Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches by Gary Myers

didn’t have a lot of information initially, but the Ravens organization placed its faith in Lewis. “The hard thing is there was no one to call for reference to say, ‘Okay, what happens when your best player is indicted on two counts of murder? How did you handle this?’ What was the case study? It had never happened before.”
    Four months later, Lewis reached an agreement to plead guilty to misdemeanor obstruction of justice and avoided jail time. The murder charges were dropped.
    There is nothing in the playbook, nothing one coach can learn from another, that Gibbs could reference to help him deal with the phone call he was about to receive. The Redskins returned from Tampa on the night of November 25, 2007, after losing to the Bucs. They were reeling at 5–6, the last two losses without their brilliant young safety Sean Taylor, who had become a team leader.
    Gibbs’s phone rang at six o’clock on the morning of November 26. It was Dan Snyder. It could not be good.
    “Sean has been shot,” Snyder said.
    “How bad is it? Where is he shot?” Gibbs said.
    “He’s shot in the leg,” Snyder said.
    Gibbs’s first thought was, okay, it’s only the leg; Sean is going to be fine. This was a strong twenty-four-year old athlete. He might need time to recover, but at least he hadn’t been shot in the head or the chest. Gibbs didn’t have enough information. “Not realizing exactly where he got shot and the fact that he bled so much,” Gibbs said.
    Taylor was in bed with his two Jackies in his house in the upscale area of Palmetto Bay when he heard intruders. He reachedfor a machete that he kept by the bed for emergency situations. This was an emergency. The house had been burglarized on November 17, but no one had been home. A kitchen knife had been left on the bed. The intruders clearly didn’t expect anybody to be home this time, either. Taylor played for the Redskins, and he was not supposed to be in Miami.
    Taylor tried to block the bedroom door. Two shots were fired. One hit the wall. The other hit Taylor in the leg in the upper thigh area near the femoral artery. Jackie called 911 on her cell phone at 1:40 a.m. Taylor was airlifted to the trauma unit of Jackson Memorial Hospital.
    He underwent seven hours of surgery beginning at 5:30 a.m. He lost a massive amount of blood and required seven transfusions. His heart stopped beating twice during surgery. He was unresponsive and unconscious when he came out of surgery. Back at Redskins Park, Gibbs and team chaplain Brett Fuller addressed the players at noon and told them Taylor was in critical condition. Snyder flew to Miami in his private plane and took running back Clinton Portis and others with him. Portis and Taylor were tight from their days together at the University of Miami. Portis played the first two years of his career with the Denver Broncos but was traded to the Redskins for cornerback Champ Bailey two months before the Redskins selected Taylor in the first round.
    Portis had seen the change in his friend. “It’s hard to expect a man to grow up overnight,” he was quoted in the
Washington Post
. “But ever since he had this child, it was like a new Sean. And everybody around here knew it. He was always smiling, always happy, always talking about his child.”
    There was a shred of optimism when it was reported the night of the surgery that Taylor squeezed the doctor’s hand and made facial expressions. It was false hope. He was dead at 3:30 the next morning.
    The coaches’ manual does not provide instructions for how to handle a locker room in mourning when a teammate is shot todeath in the middle of the season. There was no crisis management team to call in. Football teams are like families. At least the good ones are.
    “We wind up losing Sean. You never plan for that,” Gibbs said. “Coaches go through a lot of things, but you don’t go through that. We certainly didn’t have a plan. You just kind of embark on something like that,