Tom E. Curran • E-mail

In minute 32 of a 35-minute conversation, Mike Martz says simply, “People are determined to keep me out of the league. It’s been going on for three years and at this point, I can’t fight it. I just can’t fight it. Three years of people putting it out there that I’m a high-maintenance lunatic.

“I keep asking, ‘Who says these things?’ No one will tell you. But I just put two and two together. But when you have a tag and the same damaging things get said two or three times it becomes very hard to shake that tag.”

He’s right, that tag’s pretty well stuck on there. It reads: “Stubborn. Arrogant. Hard to work with or for and too smart for his own good.”

As a result, Mike Martz, one of the great offensive minds of any generation, is out of work. And if nothing breaks, for the first time since 1998, the NFL will be Martzless.

The bad rap lives, Martz believes, thanks to the regular care and feeding from his former co-workers with the St. Louis Rams, John Shaw and Jay Zygmunt.

“Most of the perception came from St. Louis,” says Martz. “There was so much bitterness and anger and it all stems from my relationship with Jay. Really, it emanated from a couple people and I’ve now been dogged with it throughout my career.”

Martz, of course, wouldn’t be the only coach in the league toting around those kinds of labels. Bill Belichick’s had them applied to him repeatedly and he’s done pretty well in New England. Just as Martz did pretty well during his tenure as head coach with St. Louis.

Remember that Martz had never been an an NFL coordinator before 1999 when he unveiled "The Greatest Show on Turf." His Rams set a record for points scored and won the Super Bowl. Head coach Dick Vermeil stepped down and Martz succeeded him as head coach.

From 2000 to 2005, the Rams went 53-32. They made it to another Super Bowl after the 2001 season, normally a feather in the cap of a second-year head coach. But the Rams were upset by the Patriots. And the aftershocks of that game are still being felt by Martz. He got reamed for not running Marshall Faulk enough against a New England defense loaded up to stop Kurt Warner and Co.

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“Stubborn” and “arrogant” were the verdict for that. And a power-grab resulted in which Zygmunt, the president of football operations (fired two months ago in St. Louis), began exerting himself in personnel struggles. Even though Martz was supposed to have final say, team president John Shaw often sided with Zygmunt and the lines of battle were drawn.

A November 2005 article written by then-Sports Illustrated writer Michael Silver detailed how bad it had gotten.

Silver wrote: “The coach, sources say, added to the tension within the organization with his obsession over peripheral matters – such as the color of the locker room carpet and the selection of player photos for the halls at Rams Park – and his brusque treatment of employees. ‘Some of the things he did were ludicrous and crazy, and a lot of it came down to power and control,’ (a) former player says. ‘He was so insecure, so worried that people were out to get him, that he would do things to make everyone feel that he was in charge.’

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“Late last season, according to team sources, the coach bristled after coming to believe that employees in the Rams’ business department had an office pool on when he would be fired. In Martz’s defense, there have been indications that his paranoia was sometimes justified. Just before the start of the '05 season St. Louis-Post Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz wrote a column naming various team executives who Miklasz had been told were disloyal to Martz and imploring them to stop undercutting the coach. A few days later, Miklasz reported, one of those executives, director of football administration Samir Suleiman, left a message on Miklasz’s voicemail stating, ‘Tell your source that I'm not a back-stabber; I’m a f------ throat slasher, and he’ll know the difference before all is said and done.’ Suleiman, who is Zygmunt’s righthand man, was reprimanded by Shaw but remained with the organization.”