This time, Pepper Johnson was sure his chance was coming. He had finally stepped out from Bill Belichick’s long shadow. His old team, the Giants, was talking to him about the defensive coordinator job he has always wanted.
Then his phone rang on Thursday morning and Tom Coughlin told him, “We’re going in a different direction.” And just like that, Johnson got that same feeling of frustration he has felt for years.
“I feel bottled up,” Johnson, the former Giants linebacker, told the Daily News on Thursday afternoon. “I have a lot of knowledge and a lot of information that I feel like I just have to keep to myself.”
Johnson, 50, would prefer to share that knowledge, but after 15 years as an NFL assistant coach he feels stuck in a role as a position coach — a fact that remained unchanged on Thursday when the Giants passed him over and rehired Steve Spagnuolo as defensive coordinator instead. Johnson said he felt like he could give so much more to the game if he were running a defense of his own. And he thought getting out of New England — after 14 years of coaching the Patriots’ linebackers and defensive linemen — would help push him in that direction, especially after he was passed over by Belichick for the Patriots defensive coordinator job in 2012.
At first it seemed to work. After Johnson spent a season coaching the Buffalo Bills defensive line in 2014, the Giants called to interview him as soon as they fired defensive coordinator Perry Fewell last week. And they weren’t doing it as a favor to an old friend, either. A team source insisted Coughlin was genuinely interested in Johnson as a candidate for the job.
Amazingly, it was his first-ever interview for a defensive coordinator position, and Johnson said he left thinking he had a real shot.
“I thought it went real well,” Johnson said. “I went out after the interview doing that old Toyota commercial, jumping and clicking my heels.”
Now, though, he may instead be left out of a job completely. Johnson said he was told by Rex Ryan, the new Bills coach, that a job would be waiting for him on Ryan’s staff if things didn’t work out with the Giants. Johnson said he spoke to Ryan about that as recently as Wednesday. But on Thursday, the Bills announced Ryan’s new staff and there was no mention of Johnson. And even though Johnson is technically still under contract in Buffalo, it appeared that every defensive job on the staff was filled.
There are still jobs available around the league, though, including several at defensive coordinator as teams continue to hire new head coaches who hire new staffs. So as frustrated as Johnson is with the road blocks he’s been facing, he remains optimistic that his dream will eventually come true.
“Moving away from the Patriots, spending a year in Buffalo, I was hoping it would open doors and open some eyes, that more people would be watching,” Johnson said, “and (that some team) will give me a call before all this is said and done.”
