Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (19 page)

Johnson may have taken the chalk pick in Aikman, but by nature he was a risk taker when it came to football. He shocked the NFL when Steve Walsh, his quarterback at the University of Miami, applied for the supplemental draft held that summer and
he took him. Why? It made no sense. Johnson had just drafted Aikman. There was no way Johnson could rationalize taking Walsh and forfeiting the Cowboys’ number one pick in 1990. Johnson looked at Walsh as a valuable trading chip. He drafted Walsh, and his intent was to trade him immediately. There was no doubt who his quarterback was going to be. Aikman had a dynamic arm. Walsh, although he was a winner and was smart, wasn’t going to be able to squeeze the ball between defenders or throw the tough sideline pass. His strength was managing games. Walsh’s presence caused friction with Aikman, but Johnson figured it was only temporary. He would find a trade partner for Walsh before the season started. Johnson wasn’t concerned about Aikman’s feelings. He was trying to put the Cowboys back together again. Alienating Aikman before they even got to training camp wasn’t on his mind.

“I didn’t care. I knew that was value,” he said. “And I did not anticipate keeping Steve. But I felt like he was a good enough player. We had the opportunity because we were at the top of the draft in the supplemental draft—to get a player of value and then make a trade down the road. I wasn’t concerned about the competition at quarterback. I felt like Troy was going to be our guy, but I wanted to get another valued player, and I knew down the road it would pay dividends for us.”

The Cowboys finished 1–15 in 1989, and Walsh was the quarterback for the only victory when Aikman was injured. After the season, Johnson’s gamble paid off. The Saints gave him first-, second-, and third-round picks for Walsh.

“I tried to flip it right away, and I couldn’t flip it right away,” Johnson said. “As it turned out, Troy hurt his thumb and Steve played some, and so we were able to showcase him a little bit, and that helped us on the trade.”

When Jones declared that Johnson was worth more than five first-round picks and five Heisman Trophy winners, Johnson took that as a challenge. Of course, if any team agreed with Jones, he would have traded them Johnson in a heartbeat to speed up the rebuilding process. Although Johnson was highly thought of in the NFL community and Jones was a complete unknown, they were an effective team. Jones, despite bragging that he held the general manager’s title, deferred to Johnson on personnel decisions. The owner concentrated on turning the Cowboys, who had surprisingly never been a big moneymaker, into a cash cow. Johnson had never worked in any capacity for an NFL team before joining the Cowboys, but he was prepared. He knew he would be a head coach on the biggest stage sooner rather than later, and the transition was seamless. He quickly familiarized himself with the rules and the personnel around the league and was up to speed by the time he started having to make decisions in the draft. It took him no time to figure out the obvious—his team stank.

In training camp, he had one star in Herschel Walker. He had two rookie quarterbacks in Troy Aikman and Steve Walsh. His former Miami receiver Michael Irvin, the Cowboys’ first-round pick in 1988, was on the team, but he had caught only thirty-two passes as a rookie without showing any indication that he would go on to have a Hall of Fame career. There was even talk that Johnson might trade him. In addition to Aikman, the first draft produced fullback Daryl Johnston, center Mark Stepnoski, and defensive end Tony Tolbert, who all became Pro Bowl players.

Johnson was not about to embark on a five-year rebuilding plan. The fans in Dallas were already skeptical about the Jones-Johnson regime, so they were going to receive a one-year grace period and then needed to show that they had the smarts to turn around America’s Team. Johnson went into his rookie season knowing he didn’t have much talent but was determined to find out which players he could win with while building the team around Aikman.

Johnson liked to jog with his coaches. They were brainstorming sessions. He was running players on and off the team and barely had time to learn their names. There was a lot to talk about with his “crew,” as Johnson called his coaches. The jog he went on the first week of the 1989 season turned around the franchise. Johnson already had convinced himself that the only way to get better before the turn of the century was to trade Walker, the former Heisman winner and his only marketable commodity. Now he wanted to hear what his crew had to say about it.

Landry, Schramm, and Brandt invested a fifth-round choice in Walker in the 1985 draft. He was playing in the United States Football League, and the Cowboys retained his rights and would try to sign him either when his deal with the New Jersey Generals expired or when the USFL folded. Dallas had shown similar foresight in 1964 when it used a tenth-round pick on Navy quarterback Roger Staubach and then waited five years for him while he served his military commitment. That worked out pretty well for the Cowboys when Staubach led the team to its first two Super Bowl championships.

In the summer of 1986, the USFL was awarded $1—it was tripled to $3—in its $1.69 billion antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. The three-year-old league was counting on a huge settlement to bankroll its move to a fall season to compete against the NFL or on the award being so high that it forced the NFL into a merger. Instead, the USFL went out of business.

Dallas had Tony Dorsett, a future Hall of Famer, at running back, and he was coming off one of his best seasons, having rushed for 1,307 yards in 1985. Training camp began the next summer with Dorsett still the focal point of the offense. That changed the day the USFL folded. The Cowboys were falling over themselves trying to get Walker into training camp in Thousand Oaks, California. Walker was home in New Jersey insisting that he would flip a coin to decide whether to sign with the Cowboys or retire. Walker was a bit eccentric. He eventually signed a five-year
$5 million contract, the biggest contract in Cowboys history, and an NFL record for a running back. That angered Dorsett, who was making considerably less, and then Walker scored the winning touchdown in the season opener at Texas Stadium on a 10-yard run with 1:16 left against the Giants, who would lose only one more game the rest of the season on their way to winning the Super Bowl. Landry could never figure out a way to get the most out of Dorsett and Walker. Dorsett had a career-low 748 yards rushing in his first season sharing time with Walker. He and Walker played one more year together before the Cowboys gave in to Dorsett’s trade demands and sent him to Denver.

