Wade Phillips a proven coach in his own right
By DALE ROBERTSON
DALLAS — There was no master plan, just a father doing what he loved best and a son paying close attention. Not once did Bum Phillips try to steer his boy Wade into coaching.
To this day, 35 years after the son followed the father into the profession, they swear the subject never came up.
"I honestly don't remember him ever saying anything to me about it," said Wade, who, at 60, returns to Houston on Saturday night as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys — and one of the most tenured coaches in the NFL.
"I didn't plan his life for him," said Bum, the still-beloved former coach of the Oilers. "I only wanted him to be a coach if he wanted to be one. Coach (Bear) Bryant told me a long time ago the only way a guy should coach is if he couldn't be happy doing anything else."
Bum never had a Plan B, and neither did Wade, once he figured out he wouldn't be able to play football for the rest of his days. Like father, like son.
Wade was a tough, sharp-as-a-tack linebacker for Bum both in high school at Port Neches and at the University of Houston. He was one of those players, Bum said, sounding as proud today as he surely was at the time, "who knew his assignments and everyone else's." It was during his senior season as a Cougar that Wade began to contemplate following Bum into coaching.
By then he'd already seen plenty of what Bum calls "the ugly side — the hirings and the firings and all the moving around," never mind the long hours.
"But I'd seen the good side, too," Wade said. "I saw guys enjoying what they were doing. As far back as being a water boy, I'd been in locker rooms after the wins, seeing how excited everybody was. It made you feel good about the game. I'd always looked up to football players. I wanted to be around them."
He had already landed his first job — defensive coordinator at Orange High School — before he told Bum he was going into coaching. What Bum couldn't yet know, of course, was what kind of coach Wade would make.
In 1973, Bum took over as defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State for Jim Stanley, who had worked under him at UTEP. Although Stanley encouraged Bum to bring Wade aboard, Bum admitted he hadn't seen him coach and wasn't sure. So, surreptitiously, he snuck over to watch a workout in Orange one afternoon.
Had to see for himself
"I don't care how much intelligence you've got," Bum said. "If you can't get a kid to do what you're telling him to do, it doesn't do you any good to know a whole lot. How they respond to you determines how good of a coach you're going to be. Just wanting to be one doesn't necessarily mean you can be one. I needed to see how he handled kids in practice, and I was OK with what I saw."
He called Stanley and told him to offer Wade a contract.
They worked together in Stillwater for a year before Bum, who had overseen Sid Gillman's San Diego Chargers defense for five seasons, agreed to join Gillman back in Houston, where he was the Oilers' new head coach. But Gillman and owner Bud Adams clashed repeatedly over financial matters and, despite the team's improvement from 1-13 to 7-7, Gillman was gone after one season.
Because the team's turnaround was largely the result of Phillips' swarming, aggressive 3-4 defense — a set made famous at Oklahoma under Bud Wilkinson but never before seen in the NFL on an every-down basis — Adams promoted him to head coach. Wade already had agreed to join the staff at the University of Kansas, so it wouldn't be until Bum's second season with the Oilers that Wade rejoined him, reaching the NFL in 1976 at the age of 29.
Save for the 2001 season, which he sat out "after being fired for no reason" as Buffalo's head coach, he has been in the league ever since.
Wade tutored the Oilers' linebackers his first year, then "graduated" to the defensive line, a far stiffer challenge for a young coach because it was populated by the gruff, cantankerous likes of future Hall of Famer Elvin Bethea and Curley Culp, a former star for Kansas City's Super Bowl championship team who became the prototypic NFL nose guard.
None of this, however, stopped Wade from rigorously putting them through their paces on the practice field.
"We had a drill that I made them do over a couple times," he said. "I wanted a lateral step on a bullet stunt, and one afternoon, Elvin just wasn't doing it right. I was coming out of college — that was what coaching was to me. But in the pros in those days, there wasn't that much college-type teaching. Guys just played."
Bum well remembers the session, too.
"I was up in the tower," he said, "and Elvin hollered at me, 'Hey, Bum! Wade's down here coaching his (butt) off!' You can either handle people or you can't. It don't matter who you are or how old you are. Wade could, and he did."
