Chargers Hope Turner's Past Isn't Prologue

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 17, 2007

SAN DIEGO -- Long before he became the mastermind behind the San Diego Chargers, with his harem of superstars in lightning-bolt helmets and an office from which he can gaze out across Murphy Canyon, A.J. Smith would spend many of his days inside a closet of a room, alone with nothing but a television and a pile of football game videotape.

This was a beautiful place, for in the darkness the tapes never lied. They gave a glimpse into a football man's soul. And Smith, as an advance scout for the Buffalo Bills in the early 1990s, spent hours looking into the heart of a Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator named Norv Turner. Super Bowls loomed, the Cowboys would break the Bills twice in four January Sundays, and Smith wanted to understand the genius. How was it that a man could be bequeathed Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith and find a way to let them all shine at once?

So maybe it isn't absurd that when pro football's best backroom melodrama finally played itself out and Marty Schottenheimer and his 0-2 playoff record with San Diego were dispatched, A.J. Smith handed one of the most talented teams in the NFL to Turner. This despite Turner's 58-82-1 record as a head coach with the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders, and the howls of laughter that followed the announcement.

But those cackling are not football men the way Smith is a football man. They did not sit in the room for hours in Buffalo, crawling into the brain of Norv Turner. They are not scouts the way Smith, despite his title as Chargers general manager, truly will be a scout, always searching the tapes for a truth no one else can see.

"Game day, in the playoffs, when it's turned up a notch big-time, there are critical, critical [coaching] decisions that must be made," Smith said. "I'll just say four, five or six decisions that take place in a game, critical decisions made by the head coach. Consult with the coordinators, yes, but you still have to make the call. The strategies, the chess game, it's all very important. You have to make the right call.

"I think Norv has this."

There is no great supporting body of evidence for his belief. Turner does not have a sparkling postseason record to call upon, as he has led a team to the playoffs in exactly one season. Unlike Schottenheimer, who has been to the playoffs 13 times and then failed miserably when it came to the four, five or six big-game decisions, most of Turner's seasons were over by the new year.

The word on Turner has always been this: He's a great offensive coordinator, but a man unsuited to be a head coach.

"Bill Belichick was in Cleveland once and there are a lot of opinions of him there," Smith said. "And there are a lot of opinions of him as a coordinator under Bill Parcells. Then stepping outside of the box is [Patriots owner Robert] Kraft. He goes with his instincts, he makes a decision, the rest is history."

The coach who would be the next Belichick, about to rewrite his own history, sat at a table next to the Chargers practice fields the other day. Turner is a kind man, a gracious man, forever haunted by the label of being too nice to be a head coach

"That's a knock that just isn't fair," he said. "There are things that I am that people perceive differently. When I'm with our players and I'm with my team, I'm vocal and aggressive and I make it clear what I am asking of them. I'm not going to throw a tirade in front of the media that's self-serving. I'm going to deal with it in our team, in the meeting room and on the practice field. The great thing is there are some guys in this league -- and I'm not going to put myself in this category since [Colts Coach Tony Dungy] just won a Super Bowl -- but there are some guys being successful with what some would call being mild-mannered.

"Can I make it work? We'll find out. But I certainly see myself making it work."

He knows what is being said about him. He realizes people think he is at once the luckiest man in football yet also the worst hire Smith could have made. But he said he ignores such talk. He knows the Chargers are gifted, that he has been handed the keys to a team many believe could drive itself to the Super Bowl and that the only thing getting in its way is the head coach.

In many ways, Turner has ownership of the Chargers' two AFC West titles in the last three seasons. He gave this team its offense back in 2001, when the was the team's offensive coordinator and befriended the club's then-assistant general manager, a man named A.J. Smith, who had dozens of questions about how Turner made the 1990s Cowboys work. Back then, the team had just drafted TCU running back LaDainian Tomlinson. Turner designed the offense around Tomlinson's skills, and 9,176 rushing yards and 117 total touchdowns later, Tomlinson has become the best offensive player in the league.

But even with that legacy lingering on the field behind him, Turner found himself defensive. He complained that the past has not accurately been chronicled, especially his tenure with the Redskins and the memories of his late-season firing in 2000 after a team predicted to win the Super Bowl fizzled out at 7-6.

"We turned that program around in 1999," he said. "We won the division, we were 6-3 when Brad Johnson got hurt. There were a lot of things going on. We had three owners, you know? There's a lot of things that happened there. I took over a team that was 3-13 [in his first season], but we fought through a lot of struggles to get back to where we were a playoff team and a respectable team. I don't want to sound defensive, but that one is not portrayed the way it should be."

Turner was asked about Daniel Snyder, the Redskins owner who seemed to torment him for so many months, and before the question could be finished he shook his head. That time doesn't bother him, he said. That's just what happens in this business he has chosen.

"If I bought a team and I told the guy, 'You got to play this quarterback, he might decide to get another coach,' " Turner said.

Someone asked if Snyder really did that.

"Sure he did," Turner replied.

Another reporter, unfamiliar with the history of Turner's downfall in Washington, asked whom Snyder wanted to play.

"We were playing Brad Johnson through that period of time," Turner said, then paused. "He liked, um, Jeff George."

And the men gathered at the table with Turner broke into uproarious laughter. The coach smirked.

Someone else asked Turner if he had learned anything from his seasons with the Redskins, and later his 11- and 12-loss seasons in Oakland. He smiled again.

"I'm excited to have a field goal kicker who goes 3 for 3 and hits a 50-yarder," he said, in reference to the many special teams failures of his Redskins years. "Because if I had him in Washington, we wouldn't be having these discussions. Yeah, you can say, 'What did you learn?' Yeah. Learn to have a field goal kicker."

Smith and Schottenheimer never got along and rarely spoke the last couple of years. Smith's standard reply to all queries about the previous coach is, "The views of how to win a world championship between myself and Coach Schottenheimer were galaxies apart."

The general manager never appreciated Schottenheimer's rigidity, nor the seemingly panicked decisions he made in the most important games. He has longed for someone creative enough to design a great game plan for his collection of stars, but also someone confident enough in that plan to not abandon it when things are tough. He wants a coach who will trust that Tomlinson will do something spectacular even if he has only 30 yards through three quarters. The best ones, Smith is convinced, always find a way to win.

Smith was asked how he possibly could have worked with Schottenheimer if the two didn't talk and had such different visions.

"I think it's over now, isn't it?" Smith said. "I think at zero and two we didn't have much success in the postseason. And there were other situations that I did not like during the season as far as games. One in particular, early in the year, on the East Coast [when Schottenheimer didn't throw on several long-yardage situations in a loss at Baltimore]. There are lots of reasons."

Then the general manager changed the subject. Enough about him and Schottenheimer. What happened with Schottenheimer in Washington? How come Snyder gave him a four-year contract the year after he fired Turner, yet Schottenheimer was gone after a season when coach and owner could not see eye-to-eye?

"To me that's a remarkable story, this is back burner to that, it really is," he said.

He left the thought dangling, as if Snyder and Schottenheimer's feud somehow justified his own battles with the same former coach. Much the way Turner saw his own vindication in Snyder's insistence on playing George.

Maybe now, with one of the NFL's most talented teams, each has found the man who is right for the other.