In his first season with the job to himself in ’88, Walker rushed for 1,514 yards for a 3–13 team. It would be the best season of his career. Landry was gone six weeks after the season ended, and Johnson took over. He was going to be true to his personality, which meant he was going to be a wheeler-dealer; in the world of the NFL, where executives are concerned about being second-guessed, Johnson just didn’t care. He was going to do what he thought was right and live with the consequences.

He told his coaches on that jog that Walker had to go. “The way this process is, number one, you build your team through the draft, and I understand that. But that’s a long process the way the system is now. And we’re the worst team in the league, by far. We were the worst team before I got there, and we were the worst team my first year,” Johnson said.

Here is what he told his coaches: “We’ve got to look for a way to speed up the process. Only way you could speed up the process is to get more picks. And the only thing we’ve got that anybody wants is Herschel Walker. Nobody wants any of our other players. What are your thoughts about trading Herschel Walker?”

Johnson’s coaches were shocked. Was he nuts? Walker was all the Cowboys had going for them.

“The defensive coaches, they were lukewarm. Our offensive coaches were vehemently against it. They said, ‘Hey, we won’t
score a point if we don’t have Herschel,’ ” Johnson said. “David Shula and Jerry Rhome, they were all against it. They said no way, don’t trade him. But I told them there was no way we can improve our football team two years down the road just by going through the draft. I said I’ve got to do something to speed up the process.”

Fortunately for Johnson, two teams were interested. Browns general manager Ernie Accorsi would set the market, and Johnson planned to use Cleveland’s interest to drive up the price on Vikings general manager Mike Lynn, who had casually mentioned being interested in Walker over the summer. Johnson had dismissed it at the time, saying Walker was his only Pro Bowl player. Now, with the regular season having arrived, he realized that dealing Walker would be taking a step back in the short term but could lead to big long-term gains.

Johnson would go on to win Super Bowls in his fourth season and fifth and final season with the Cowboys, and if he hadn’t pulled off the deal of the century with the Vikings that fast tracked the Cowboys’ ability to compete for a championship by at least three years, he said, “I’d have found a way. I’d have done something.”

Landry planned to draft Aikman first overall in 1989, but there is no way he ever would have approved trading Walker. He loved Walker’s skill set, admired him as a person, and considered him the foundation of the Cowboys’ future. Johnson turned him into the draft picks that became the Cowboys’ foundation.

The Walker trade turned out to be the most lopsided trade in NFL history. How did it happen?

“It actually came about when Ernie Accorsi called me. They wanted Herschel Walker,” Johnson said. “They felt like that was the missing piece for them. I just told them what I wanted. I wanted three ones, three twos, and three threes. He said that’s awful steep. He was our only Pro Bowl player on a horrible team.”

Accorsi was the general manager in Baltimore in 1983 when
the Colts drafted John Elway even though Elway said he would never play for them. Accorsi fielded numerous trade offers before the draft but turned them all down. He was a big believer that you always take the franchise quarterback. One week after the draft, Colts owner Robert Irsay traded Elway to the Broncos behind Accorsi’s back. Throughout his front office career, Accorsi was always enamored with big names.

Johnson was now intent on dealing Walker and continued to negotiate with Accorsi. “They didn’t have a one the next year,” Johnson said. “They had an outside linebacker that they had drafted from Florida, Clifford Charlton. What they would do is they would give us him and a one the following year and a one the following year and then the twos and threes. I said let me give that some thought. I said I think we could probably pull the trigger on it, so let’s talk tonight. He said I got to get Art Modell to talk to you before it’s a finalized deal anyway. He said let me have Art call you tonight. I said fine.”

Johnson felt he had the parameters for a trade that he could now shop around the league. He went to Jones, and they elected to see if they could do better. Jones called Falcons owner Rankin Smith. Walker had played at Georgia and was still a big name in Atlanta. Walker would help sell tickets. Johnson called Lynn, who had reached out in the preseason about Walker. The October 17 trade deadline was one week away. The Cowboys were 0–5, and the only intrigue left was whether they would be the first 0–16 team in NFL history. That honor eventually went to the Detroit Lions in 2008. The Vikings were 3–2 but felt Walker would make them instant Super Bowl contenders.

Johnson got on the phone with Lynn. He put a 6:30 p.m. deadline on Lynn to top Cleveland’s offer.

“Here’s what I’ve got on the table. If you can get something better, maybe we can pull this thing off,” Johnson told Lynn.

He outlined the Browns’ proposal. “Well, when I got in from practice, he had faxed me his proposal,” Johnson said. “His thinking
was, he was going to unload some players who were better than anything we had, but a couple of them were injured, a couple of them were toward the end of their career. They were expendable for the Vikings, but again, they were better than anything we had.

“He said we would tie a draft pick to each player, and if I kept the player, I wouldn’t get the pick. But if I cut the player or released him, then I’d get the pick. Well, when I looked at it, I could see that as the year would go on, if I didn’t fall in love with these players, I could get the picks and I could have leverage on him to keep the player and the pick.”

Lynn offered his first-round pick in the 1992 draft and linebackers Jesse Solomon and David Howard, cornerback Isaac Holt, running back Darrin Nelson, defensive end Alex Stewart, and six conditional draft picks. Each of the picks was tied to one of the players Minnesota traded to Dallas. The players could help Johnson during the 1989 season, and then he would decide between the player and the draft pick. It sounded like a game show.

Solomon was attached to the Vikings’ first-round pick in 1990. If he was on the roster on February 1, the Vikings would keep the pick. If Johnson cut him, Dallas would get the pick. Howard was attached to a 1991 first-round pick, Holt to a second- and a third-round pick in 1992, Nelson to a second-round pick in 1991, and Stewart to a second-round pick in 1990.