The man behind the bounties

The Gregg Williams who has become the face and focus of the Saints’ bounty scandal is the one so aggressive, with such boundless bravado, that he greeted his New Orleans players for the first time in 2009 with a telling command to knock out their opponents, mixing in a vulgarity for good measure.

It is the one so enraptured by the blitz, and with such a large ego, that after the Saints battered the Indianapolis Colts and the hapless quarterback Curtis Painter, 62-7, last season in a Sunday night game, one former team executive said: “What did you expect? It’s Gregg Williams. And national television.”

According to the N.F.L.’s investigation, Williams, one of the most highly regarded defensive coaches in football, oversaw a bounty system in New Orleans that offered payouts to players who injured opponents. Since then, reports have indicated that similar programs existed in other recent stops in Williams’s long coaching trail. The N.F.L. is looking into those claims, too. On Tuesday, Saints Coach Sean Payton and General Manager Mickey Loomis issued a statement in which they acknowledged the investigation and apologized to the team’s owner, Tom Benson. They did not mention Williams.

If the investigation has cast Williams as an arrogant villain, former players and even opponents say he is something more: a detail-oriented coach who shunned the aloof manner many head coaches assume. They say Williams cared deeply about his players while designing defenses that had considerable success by harassing quarterbacks and generating turnovers.

He believed so much in team bonding that when he became Buffalo’s head coach in 2001, he insisted that players dine together the night before road games rather than allowing them to go their separate ways, as had been the custom. He spoke frequently of players taking pride in their jobs. In Washington, players found themselves keeping the locker room neater.

“I remember him reprimanding us for signing our names on autographs sloppily,” said Bill Conaty, who played for Williams in Buffalo before retiring and becoming a lawyer. “He said, ‘Listen, if you’re going to sign your name, you should have pride and make sure those little kids can see it.’ ”

Williams began as a high school coach and teacher in Excelsior Springs, Mo., a town about 30 miles outside Kansas City, where he was born. Well into his professional career, Williams continued to raise money through his foundation to benefit local schools.

Williams has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and considered a career in higher education until the former N.F.L. coach Jack Pardee hired him as a graduate assistant at the University of Houston. Williams followed Pardee to the Houston Oilers, where he eventually worked under a young defensive coordinator, Jeff Fisher, who had played for and started his coaching career under the renowned defensive wizard Buddy Ryan, under whom Williams briefly worked, too.

After Pardee was fired, Fisher became the head coach, and Williams remained with him through the team’s move to Tennessee. He eventually became the defensive coordinator there. The job catapulted his career trajectory upward, but it may have been the starting point of his undoing.



The former Tennessee player Josh Evans said the Titans had a reward system for big plays, although he never heard Williams call for players to injure opponents. Instead, he would remind them, over and over, “You hit the quarterback, you win the game.” As he rose in Tennessee — he was a defensive assistant, special-teams coach and linebackers coach before becoming the defensive coordinator — Williams began to engender the unswerving loyalty of those who defend him now.

“I love him to death,” Evans said. “In the N.F.L., it’s a system where sometimes you don’t get looked at because you weren’t drafted or you’re low man on the totem pole. With Gregg, he made you feel like if you do what you’re supposed to do, he’ll give you the opportunity. He took me from the practice squad to the Super Bowl. He is the one coach who always made me feel valuable.”

The Titans helped Williams hone his reputation for unrelenting aggressiveness and gambling, a blitz-at-all-costs mentality that follows him still. Williams’s defenses have often been among the top ranked in the league. But in the Saints’ N.F.C. playoff loss to San Francisco in January, the blitzing caught up to them in the final moments. New Orleans failed to double-team tight end Vernon Davis, and blitzes left gaping holes for him to run through on the way to the 49ers’ victory.

This article was written by Judy Battista and appeared in the New York Times.

Posted by Necesitamos Mas Football on 12:38 p. m.. Filed under destacada , gallery , Gregg Williams , New Orleans , nfc , noticias , principal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0