The Deal That Put Parcells on the Jets’ Sideline

The Jets had named Bill Parcells a consultant and Bill Belichick their head coach, with Parcells scheduled to take over in 1998. On Feb. 10, 1997, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue ended that arrangement before it could last a season. After more than six hours of meetings with Jets owner Leon Hess and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, he brokered a deal allowing Parcells to coach New York immediately. The price was four draft picks over three years and a $300,000 donation to the Patriots’ charitable foundation.

Parcells had left New England after taking the Patriots to the Super Bowl. His departure followed a season of disagreement with Kraft over how much authority the coach would have over personnel decisions. New York, meanwhile, had finished 1–15 and fired Rich Kotite. The Jets wanted Parcells, but his move was not theirs alone to arrange.

On Jan. 30, Tagliabue ruled that Parcells could not coach or serve as general manager for another team without the Patriots’ permission. The consultant appointment followed in early February. Belichick, New England’s defensive coordinator and a longtime Parcells assistant, would coach the Jets for 1997, then become Parcells’s assistant when Parcells took over the following year.

The arrangement offered New York a way to bring Parcells into the organization without first meeting New England’s demands for compensation. Kraft called the consultant job “a transparent farce” and formally asked Tagliabue to intervene. The dispute was not simply about whether Parcells could move, but what the Patriots would receive for allowing him onto the Jets’ sideline that year.

Kraft had demanded New York’s first overall pick in the 1997 draft. The Jets kept it. After the clubs failed to agree on compensation, both allowed Tagliabue to determine the package: New England received the Jets’ third- and fourth-round selections in 1997, their second-round pick in 1998 and their first-round pick in 1999. The charitable donation was part of the agreement.

The deal gave the Jets the coach they had intended to install a year later and compensated the Patriots for letting him leave immediately. But Kraft later said the picks had not resolved his concerns about the league’s conduct. In ESPN’s 2018 documentary “The Two Bills,” he alleged that the league office had helped the Jets devise the arrangement. “What always bothered me,” Kraft said, “is I think the league office tacitly blessed it and they told them how to do it.”