Do You Love Football?! (6 page)

Anyone who aspires to be a coach usually majors in physical education, as my dad did at Heidelberg College. I ended up graduating from Dayton with a degree in communications because my dad discouraged me from being a PE major. He was reluctant for me to get into coaching because he knew, firsthand, that maybe it was not all that I thought it was cracked up to be.

"It involves a lot of moving around," my dad told me. "Your fate is not going to be determined by just your performance. It's going to be determined by that odd-shaped ball. It bounces funny ways.

"It's not a job where you're going to have a lot of free time. It involves a lot of hours. So don't put all your eggs in one basket."

It was sound advice. What if I got into coaching and three or four years down the road, I decided I hated it? Now what am I going to be? With a degree in communications, maybe I'd be able to do something in that capacity. I also was kind of interested in going into TV broadcasting, in becoming one of those Curt Gowdys I used to imitate in front of the mirror. I could see myself as a sports anchor or even a writer. I liked creative writing and was pretty good at making up stories. I'm happy to say that this isn't one of them, even if there have been some experiences that seem unreal or almost too good to be true.

I enjoyed studying communications. It forced me to do something that a lot of people-especially young people-don't like to do, which is get up and speak before an audience. I learned all about LOMM-large, open, moving mouth. I learned that it was important to enunciate your words, speak clearly, don't slur.

Still, as I've mentioned, my mom always said, "Find your passion." For me it was coaching football. I was never a banner student, but I made damn sure I was solid enough to make it through college because I knew that my lifelong dream was riding on it.

Although I might not have realized it at the time of my graduation, my degree in communications has been helpful throughout my coaching career. It isn't just a matter of being able to express what you think to the media, but also being able to present material to players and other coaches in a classroom-type environment.

I understand the value of using visual aids and creative ways to convey your message to stimulate the viewer. I won't just use the standard coaching videotape with sideline and end-zone views. I'll use little highlight clips with music in the background. Sometimes it's old footage. Sometimes it's footage of next week's opponent.

Sometimes it's individual, private, off-the-field stuff. But it's always short, always quick, and then we're on to the next thing, which might be looking at an acetate image on the overhead projector or drawings on a grease board or a chalkboard. That's how I run our meetings, kind of like The NFL Today on CBS.

I can't begin to tell you how fortunate I am to have a father who is also my mentor and role model and someone who is always there to give me advice that most guys in this business would kill for. Not only that, but he's also my best friend. You're talking about a guy who has helped me through some difficult situations, personally and professionally-a guy who has enjoyed some of the good times and great times with me. He has been there for every aspect of my football career-as a player and as a coach. We've also sat together at numerous Arena League games, cheering like hell for my brother Jay. One of the reasons my dad wanted to get out of coaching and into the personnel side, first with Tampa Bay and later with San Francisco, was so he could travel and scout college players all over the country and end up wherever Jay was playing for the University of Louisville on Saturdays. He got to see Jay play every game of his college career, which was pretty taxing and quite a sacrifice.

Not much has changed since. Between watching me coach in the fall and winter and Jay play in the spring and summer, I think my dad's been to a football game every weekend the whole year. He told me, "I'm sixty-five years old. I can't take much more of this."

While my dad might have steered me toward a different field of study in college, he did give me plenty of direction on how to become the best coach I could possibly be. He told me that the most direct path I could follow to the top of the business was to become a quarterbacks coach. Even though my dad had spent his career coaching running backs, he knew that a quarterbacks coach usually had the best opportunity to become an offensive coordinator and ultimately be the one calling the plays.

I'm sure that wasn't easy for him to admit, because what he was really telling me was that he wanted me to go further in the business than he had gone. He gave me the road map, the compass and whatever else he could give me to get there.

"If you're going to advance in coaching, you have to learn more about the game than just the running backs," my dad told me. "You want to become a guy that understands protections, understands route distributions, understands the audibles. You were a quarterback. You want to be a guy that has the command of the offense that can develop people that touch the ball on every play.

"You want to be a quarterbacks coach. And if you want to be a major-college coordinator/head coach kind of guy, you must learn to communicate with the quarterback. And to become the best quarterbacks coach you can be, you need to learn from the best damn quarterbacks coaches in the world.

"Listen to them. Watch them. Study them. Before you're married, while you're young, do whatever you've got to do to get around these kind of coaches."

In 1986, when I was twenty-three years old, that became my mission in life. I was going to go to the football equivalent of Harvard. I was going to grab hold of a branch on the Bill Walsh tree of coaching knowledge that had grown within the San Francisco 49ers. I was going to practically stalk Mike Holmgren, who at the time was the 49ers' quarterbacks coach and one of the best in the business. I was going to find a way to become a great quarterbacks coach myself.

I'm still on that quest.

FIVE
Whether You're Cutting Film or Cutting a Rug,
You Can't Volunteer Too Much for Knowledge

T HANKS TO MY DAD 'S CONNECTIONS I got an interview to become a graduate assistant on the University of Tennessee coaching staff. The Volunteers had one of the greatest offensive minds at the college level in Walt Harris, their offensive coordinator and still one of the topflight coaches in the world.

Walt, who became head coach at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, was the guru of coaching college quarterbacks at the time. Before joining Johnny Majors's staff at Tennessee he spent three seasons at the University of Illinois, where he developed future NFL quarterbacks Tony Eason, Dave Wilson and Jack Trudeau. Eason and Wilson were first-round picks, while Trudeau was a second-rounder.

