Though more than two and a half decades have passed since they parted ways, sore feelings are still simmering between Robert Kraft and Bill Parcells.
In the third episode of “The Dynasty: New England Patriots” on Apple+, the doc-series takes a look at the friction between Kraft and Parcells that came to a head at Super Bowl XXXI, with input from both sides. Ahead of the game, it leaked that Parcells was planning to leave New England to coach the Jets, and that proved accurate — Parcells didn’t take the team plane home with his players after a crushing loss to the Packers.
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For Parcells, the reasoning was simple: Kraft wouldn’t give him personnel control, and instead empowered people he believed were “incompetent” to construct the Patriots roster.
“We finally got some success, but I felt like Kraft wasn’t always in line with the things that I knew to be in the best interest of building a team. Kraft had no real background in football, and in his inexperience, took the draft away from me and he gave it to somebody else,” Parcells said. “I felt like some people that were incompetent were making decisions for the organization personnel-wise, and I didn’t like it. I knew I wasn’t going back to the Patriots.”
On Kraft’s end, he felt his big-name coach behaved selfishly.
“With Coach Parcells, I didn’t feel he always put the team first,” Kraft said. “He was making decisions that were best for Bill Parcells, as opposed (to) for the New England Patriots. I promised myself that in the future, I would find a coach that truly put team first.”
It caused a massive distraction in the days leading up a 35-21 loss to Green Bay in January of 1997, and starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe offered a player’s perspective on the awkwardness of that Super Bowl week in New Orleans.
“That was a frustrating thing for us as players,” Bledsoe said. “For us to go to the Super Bowl after being the worst team in the league, it was a pretty big accomplishment. And that was not the story during the week of the Super Bowl. The story was whether or not Parcells was going to go to the Jets.”
