Like many businesses with multiple offices, the NFL has a tendency towards turning simple facts into exaggerated rumors. The locker room argument in San Diego turns into a defensive lineman throwing a treadmill at a cornerback by the time the story makes its way to Cincinnati. An Atlanta coach benching a starter for being late to a meeting becomes the Falcons considering releasing that player for selling stolen car parts once it's retold in Green Bay. You learn to take a lot of things with a grain of salt and never trust that things are as juicy as they sound.
After the Axe: Leslie Frazier and the golden handcuffs
Leslie Frazier and George Costanza have a lot in common. Ryan Nanni gets to the bottom of it in a completely fictitious interview with the former Vikings head coach.
So when a friend described the circumstances of Leslie Frazier's departure from the Vikings, I had serious doubts. No way he had his boxes already packed. No way he had "Celebration" by Kool & The Gang queued up to play the second he was given the news of his firing.
No way he got a cookie cake that said “FREEDOM” on it.
But you still have to ask, and, after some generic questions about what Frazier thinks the Tampa Bay defense, his new assignment, needs to improve this offseason, I decide to dive in. He didn’t really do a backflip out of Zygi Wilf’s office, did he?
“Of course not,” he chuckles. “It was a back handspring. I don’t think I’ve been able to do a backflip for fifteen years. The cookie cake, though? Absolutely true. And I ate the whole thing by my lonesome.”
After the Axe
I’m racking my brain recalling all the stories I’ve heard of coaches getting fired. Some are unspeakably sad, some are angry, and a few are stoic. But overjoyed? That has to be a first. Coaching an NFL team is a dream achieved by so few. Why would Frazier be happy to have it taken away?
“At first, being a head coach is great. You’ve got all this control, and all you think about is how you’ll finally take your vision and get a chance to put it into place. I was so EXCITED when I got the interim job in the middle of 2010. And 3-3 felt like a good start, considering we only got one real home game in that stretch after the Metrodome collapsed.”
“But here’s the thing: from the day you become the head guy, there’s some segment of the fan base that thinks you’re terrible. They are convinced you are the thing holding the team back, and they want you out. It’s not that the clock’s ticking; these are the folks who have already smashed the damn thing.”
That’s certainly true; I imagine if you looked hard enough you could find Seattle fans who want to fire Pete Carroll. The fact that an NFL coach will never be universally beloved doesn’t fully explain Frazier’s response to me, though. Wouldn’t the better approach be to just ignore the fans and focus on doing what’s best for the organization?
Frazier laughs at the suggestion. “Who runs the organization? The owner’s just a fan with a fiscal stake on top of the emotional one.” He leans towards me and lowers his voice.
“So I decided to see how long I could get by doing the bare minimum.”
I didn’t believe it. Until Frazier walked me through how he pulled it off.
He started with the 2011 season. Minnesota started 0-4, but all of those games were within a score. The fourth loss was too close to the edge, however. "We let Matt Cassel throw for 260 yards and a touchdown on us, and it nearly cost me. There's an insurance fraud element to this - you want to burn the house down, but you can't just drive up to the garage with a Sam's Club palate of lighter fluid. So we had to beat Arizona the next week. Poof - now the suspicion's gone." Two more losses followed that, sending the Vikings to 1-6.
“We had our bye in Week 9, so I knew Week 8 was going to be important. The NFL wants to think of itself as excessively cerebral and analytical, but it’s subject to recency bias just like anything else. Objectively, 2-6 is the same lousy record no matter when the second win comes. But you put win two before the bye week? Hell, now you’ve got the ship turned in the right direction!”
The Vikings promptly lost six in a row after the bye. I asked Frazier if he’d ever worried along the way that he’d go too far.
“Once,” he said, after some thought. “It was after we lost to Denver. To Tebow, specifically. I really didn’t know how to make that defensible. Tim seems like a nice kid, but getting beat by him is like explaining why you covered a whole wall with mayonnaise instead of paint. It’s too stupid to explain without laughing.”
“And then Zygi gave me a vote of confidence the very next day! I’m telling you, man. These owners HATE having to pick a new guy.”
Photo credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports
Everything Frazier was telling me made a strange amount of sense. Maybe he hadn’t cared as the 2011 team careened to the franchise’s worst record in nearly three decades. Maybe he really was just exploring how little he could do without getting fired.
Of course, then how the hell could he explain 2012, when the Vikings won 10 games and made the playoffs?
“That’s easy,” he told me. “Peterson was just too damn good. Coming off a major injury and he nearly breaks the single season rushing record? I mean, come on. Not even Norv Turner could go 7-9 with that happening.”
Now I think I've got him cornered. If Frazier was looking forward to losing his job, wouldn't he have just taken the ball out of Adrian Peterson's hands?
“See, that’s too obvious. The point isn’t to try and get fired. That’s as easy as shooting your mouth off in a way you know the owner won’t be able to accept. And taking away carries from AD would have been just like saying I didn’t think Obama was a U.S. citizen. Or Biden. It’s not like it was hard; we didn’t try to make the passing game better to keep the defense honest or anything. Adrian just did his thing and I stood there and pretended to be focused.”
“Most of the time I was using my headset to work as a customer service representative for Enterprise. Employee discount was pretty solid.”
Frazier had to excuse himself for a meeting, so I took the time to gather my thoughts and review the evidence:
1. Minnesota's roster from 2010-2013 likely had too many weak spots to make, much less win, the Super Bowl.
2. Neither Vikings fans nor Zygi Wilf would be eager to accept that as true.
3. Given those two facts, probability suggests that Frazier’s eventual firing was almost certain.
Looking at it from that perspective, you can kind of see the logic. If failure is preordained, you may as well have some fun with it - and that’s exactly what Frazier did in 2013, as he explains it.
There's an insurance fraud element to this - you want to burn the house down, but you can't just drive up to the garage with the lighter fluid.
“At some point, even treading water gets tiring. I was ready to be done with the head coach thing, so I pulled the ripcord. On Monday Night Football. In front of the whole damn country.”
You might recall the game in question, or you might have blocked it out as a coping mechanism, but what Frazier pulled was amazing. The Vikings were 1-4 at that point and hadn't looked great. It seemed like good fortune, then, that they'd drawn a road game against the 0-6 Giants, who were watching Eli Manning collapse like a sand castle as the tide came in. This seemed like an opportunity for Minnesota to turn things around.
So Frazier painted his masterpiece: he started Josh Freeman, who'd been with the team for two weeks, and let him throw the ball. Fifty-three times. Adrian Peterson? He only got fifteen touches.
“It was majestic,” he recalls. “And I’ll never be able to thank Josh enough for freeing me from those golden handcuffs.”
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