Super Bowl Has a Twist: Parcells vs. the Packers

This Super Bowl comes with a twist.

Woven into the usual plot of an NFC team favored by two touchdowns is an odd central character.

A coach.

“You’d think it’s the Packers against Bill Parcells,” says Aaron Taylor of the Green Bay Packers, who are trying to bring a title back to Titletown, USA, and extend the NFC’s Super Bowl winning streak to 13 games.

“Is he going to suit up or something?”

Actually, quite the opposite.

Parcells is the centerpiece not only because he’s by far the best-known New England Patriot, but also because he’s likely to leave the team after the game and return to New York -- either as coach of the Jets or as a network analyst. It’s a prospective divorce that’s had Parcells on the defensive all week.

He is, after all, a coach whose specialty is defense.

Beyond that, it’s the same old storyline.

The 13-3 Packers come in as the latest NFC power, pursuing their first championship since Vince Lombardi’s last team won the second Super Bowl 29 years ago. They were the preseason favorite to win it all, playing in the spotlight throughout and capturing the NFC title 30-13 over Carolina in a game that rekindled the Lombardi legend at Lambeau Field.

They have Brett Favre, the NFL’s MVP for the last two seasons, at quarterback and a defense anchored by Reggie White, in his first Super Bowl after 12 seasons as one of the dominant defensive ends in league history. White has been the rallying point for the Packers -- “Win one for Reggie.”

The 11-5 Patriots come in as an incarnation of Parcells, much as those early Packers were an incarnation of Lombardi.

There are parallels -- Lombardi’s coaching career began at St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J., where Parcells was born. The Vince Lombardi service area on the New Jersey turnpike is three miles from Giants Stadium, where Parcells first made his coaching reputation.

Yes, the Patriots have a good young quarterback in Drew Bledsoe and some other first-rate players: Curtis Martin, Terry Glenn, Willie McGinest, Ben Coates, Dave Meggett. But the common perception is that they wouldn’t be here were it not for Parcells, who won Super Bowls after the 1986 and 1990 seasons with the New York Giants and is just the second coach -- Don Shula is the other -- to make it to this game with two different franchises.

This time, Parcells has a team that was 6-10 a year ago and started this season 0-2. The Patriots went 11-3 the rest of the way, coming back from a 22-0 deficit against Parcells’ old team at Giants Stadium in the final regular-season game to secure a playoff bye.

Then the Patriots knocked off AFC champion Pittsburgh 28-3 and upstart Jacksonville 20-6 after the Jaguars had shocked Denver, the conference favorite entering the playoffs.

The Patriots have a far more explosive offense than Parcells’ old Giants. Glenn set a rookie record with 90 receptions, and Bledsoe bounced back from a season in which he was beset by injuries.

But the hallmark of the late-season run was Parcell’s specialty: defense.

In their last seven games, the Patriots allowed only four offensive touchdowns, none in the two playoff games. McGinest became the pass rusher that Parcells was seeking when he drafted him fourth overall in 1994 -- his most recent attempt to clone Lawrence Taylor -- and a secondary led by safety Willie Clay made big play after big play.

“He doesn’t try to tell me I’m the next Lawrence Taylor,” McGinest says. “But he sure talks about LT this and LT that to make sure we know that standard he wants us to achieve.”

That’s a Parcells trademark -- he loves to push buttons to motivate his players. He can be Tuna the Tyrant one day (Tuna as in “Charlie the Tuna”) and Beloved Bill the next.

“He’ll tell you he loves you, then he’ll tell you you’re gone if you don’t shape up,” says left guard William Roberts, who has spent 10 of his 13 NFL seasons playing for Parcells.

Parcells even found himself part of the week’s most embarrassing moment -- a joint appearance with Patriots owner Bob Kraft, who tried to put a happy face on what likely is an imminent divorce. The result: a bad joke about Kraft giving Parcells a 10-year contract to run his paper business, and Parcells pretending he would close Kraft’s biggest plant.

Ouch!

By contrast, there is Green Bay’s Mike Holmgren, a laid-back Californian who spent 12 years as a high school coach in the San Francisco Bay area. In 1983, Parcells’ first year as an NFL head coach, Holmgren was in his second year as quarterbacks coach at Brigham Young, tutoring a player named Steve Young.

“I’m the coaching underdog,” Holmgren said when he arrived in New Orleans on Sunday.

Then he put it more graphically.

“If you did one of those check mark things -- who gets the edge on offense, defense, special teams, I don’t think I’d get the check mark by coach.”

Nonetheless, Holmgren is one of the NFL’s best coaches in his own right, a man who turned Favre from a wild thing who threw too many interceptions into the best quarterback in the league. He had 39 touchdown passes this year after spending 46 days last summer being treated for an addiction to painkillers.

Favre hasn’t been as much an attraction this week as his hometown, Kiln, Miss., an hour away from New Orleans on what’s known as Mississippi’s “Redneck Riviera.” For two weeks, reporters have been making pilgrimages there, and on Wednesday, there was a bus tour that attracted 40 people.

Favre showed up on media day wearing sunglasses, following the lead of his backup, Jim McMahon, who as the Chicago Bears’ starter 11 years ago, stamped his “punky QB” image on New Orleans. That game, a 46-10 Chicago victory, was the last time the Patriots appeared in a Super Bowl.

If there’s one Packer who defines this game, it’s White.

He spent his first eight NFL seasons on a talented but underachieving Philadelphia team that never won a playoff game. Green Bay’s Keith Jackson and New England’s Keith Byars were White’s teammates.

Then he signed in 1993 with Green Bay for $17 million over four years, the first superstar in the NFL’s first year of unrestricted free agency.

Last year, he made it to his first NFC championship game and this, at age 35, is his first Super Bowl.

“God had a plan,” says White, an ordained Baptist minister. “It was to make me wait this long before I got to the Super Bowl.”

The same might be said of some others: Jackson and Byars, Bruce Armstrong of the Patriots, and Sean Jones and Eugene Robinson of the Packers. All have had long and distinguished careers before making it to the NFL’s ultimate game.

But where White puts his faith in God, most of the Patriots figure it can’t hurt to put theirs in Parcells.

“Bill has a plan,” middle linebacker Ted Johnson says. “He’s won two of these games, so we’d be crazy if we didn’t listen to him.”

It’s probably the last chance the Patriots will have to hear him. A week from now, he’s likely to be gone.

For now, though, he’s New England’s best chance.