Delegating a no-no
The Phillips' Oilers partnership endured a couple of unsatisfying seasons, but Earl Campbell's arrival in 1978 rang in the Luv ya Blue era, producing a beautiful love affair between the city and its football team, with the glib, homespun Bum at the epicenter. Wade's own profile stayed low, as it remains today, but his reputation as a coach was growing.
When the party ended on New Year's Eve 1980 with Bum's firing — he had refused Adams' request to hire an offensive coordinator after a bad playoff loss in Oakland — New Orleans Saints owner John Mecom Jr. brought him in to fix his dreadful team. Bum's first decision was to name Wade his defensive coordinator.
The Phillips' magic, however, didn't translate in New Orleans, and Bum, fed up with being doused by beers thrown by frustrated fans as he left the Superdome field, resigned with two games remaining in his fifth season. Wade supplanted him as interim head coach.
"The day I resigned I caught an airplane back to Houston," Bum said, contending the long-held assumption that his quitting was designed to get Wade the interim job is "flat wrong. I read in the paper the next day he'd gotten the job."
Wade didn't keep it beyond the end of the year, but his career was on solid footing. Although his father never coached again, Wade went on to serve as Buddy Ryan's defensive coordinator in Philadelphia, then moved to Denver to work in the same capacity for Dan Reeves, whom he replaced as head coach in 1993.
There, Wade made what he considers his biggest mistake. While delegating much authority to assistants had been his father's forte, it didn't work for Wade in his two seasons at the Broncos helm.
"My strength was being able to coach defense," he said. "Instead, I told my coaches, 'Y'all do it — but do it my way.' It didn't work, and on top of that, I lost my expertise. In Buffalo (where he later worked for and then replaced Hall of Famer Marv Levy), I was completely hands-on. Here (in Dallas), I'm hands-on."
Like father, like son
If not for the Music City Miracle, when, with resounding irony, the Tennessee Titans nee Houston Oilers beat his Buffalo team with a kickoff return for a touchdown near the end of their wild-card playoff game, Phillips might have taken the 1999 Bills to the Super Bowl. Instead, a year later, he was out.
But after the one-season hiatus, he was back, whipping Reeves' Atlanta Falcons defense into shape, then doing the same for Marty Schottenheimer's in San Diego. The last six times Phillips has joined a losing team as either a coordinator or a head coach, that team has reached the playoffs in his first season.
Ask the Phillipses what the son learned from the father, and they provide the same answer.
"He always said, 'Just be yourself,' " Wade said. "Don't coach the way somebody else coaches or the way you think you're supposed to coach. I spent a lot of time around coaches when I was young, and I'd see a guy who was one way on the field wearing the players out with his screaming and yelling and then be a great guy away from the field. I thought, 'If he would just coach the way he really is, he'd be a lot better off.' "
Bum insists, far too humbly, "I think the only thing Wade got from me is that you can't be a counterfeit. Even if you're a bad coach, just be a bad coach your way. Don't go trying to be somebody else."
So after all these years, Wade is who he is, something of a rumpled, unprepossessing presence on the sideline and not the most silver-tongued of news conference orators. The only thing overtly sexy about him is his latest job title: head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, one of sport's most lustrous brands.
But Wade's lofty status doesn't stop a certain, soon-to-be 84-year-old rancher from offering unsolicited advice.
"Daddy came up here one day last spring during a minicamp," Wade said. "For the first part of our practice, we were doing a 'team-takeoff' drill where the quarterback calls a play in the huddle and we run it against air, no defense. One day after practice, he comes over and says, 'Why don't you just have the quarterback call the play at the line of scrimmage? That way everybody has to listen and pay attention, and you'll get more plays run in less time.' Well, that's how we've done it ever since. He just sees stuff. He's always been like that."
Funny thing. If you ask the Cowboys about their new coach, they're wont to speak about how Wade also sees stuff. For that reason, quarterback Tony Romo calls him the smartest coach he has ever been around.
And Wesley makes three
Further, Phillips' 27-year-old son, Wesley, a former UTEP quarterback who was an assistant at Baylor last season, is on board as his father's offensive quality control assistant.
The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?
"Getting to work for my dad was great," Wade said, "and it was a great opportunity. Now, I know how he must have felt having me around."
It felt real good, Bum admitted.
"I can honestly look back and say I didn't try to get them into something just because I did it," he said. "But to have Wade choose coaching and then my grandson, too ... it tickles me to death."
