Holmgren Invests Wisely

SEATTLE — It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what makes a genius in the NFL.

Bill Walsh? Joe Montana.

Mike Shanahan? John Elway.

Mike Holmgren? Brett Favre.

Take away the quarterback, and the genius can suddenly look like a bumbling fool.

Walsh certainly isn’t impressing people in San Francisco these days. Nor is Shanahan in Denver.

Holmgren, however, is a very different matter. He walked out on Favre and the Green Bay Packers after last season, heading for the great Northwest and the Seattle Seahawks, presumably to be seldom heard from

again.

Instead, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound plus coach has become the new Bigfoot of the area, leaving the AFC West shredded and beaten as he has led his Seahawks to the top of the division.

And he’s doing all this with Jon Kitna at quarterback.

Maybe Holmgren really is a genius.

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Ron Wolf first noticed Holmgren a decade ago. Back then, Holmgren was offensive coordinator at San Francisco.

“When we would play the 49ers, it didn’t matter who we had in there,” said Wolf, the Packer general manager. “They were moving the ball up and down the field. We couldn’t stop them. So I started sniffing around, asking, who is doing it? Mike Holmgren, I was told.”

After the 1991 season, when Wolf was looking for yet another candidate to fill the un-fillable shoes left by Hall of Fame coach Vince Lombardi, he remembered the man his team couldn’t stop.

An interview with Holmgren convinced Wolf this was the man for the job.

“He has that certain aura or air about him that he can do what you are asking him to do,” Wolf said. “Some people might say that is arrogance. But it’s not. It’s confidence.”

Holmgren might have looked confident, but he admits that, at first, he too was caught up in the Lombardi mystique.

“When you walk in the door at Green Bay and see the murals of all the football players you knew as a fan, it can get to you,” he said. “I grew up being Bart Starr and Paul Hornung on the playground.

“But what I had going for me was that those other coaches [three of the five between him and Lombardi] had some direct connection to him, so there was more pressure on them. I could do my own thing and that helped me in those years. I respected the standard Vince Lombardi set. I lived with that, but then I tried to do my own thing.”

And succeeded beyond anything accomplished since Lombardi left town.

Holmgren took the Packers to consecutive Super Bowls in 1997 and ‘98, their first appearances in football’s big show in 30 years, since Lombardi coached the Packers to victory in the first two Super Bowls.

Holmgren’s Packers beat the New England Patriots, 35-21, in Super Bowl XXXI, then lost to the Denver Broncos, 31-24, in Super Bowl XXXII.

And then, seemingly at the peak of his career, Holmgren walked out after last season.

He was following the advice longtime coach Chuck Knox had once given him: “The ticket is to leave when you’re still going good, but they’ve heard all your stuff.”

Holmgren left for the Seahawks for a chance to move into the front office and gain total control of a team as vice president of football operations/general manager/head coach, for the chance to move from the frozen tundra of Green Bay back to the West Coast.

Oh yeah, and for a chance to make $32 million over eight years.

It didn’t loom as an easy transition. Holmgren was going from a team with a tradition of excellence to one with a tradition of futility. He was going from Favre to Kitna.

But somehow, Holmgren has made it all work. Heading into Sunday’s game, the Seahawks are off to their best start since 1984. Before losing last week to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the 8-3 Seahawks enjoyed a three-game lead in the AFC West, the biggest in their history.

Kitna is progressing nicely at quarterback, Ricky Watters is behaving himself and carrying the ball with his old efficiency, and the defense is playing well.

Holmgren even survived a protracted holdout by star receiver Joey Galloway that could have, but did not, become a distraction.

Holmgren won with great personnel and now he is winning with a team whose personnel has never been great.

Or as Wolf put it: “Bum Phillips used to say of Don Shula, ‘He could take his and beat your’n. And he could take your’n and beat his.’ I think the same could be said of Mike Holmgren.”

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The story has been told before, but no tale of Holmgren would be complete without it because it explains him so well.

Back in 1971, 23-year-old Mike Holmgren saw a career of pounding into opposing linemen about to dissolve into a career of pounding nails.

Holmgren, star quarterback at San Francisco’s Lincoln High, star recruit at USC, had just about run out of options.

After languishing on the bench as a Trojan, he had tried and failed to make it in pro football.

Twice.

Cut by the then-St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Jets, Holmgren was suddenly facing the real world. He had spent a season as an assistant football coach at Lincoln, but now, with his wife Kathy pregnant with twin girls, Holmgren needed a full-time job. He could always go back to his old summer job in construction, but he still had an itch for football.

And then he heard about an opening at San Francisco’s Sacred Heart High.

Not much of an opening, really, in football terms. It was primarily a teaching position.

“Can you teach economics?” the principal asked Holmgren.

No problem, he said.

“Can you teach mechanical drawing?”

No problem.

Actually, a big problem.

“I was a business major in college so I knew economics,” Holmgren recalled. “But I hadn’t done any mechanical drawing since the seventh grade.”

Holmgren wasn’t about to kill his chances over such a small thing as being unqualified.

“I got the job,” he said. “The next day, I enrolled at San Francisco City College, where I spent the summer learning mechanical drawing. It worked and enabled me to do what I wanted to do.”

From that unlikely beginning, Holmgren rose to a spot, just more than a quarter-century later, where he was being compared to the legendary Lombardi.

Who knew?

Certainly not Holmgren. Certainly not the way his coaching career began.

As an assistant at Sacred Heart to Steve Ellison, Holmgren was part of a team that lost 22 consecutive games over a three-year span.

But Holmgren stuck with it, going on to Oak Grove High in San Jose, where he was offensive coordinator of the football team, coached several other sports and taught academic subjects.

NFL? Holmgren says it never even occurred to him.

“I was very happy,” he said. “I was teaching history, and coaching both tennis and track along with football. I felt like I had the best of both worlds. I was pretty comfortable. I thought I would be doing what I was doing for the rest of my life.”

But in 1981, after a decade in the classroom, Holmgren admitted, “I felt I got a little stale.”

He took a sabbatical to try college coaching, with every intent of coming back, he insists.

Not a chance.

Taking a job as offensive coordinator-quarterback coach at San Francisco State, Holmgren found his niche and found himself on a fast track to the top. After a year at San Francisco State and four years coaching quarterbacks at Brigham Young under Lavell Edwards, Holmgren was hired by Walsh in 1986 to coach the 49er quarterbacks, chief among them being Montana, then later, Steve Young.

That didn’t faze the old teacher. Holmgren feels his classroom background enabled him to make the big leap to the pros.

“I think it’s really important,” he said of his background. “That’s really what we are. We [pro coaches] are teachers. We just deal with older guys. It doesn’t matter what you know if you can’t teach it.”

After three years of tutoring 49er quarterbacks, Holmgren started teaching the rest of the NFL a few things when he became the 49ers’ offensive coordinator under George Seifert.

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To Holmgren, the latest job switch was about getting back to his roots.

“This is fun,” he said of his new multilevel post. “I felt it was the logical next challenge. I’m teaching again.”

As for talk that Holmgren is pro football’s latest genius, he says his wife and kids keep him levelheaded:

“They tell me, ‘You know, you are still a high school coach in our eyes.’ ”