Bill Parcells Biography - Raised In New Jersey, Parcells, Nicknamed, Patriots Beckon, Returns To New York, Chronology
football super won giants
1941-
American football coach
Not everyone liked Bill Parcells, but he won. Parcells, a football turnaround specialist, took two struggling football franchises and coached them to Super Bowls, and nearly did so with a third.
Parcells' New York Giants won the Super Bowl, the National Football League's (NFL) championship game, in 1987 and 1991. He brought the New England Patriots to the title game in 1997. And the New York Jets, under his tenure, fell one victory short of reaching the Super Bowl in 1998.
Parcells, who espoused old-school football, motivated by fear. "Parcells could be difficult, but those players who responded to his barbs earned his loyalty for a lifetime," Mike Puma wrote in ESPN.com. "Numerous players followed him to different coaching stops." "When we were playing real well as a team, [Parcells] was miserable because he needs friction," said Phil Simms, the quarterback most of Parcells' years with the Giants, during an interview on ESPN's Sports Century
Bill Parcells
series. "He lives on that friction. He needs adversity, and he's got to have a spat going with a player. If there's no adversity, he'll create it."
Additional Topics
Born as Duane Charles Parcells, he began calling himself Bill, after a lookalike, as an early teen in Oradell, New Jersey. At River Dell High School, Parcells excelled in football, basketball and baseball. "His temper was sometimes a problem, but never his work ethic," Puma wrote. Parcells spent a year at Colgate, but transferred after one year to Wichita State. There, he was an All-…
In 1986, "Parcells changed little about the team from the previous year, relying on a fearsome defense and ball-control attack on offense," Puma wrote. The Giants sported a league-best 14-2 record during the regular season, then dominated San Francisco and Washington in the playoffs for the franchise's first National Football Conference (NFC) championship since 1956, when it w…
Parcells quit the Giants after that Super Bowl, worked the broadcast booth for two years and had heart surgery. Then, New England owner James Orthwein beckoned Parcells. Taking over in 1993 a team in disarray and rumored to be moving out of town, Parcells rebuilt it around quarterback Drew Bledsoe, whom he drafted out of Washington State. The Patriots made the playoffs in 1994, Parcells' se…
Parcells took over a Jets team coming off a 1-15 season and produced a 9-7 record in 1997, the team just missing the playoffs. One year later, Parcells, armed with some of his former New England and New York Giant players and assistants, went 12-4 in the regular season. In the AFC Championship game, the Jets led 10-0 at half-time but the Broncos rallied to win 23-10 in Denver. In 1999, his final c…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments