Of course, that was before this season. Now they’re saying that Vermeil is coach of the year. Suddenly the Rams, awful throughout the 1990s, are the Super Bowl favorite and are leading the NFC with a 13-3 record. “I didn’t give a damn what anyone said or wrote,” said Vermeil, as the Rams prepared for their postseason opener this Sunday, the first-ever home playoff game in 33 years of football in St. Louis. “I knew my job was on the line. But I didn’t want to be distracted. I know my approach works and I felt we were going in the right direction. And at 63, it wasn’t like I was worried about my future. That freed me up to keep doing exactly as I wanted. Now I don’t really feel like I have to say, ‘I told you so’.’'
As remarkable as the team’s transformation may be, it is rivaled by the transformation of Vermeil himself. He retired from coaching in the middle of the 1982 season, a self-proclaimed “burnout” less than two years after taking the Philadelphia Eagles to the Super Bowl. Vermeil spent 15 years on the game’s periphery as a broadcaster, then returned to coaching confident that he could still do it the same way. “Back then he said it and we did it–his way or the highway,” says Wilbert Montgomery, one of three Ram assistant coaches who starred on Vermeil’s Philly teams. “So it was a real cultural shock here discovering that the new athlete needs a lot more pampering. But that old dog showed he could learn some new tricks.”
The first two seasons were brutal. But after two years of losing football and embarrassing public gripes–“He was killing us out there,” says tight end Roland Williams–about his methods from his players, Vermeil took his system and… well, as he says, he “tweaked” it. It was, by any standard, one massive tweak. He recognized that the boot-camp approach, which he had expected to draw his team together like an elite military unit, had become divisive. At training camp, he drastically reduced the amount of practice time in full pads and cut back on meetings so endless they’d bump up against bedtime curfew.
When the season began, Vermeil instituted Victory Monday, a day off to celebrate all wins. He took the rare step of not requiring players to stay in a local hotel the night before a home game. And in the locker room before games, he limited his remarks, sometimes deferring to a player for the final thoughts before the Rams took the field. “This is a coach who believes you can never repeat anything too often,” says Montgomery. “For him not to have the very last word, now that’s really something different.”
Vermeil laughs at the notion that he has truly changed, hinting that it was just part of a clever scheme. “Look, they had been lousy for so long when I got here I felt I had to change the mental and physical toughness and do some weeding out,” says Vermeil. “The only way you can make it easier on someone is to make it tough on them in the first place so they can appreciate the difference.” His players were more than appreciative. They were awed by what they call the coach’s “throwing us a bone.” Says defensive back Keith Lyle: “You could see this was really a stubborn guy. He didn’t want to buy into the notion that players today were different. We could see how hard it was for him to change. But he did and I really respect him for it. It became our duty to respond by giving him everything we had. We had to show him that he didn’t have to break us down to get what he wanted out of us.”
Vermeil has always reached out to his players. He takes them out to dinner, invites them to his home. At first, though, the Rams greeted such overtures with some suspicion. “Everything today is dictated by money and power,” says assistant head coach Mike White, who has known Vermeil since they were assistant coaches together at Stanford University in the ’60s. “Dick is so unique that it takes a while for people to believe he’s genuine.” But players got used to seeing raw emotions spill from their coach; they saw how he choked back tears of appreciation for their best efforts. “We love the guy,” says defensive end Jay Williams. “Some coaches don’t care about you if you’re not one of the multimillionaire superstars. But coach Vermeil cares about every one of us.”
The only person he hasn’t always taken care of is himself. When Vermeil coached the Eagles, his motto–posted in the locker room–was “The only way to kill time is to work it to death.” And he tried, sleeping on a cot in his office, until the question became whether he would kill time or himself first. “My gas tank was empty,” says Vermeil, who quit the Eagles in midseason after four consecutive playoff appearances. “I tried to perfect an imperfect game and you can’t do it. I don’t try anymore.” Vermeil spent years in therapy before he could make that claim and return to the coaching ranks. When he took the Rams job, having turned down several other offers through the years, he first pledged to his wife that he would impose limits on himself. Home by midnight every night. Or at least 12:30 a.m. “My No. 1 priority is still winning football games,” he says. “But I’m older and more mature. I delegate. I trust more. I try to keep people off my roster that I don’t trust and like.”
Still, he can’t totally repress his perfectionist bent. After evincing great satisfaction over the season, he nevertheless declares: “We should have been 16-0.” And after a motion penalty by a receiver in the final, meaningless game, he had to fight an urge to race onto the field and “kick him right in the a–.” He has coped by adopting a world view that expects some catastrophe every day. “If something leaps up and hits me in the face, I no longer say ‘Ah, s–t!’ I say, ‘Sure, I expected something’.’’
The biggest catastrophe occurred this preseason when Trent Green, the Rams’ new $16.5 million quarterback, injured his knee and was lost for the season. The job fell to Kurt Warner, whose only significant pro experience, at 28, was at the outer margins–with the Iowa Stampeders (Arena Football) and the Amsterdam Admirals (NFL Europe). “When Trent went down, I felt like I was stabbed in the heart,” says Vermeil. “But Kurt came and told me he could do the job.” Nobody, not even Warner, envisioned an MVP season in which he became only the second quarterback in NFL history to toss more than 40 touchdown passes.
