Robert Kraft and Bill Parcells still have some lingering frostiness.
Parcells had an acrimonious split with the Patriots after New England lost to the Packers in the Super Bowl in early 1997.
In an upcoming episode of the documentary “Dynasty” on Apple TV+, Parcells and Kraft traded barbs.
As covered by MassLive, Parcells wanted personnel control but groused that “incompetent” people were in charge of assembling the 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 in the documentary.
“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.”
For his part, Kraft felt that Parcells was putting himself ahead of the team.
“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.”
Parcells had coached the Patriots for four seasons, beginning in 1993.
It does not come as a surprise that he was upset about a lack of personnel control.
”It’s just like a friend of mine told me,” Parcells famously said amid his split from Kraft, ”’If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”’
Parcells left the Patriots for a four-year tenure with the division-rival Jets and was replaced in New England by Pete Carroll.
Rumors were circulating leading up to the Super Bowl berth that Parcells was flirting with the Jets, and this did not sit well with Drew Bledsoe, New England’s quarterback at the time.
“That was a frustrating thing for us as players,” Bledsoe said in the documentary. “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.”