Parcells, Bill

Bill Parcells, byname of Duane Charles Parcells, also called the Tuna and the Big Tuna, (born August 22, 1941, Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.), American professional gridiron football coach and executive who coached the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) to Super Bowl victories in 1987 and 1991.

Parcells spent most of his childhood in New Jersey, where he acquired the nickname “Bill” from teachers who confused him with another student. In high school Parcells played football, basketball, and baseball. Parcells was offered athletic scholarships to several colleges in both baseball and football. He chose to play football at New York’s Colgate University but was dissatisfied with the team there and transferred after one year to Wichita State University in Kansas. He had a solid college career as a linebacker and was chosen by the Detroit Lions during the seventh round of the NFL’s 1964 draft. Parcells was cut during training camp, however, and immediately turned to coaching.

Over the next 15 years Parcells held assistant coaching positions at Hastings (Nebraska) College, Wichita State, the United States Military Academy, Florida State University, Vanderbilt University, and Texas Tech University. He received his first head coaching job at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1978. Frustrated with the recruiting that comes with coaching a college team, he accepted an assistant coaching position in 1979 with the New York Giants. His family resisted moving, however, and Parcells soon quit the Giants and came back to Colorado to begin a real estate career. Sensing his unhappiness, his wife urged him to return to football, and in 1980 he became the linebackers coach for the New England Patriots. In 1981 Parcells returned to the Giants as defensive coordinator. When the team’s head coach left at the end of 1982, Parcells was promoted to that position.

Parcells quickly developed the Giants into a powerhouse team. After the Giants posted a disappointing 3–12–1 record in his first year guiding the team, Parcells led them to playoff berths in 1984 and 1985. He gained a measure of notoriety in 1985 when he was doused with the contents of a Gatorade sports drink cooler after a victory, a celebration that soon became commonplace after significant wins at all levels of football—and was carried over to other sports. In 1986 the Giants won 14 of their 16 games and steamrolled through the playoffs to capture the first Super Bowl title in franchise history in January 1987, which was also the Giants’ first league championship of any kind since 1956. After Parcells’s Giants won another Super Bowl in 1991, he retired and then signed with NBC Sports to serve as an analyst for its football broadcasts.

Parcells did not leave the field for long, however. In 1993 he became head coach of a New England Patriots team that was coming off of a 2–14 season. He turned the franchise around and led the Patriots to a Super Bowl appearance opposite the Green Bay Packers at the end of the 1996 season. In so doing, he became the second coach in NFL history (after Don Shula) to take two different teams to the Super Bowl, though the Patriots lost to the Packers. An acrimonious relationship with Patriots ownership led to Parcells’s departure soon after the Super Bowl. He then became head coach and general manager of the New York Jets, which he took from a 1–15 record the year before his arrival to a 12–4 mark and a berth in the conference championship game in his second season. He stopped coaching the team after the 1999 season and stayed on as general manager for one more year before retiring once more in 2000.

In 2003 Parcells was lured back into the sport to become head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. He again took a team that had double-digit losses in the season before he arrived and led it to the playoffs, this time in his first season with the franchise, as the Cowboys went 10–6 but lost in the first round of the postseason. After guiding the team to a cumulative 34–30 record over four seasons, he retired from coaching a final time in 2007. Parcells then took over the football operations for the Miami Dolphins, where he oversaw an improvement of 10 wins in his first year with the franchise, which tied the NFL record for the greatest win increase from the previous season. In 2010 he ceded control of the Dolphins’ operations.

Parcells was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013. He published the memoirs The Final Season: My Last Year As Head Coach in the NFL (2000; written with Will McDonough) and Parcells: A Football Life (2014; written with Nunyo Demasio).