There remain plenty of skeptics who view Vermeil’s success with the Rams as something less than football’s version of “Miracle on 34th Street.” After all, the NFL’s commitment to parity favors losing teams with high draft choices and weak schedules. But the Rams have drafted, signed and traded wisely and there remain only six starters from the team Vermeil took over. “The key is getting the ball into the hands of your skilled people,” he says, “and nobody has more talent at the skill positions than we do.” The coach admits that he had difficulty at first assessing the team’s talent. “Everyone was so much bigger and faster than my Super Bowl team in Philadelphia that initially I thought they were all ready to go play in the Super Bowl,” he says. “But I never thought we were going there in one or two seasons.” Three, though, just may be the charm.
title: “Old School New Age” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Mary Coan”
How the mighty have fallen. Today its growing critics call ENA: Old-fashioned. Irrelevant. Out of touch. The French, eager to embrace the Internet age, seem to be fed up with the tradition-bound grande dame. Industry leaders have usurped the pride once reserved for the state and its servants by embracing the New Economy and, with it, new ways of thinking, working and living. Young people are heeding their call; the most desirable places to work, these days, are no longer the august bureaucracies of yore–the Finance Inspectorate or the Transport Ministry. Instead, France’s hotshots are opting for private industry. Rather than the stolid, functionary training they would get at ENA, they increasingly prefer M.B.A.s–if they go to graduate school at all. “There isn’t any prestige associated with the state anymore,” laments Jacques Julliard, a former board member of ENA who resigned last year in protest over the school’s seeming inability to change. In short, de Gaulle’s august institution is sunk in a crisis of identity–possibly deep enough to challenge its very survival.
To appreciate the mess the place is in, you need look no further than the headlines: Jacques Chirac has been called to testify in court concerning kickbacks from low-cost housing projects when he was mayor of Paris. Chirac has not been charged with any crime–but it is the first time in memory that a president has been summoned as a witness in such a case. What’s more, some accusers claim that he in fact orchestrated the scam. The country’s scandal-weary public is inclined to dismiss the flap as little more than enarque politics, leading up to the 2002 presidential elections when Lionel Jospin and Chirac are expected to face off. But this is not the first time Chirac has been tarred by what many see as an impenetrable and elitistsystem. Former prime minister Alain Juppe, a top ENA graduate reviled for his “elitism,” was ousted from office in 1997, costing Chirac the Parliament and fostering a generalized anti-ENA-ism. Juppe himself actually proposed that the school be closed, a measure that was never put to a vote. Says Michel Mangenot, of the Political Science Institute in Strasbourg, “ENA has never been threatened as seriously as it is today.”
Perhaps the most serious threat comes from the private sector. Since 1982, according to a recent survey, the number of enarques going into business has doubled. The phenomenon, known as pantouflage, or “putting on slippers,” has deprived the state of many of its top professional bureaucrats–along with a disproportionate chunk of its youngest would-be recruits. The crisis was highlighted last year when Finance Minister Laurent Fabius, another enarque, hired an inexperienced ENA graduate as his cabinet director after discovering that the most qualified people had all but disappeared. “It is a problem,” concedes Marie-Francoise Bechtel, ENA’s current director, adding that France’s ministries clearly face a growing problem in finding experienced staff to fill senior posts.
Money is a big issue. Alain Demarolle, valedictorian of the class of 1993, defected to a major U.S. investment bank several years ago, partly out of frustration with the pace of government work, but also for better pay. “The best people in France don’t want to work for the state anymore,” he says. Top ENA graduates earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year in government work. Next to the compensations of business, says Demarolle, there’s “no comparison.” ENA seems out of step with the times in other ways, too. Enrollment in the ENA preparatory program at the Paris Institute of Political Studies has dropped from 600 five years ago to only 280 today. Mangenot considers it a question of relevance. “What students are being taught at ENA isn’t what’s needed anymore,” he says. ENA grads are perceived as lacking the skills employers are looking for, especially in the private sector. “I no longer recruit from ENA,” says Frederic Lagneau, of France’s oldest headhunting firm, Boyden. “They’re disconnected from the reality of our clients’ needs.”
If anything, the students themselves are more critical. They complain that ENA’s curriculum is out of touch with changes in both government and industry. Instead of courses in new technologies and human-resource management, they are peppered with classes in law and the rudiments of bureaucratic management, much of which they claim to already know. Students spend much of their time reducing 50-page dossiers to three-page summaries. “The lack of training is incredibly frustrating,” says Axel Barlerin, 35, a former tennis coach who graduates this year and hopes to get a job as a judge in Nancy. “You feel like you’re turning in circles here.” For students who don’t make it to the top of their class, the choices are often limited. Jean Guellec graduated 75th out of a class of 85 in 1993 and went on to a minor government post with meager pay. He, too, now thinks of defecting to the private sector. “It’s like Plato’s cave,” he says of the school. “You just get stuck.”
Pressures for reform are building. This year’s graduating class is the first in history to petition nearly unanimously for an end to the ranking system and to call for changes in the way grads are hired for choice government jobs. Ninety-six of 103 students signed, including 28 of the top 30. For their part, school administrators insist that a slate of proposed reforms will provide students with the tools they need to become “modern bureaucrats.” They tout measures designed to encourage “creativity,” but so far they have refrained from modifying–let alone jettisoning–their cherished rankings. ENA director Bechtel defends the system as “bad, but the least bad of all the options.” Talk about your bureaucrats. It’s enough to make you think twice about becoming one.
