he were a free-agent coach, he would be signed in an instant. He has five seasons of double-digit victories and no season worse than 7-9. He also won a Super Bowl. If they fix the defense this season — and they’ve made strides — they will be in the mix again to get back to the Super Bowl.

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7. John Harbaugh, Ravens
He has five seasons of double-digit victories in nine with the Ravens, and he has one Super Bowl victory, that coming in the 2012 season. He has had only one losing season, a 5-11 stinker in 2015, and he’s only 13-19 the past two seasons without a playoff berth. It hasn’t helped that he has changed offensive coordinators like he changes underwear. That makes Ravens fans a little jumpy when it comes to their coach. This could be a big year for Harbaugh and his job status. Three non-playoff seasons would be tough to overcome.

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8. Adam Gase, Dolphins
He is a star in the making. Gase took over the Dolphins last season and got a team hardly stacked with talent to 10-6 and into the playoffs. He has great give-and-take with his players, knowing when to push and when to pull back. He is also a great offensive mind, which you need in this league today. One more thing: He is a maniac when it comes to working, which can be seen in his preparation. A few years from now, he might top this list when Belichick retires if he can keep it going forward.

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9. Bruce Arians, Cardinals
He had his first losing season as Cardinals coach in 2016, going 7-8-1 in what can only be described as a major disappointment. But, counting his interim stint with the Colts in 2012, Arians has a .648 winning percentage, third best among active coaches. His players love him, and he’s a keen offensive mind. If there’s one criticism, he needs to fix his special teams.

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10. Bill O’Brien, Texans
O’Brien has gone 9-7 in each of his first three seasons with the Texans, making the playoffs the past two and winning a playoff game last season. That’s unreal considering the quarterback situation since he has been there. He has coached the heck out of this team without a true franchise passer. Imagine if he gets one? He’s a smart offensive mind who plays without a true weapon under center. That’s the definition of frustration. Yet he’s 27-21 over three seasons (.567). That is coaching.

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11. Chuck Pagano, Colts
Does this seem high for a guy on the hot seat after last season? Maybe, but he has a .613 winning percentage and still hasn’t had a losing season in five with the Colts. This is a team that hasn’t had a lot of talent, yet it has been to the postseason three times during Pagano’s tenure. The past two 8-8 seasons, coming in a bad division, don’t help his ranking. But the talent level wasn’t good and Andrew Luck has suffered nagging injuries. If he had been fired, I think another team would have hired him quickly.

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12. Dan Quinn, Falcons
He took the Falcons to the Super Bowl in his second season, and was a blown 28-3 second-half lead away from winning a ring. The decisions made late in that game will help him grow, and he has shown amazing maturity getting past it. One of the hidden stories behind last season’s Super run was how he became more involved with the defense in the second half of the season, spurring the turnaround. He has a great temperament to be a long-term success. In two years, I bet he’s much higher on this list.

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13. Mike Zimmer, Vikings
It’s hard to evaluate him based on an injury-decimated 2016. No coach, not even Belichick, could have sustained success through that, and yet Zimmer got the Vikings to 8-8. The year before, Zimmer led the Vikings to a division title in his second season. I think that’s more of who he is as a coach than last season. His fiery approach is perfect for the modern NFL player. The offensive coordinator issues last season — with Norv Turner walking away — stain his résumé a little.

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14. John Fox, Bears
In his 15 seasons with Carolina, Denver and Chicago, he has been to two Super Bowls, losing both, and has five seasons of double-digit victories. He has had a rough go of it in Chicago the past two seasons, going 6-10 and 3-13, but he has had some injury issues. Even so, his belief that running the football wins games is out of date. Failing to change with the times on offense has held his teams back. His .533 winning percentage isn’t that impressive, but he was 38-10 in his final three seasons in Denver. If only they had won a Super Bowl.

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15. Marvin Lewis, Bengals
He has the exact same winning percentage as Fox (.533) but has never reached a Super Bowl. In 14 seasons with the Bengals, he has six seasons with double-digit victories and four losing seasons, including 2016 when his team went 6-9-1 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2010. There’s pressure to win this season, or he could be out. There are a lot of Bengals fans who want him out, but ownership has been patient, and understandably so until last season. It’s hard to argue with his record the past six seasons.

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16. Ron Rivera, Panthers
He led the Panthers to an NFC title in the 2015 season before a Super Bowl loss to the Broncos. Carolina had a Super hangover last season and fell to 6-10 after going 15-1 the previous season. In five seasons with the Panthers, he has two seasons of 10 or more wins, but losing records in the other four. His winning percentage is .557, thanks in large part to the 15-victory season. He is a defensive-minded coach, and he loves to run it and play great defense to win games. That’s his style.

