A football life
January is the season for coaching transition in the NFL, when coaches disembark from what I call the six-month “submarine tour” they boarded in late July and come ashore to view the shifting horizon. Head coaches are fired and hired, and staffs are reshuffled, culminating at this week’s Senior Bowl—a job fair for coaches seeking continued or renewed employment. After this week, the game of musical chairs will end, with those unable to find a seat waiting until next year.
Beyond the usual turnover, however, a different type of coaching transaction caught my eye. Kevin Greene, the Packers’ outside linebackers’ coach, resigned from the Packers to spend more time with his wife and two teenage children. In a profession where people often find it difficult to imagine doing anything else, Greene’s decision is noteworthy. It also resonates personally, albeit under different circumstances. I also left the Packers, six years ago this week, and now lead a life more under my own terms, with family in mind.
I don’t know Kevin Greene—we were not in Green Bay at the same time—but I have seen the atmosphere where one can become consumed with football, both internally and externally. Many people involved in NFL team operations have “football lives,” often to the exclusion of other interests. They think and talk about football when they eat, when they drive and even when they are at home. Some find it hard to be truly “present” with their families.
These football lives take on regimentation similar to players, but with longer hours and less pay. I regularly saw coaches and scouts use the team facility for their meals, their laundry, their workouts, even their wardrobe, wearing team-issued gear wherever they went. Social time is largely with others leading similar lives. As for family time, it can come in fits and starts.
Although as a front office executive I did not have the all-consuming life coaches and scouts did, my family still felt the impact. My sons, who were quite young when I was with the Packers, saw football as something that took me away from them, especially on the weekends, and we could never actually watch a game together as I worked during home games and traveled with the team. We now cherish watching games together.
Greene was with the Packers for five years, I was there nine years, the same length of time as my first boss, general manager Ron Wolf (and two years longer than Mike Holmgren). When Ron retired, I remember saying he felt “the walls were closing in” and grew to understand that comment.
Packers fans are warm-hearted people without pretense or edge and the Green Bay community is very welcoming; we made some wonderful life-long friends. Yet at times, it became hard to talk about topics beyond the team. I remember pumping gas and being tapped on the shoulder and asked, How’s that Donald Driver contract going? or being asked everywhere I went about Brett, Aaron or some other part of the team. And I was not even a coach or player; they felt it much more than I. The constant encirclement and year-round consumption of the Packers, although a special relationship, led to feeling, as Ron said, like the walls were closing in. I sense Greene felt that as well.
Often when we hear someone leaving to “spend more time with family,” we wonder about a back story. And many who state that reason for leaving have children that have already left home. I take this, though, for what it is: Kevin Greene chose to transition from a “football life” to a more impactful presence with his children at a formative time in their lives. And as every parent knows, that time is fleeting.