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17. Jason Garrett, Cowboys
Garrett has a .558 career winning percentage and led the Cowboys to a 12-4 record and a division title last season. He has had only one losing season in seven as Cowboys coach, including his interim stint in 2010. He is 29-19 the past three seasons and overcame the loss of quarterback Tony Romo in training camp last season to make the playoffs with rookie Dak Prescott. That was impressive. Early in his Cowboys career, he was criticized for game management and play-calling, but he has improved those areas the past few seasons.

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18. Jack Del Rio, Raiders
Del Rio has turned the Raiders into a legitimate Super Bowl contender. If quarterback Derek Carr didn’t go down last season, they could have pushed the Patriots in the AFC. Del Rio was previously the coach in Jacksonville and led the Jaguars to the playoffs twice in nine seasons. He has a .509 career winning percentage, but expect that to go up the next few seasons with this young, talented team.

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19. Dirk Koetter, Buccaneers
He went 9-7 in his first season with the Bucs, justifying ownership’s decision to fire Lovie Smith and make Koetter the coach after he served as offensive coordinator in 2015. Koetter is a bright offensive mind who has nice give-and-take with players. I always expected him to be a better NFL coach than college coach, where he served stints at Boise State and Arizona State. That’s because he’s a true football guy. He has no time for glad-handing the alums. I think Tampa Bay is finding that out, and his young team should push for a division title next season, which should move him up the list. I think he’s the right guy and will have long-term success in Tampa.

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20. Jay Gruden, Redskins
He has done a nice job turning the Redskins around, going from 4-12 in his first season in 2014 to 9-7 the next and 8-7-1 in 2016. He made the playoffs in 2015, but missed out last season with a Week 17 home loss to the Giants that hurts him some on this list. His winning percentage is .448, which isn’t pretty, but the first year drives it down. He is a smart offensive coach who needs to figure out how to get his team to play better defense. A change in coordinators this season might help.

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21. Jim Caldwell, Lions
Going into 2016, many expected Caldwell to struggle and maybe get fired with first-year GM Bob Quinn bringing in his own guy. But Caldwell got the Lions to the playoffs, where they lost a wild-card game to the Seahawks. If not for a late-season collapse, they would have won the division. They finished 9-7. In his three seasons with the Lions, he is 27-21. Before that, he was coach of the Colts when they went to the Super Bowl in 2009, his first year with the team. They lost to the Saints in that game. The Colts let him go after they went 2-14 without Peyton Manning in 2011.

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22. Ben McAdoo, Giants
He took the Giants to the playoffs his first season as coach in 2016, going 11-5 before losing to the Packers in the wild-card round. McAdoo, who was the offensive coordinator before taking over for Tom Coughlin, continued as the team’s play-caller. The offense struggled in 2016 with McAdoo handling both roles. That will be something to watch going forward.

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23. Mike Mularkey, Titans
The Titans are Mularkey’s third team after previous stops with the Bills and Jaguars. Those two stints didn’t end well. He was 14-21 in two seasons with the Bills and 2-14 in one season with the Jaguars. After taking over as interim coach of the Titans in 2015, he was hired as the full-time guy last season and led the Titans to a 9-7 record. His outdated belief in running the football paid off last season as the Titans nearly won the division. The question is whether this team can continue to push for a playoff spot with that style.

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24. Hue Jackson, Browns
It’s unfair to grade Jackson by his first season with the Browns. They had little talent, quarterback issues and understandably finished 1-15. He was 8-8 in his only season as the Raiders’ coach in 2011. I still think he can be a darn good coach, but the body of work is so small. The Browns need to be patient and let him coach a few more seasons before passing judgment.

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25. Doug Marrone, Jaguars
He was 15-17 in two seasons with the Bills, including 9-7 in 2014 before he quit. He was 1-1 as Jacksonville’s interim coach after taking over for Gus Bradley last season, which led to his hiring on a full-time basis. He is a no-nonsense guy who will bring discipline to the team, but how much is he going to be a puppet for Tom Coughlin?
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26. Doug Pederson, Eagles
When a guy starts a rookie quarterback his first season as coach, it’s tough to evaluate him. But Pederson did a nice job getting the Eagles to 7-9, although they did start fast before fading. Even so, the former quarterback who learned under Andy Reid seems to have a good feel for being a head coach. As quarterback Carson Wentz improves, Pederson will look a lot better as well.

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27. Todd Bowles, Jets
In 2015, it looked like the Jets struck gold with Bowles when he led them to a 10-6 record in his first season as their coach. He did it with Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback, which is even more impressive. But then last season, it all came apart. The Jets finished 5-11 and many were questioning Bowles. Can he turn it around? The talent isn’t good on his roster, and the quarterback situation is a mess. It will be a miracle if he does — no matter what type of coach we think he can become.

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28. (tie) Sean McVay, Rams; Anthony Lynn, Chargers; Vance Joseph, Broncos; Kyle Shanahan, 49ers; Sean McDermott, Bills
We have no idea how these first-year guys will perform, even if you think you do, so they land here. There is a lot to be excited about in these cities, but isn’t it always that way for first-time coaches?