Gary Horton, who was one of my dad's scouts when my dad was reassigned from running backs coach to personnel director for the Buccaneers just before John McKay resigned as their head coach, lined up the interview because of a friendship he formed with Walt when they worked together at Illinois. I really owe so much to Gary, who does independent personnel analysis for NFL teams as well as for The Sporting News. It's amazing,

the people you meet and how they impact your life. I'll never be able to thank Gary enough for helping me get an opportunity to interview at Tennessee. My dad was the one who helped prepare me for it years earlier by having me draw all those circles.

Graduate assistants aren't paid. You get meal money, a place to live, and a minimal amount of living expenses. You're basically a glorified gofer, doing a lot of menial tasks for the coaches but also getting the chance to learn from them and do a little bit of actual coaching yourself. Tennessee had six GA spots-three on offense, three on defense. The way I understood it, under NCAA rules at the time, you could only be a GA for two years.

After that it's time to find a job that pays.

To me it sounded like the greatest deal in the world. I was so excited to get behind the wheel of my Pontiac Grand Prix and make that eight-hour drive from Dayton to Knoxville, Tennessee, a place I had known about only from seeing it on TV.

The Volunteers had just won the Sugar Bowl, beating the University of Miami 35-7. As soon as you reached the middle of town you could immediately sense the championship atmosphere surrounding the place. When I got there I just found myself staring in awe at this huge structure they called Neyland Stadium.

Following my dad's advice I made sure I got a haircut and brought along a jacket and tie. I also had on a nice pair of brown leather Dingo boots that I thought would just put me over the top as far as my professional appearance. After that it would be a matter of selling myself to Walt, showing him that I would be exactly what he was looking for-a young guy who would work hard, who wouldn't be a pain in his ass, and who maybe was a good coaching prospect. I must have done okay, because I got the job. As for the part about being a good coaching prospect, I can only guess whether Walt actually thought that, considering he never put me on the board. Thank God, because all I could have drawn were circles-beautiful blank circles with no lines. I was like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes. I knew nothing.

I realized how fortunate I was to be hired. Walt could have gotten anybody he wanted. He could have gotten guys from big-time college programs: Florida, Miami and of course Tennessee.

There were a lot of guys who wanted that job, and he ended up picking a Division III backup quarterback-a totally obscure guy with no knowledge about the business. Go figure.

Walt handed me a playbook and told me to be back after I finished school at Dayton. Spring practice at Tennessee would start a couple of weeks later, so UD accelerated my courses to allow me to complete my studies early enough to make it back to Knoxville and be part of spring practice. The playbook, which was three or four inches thick, might as well have been written in a foreign language. It had all these formations and all these words and numbers that I just didn't understand. I thought I was back in one of those dreaded algebra classes.

After returning to Dayton I met my dad-who was in the area while scouting for the Tampa Bay Bucs at the time-on a couple of occasions just to go over the playbook. Even though different teams and coaches use different terminology, it made sense to him. He would recognize a play and then try to explain it to me by converting it to his terminology. "They call this a two hole; we call it a four hole," he told me. "They call this a three technique; we call it a B-gap player."

My dad did his very best to try and explain that "three technique" and "five technique" were references to where a defensive lineman positioned himself in relation to the offensive lineman. The number indicated the alignment to which the defender was shaded. For instance, the outside shoulder of the offensive guard was a "three technique," while the outside shoulder of the offensive tackle was a "five technique."

I still didn't know what the hell he was talking about. And that made me wonder, at least for a moment or two, whether I really was cut out to be a coach. I started to feel overwhelmed.

There were four, five, six days when I said to myself, Maybe I'm in way, way, way over my head.

Finally I decided I would give coaching a try. I decided that what I didn't know-which was a lot-I was going to learn. I decided that if I worked hard enough at it, if I put in the time and the energy, I could start figuring this stuff out. I decided that I would go after it-that I would burst into this world I knew nothing about with a work ethic that had never been seen. There really wasn't anything for me to lose, because I knew, no matter how well I did in those two years at Tennessee, I wasn't going to begin year three with a full-time spot on the coaching staff or as the offensive coordinator at Florida or the running backs coach at Notre Dame. I was going to have to climb my way up from the bottom.

Being twenty-three and single, I was willing to invest at least the next seven years of my life in finding out if, in fact, coaching was the right career for me. Then I would stop, take a deep breath and see where I had gone and what I had done. In the meantime I wasn't going to let marriage or anything else get in the way of this pursuit. I was all go, go, go, go.

Walt knew that it would take a little time for me to catch on, so he made sure that the assignments he gave me at the beginning were the kind that I could handle. Maybe it was charting plays or running the scout team secondary-introductory duties that I was able to execute while gaining confidence. I also was responsible for coaching the young quarterbacks, and the red-shirt freshmen, and for being sort of the offensive coordinator for the jayvee team that Tennessee had at that time. Walt arranged for me to live with the players in the dorm, which would allow me to be kind of his eyes and ears in there and help reinforce some of the points he wanted to get across to the quarterbacks.

Like the rest of the GAs, I served other purposes beyond helping out with day-to-day football stuff. I'd cut Walt's grass, babysit his two kids, drop his wife off at the airport, pick up his mother-in-law when she flew in for a visit, get his car washed and filled with gas, bring him dinner, get him a cup of coffee. They were assignments I could handle. Doing those chores didn't bother me, though, because I was certain that being around Walt and the rest of those coaches would lead to something good. As my dad pointed out, Johnny Majors always surrounded himself with talented coaches. Look at that staff. Besides having Walt as the offensive coordinator, he had as his secondary coach Ron Zook, who in 2002 became the head coach at Florida. His offensive line coach was Phil Fullmer, who became Tennessee's head coach in 1992 and is the winningest coach in Volunteer history.

That environment was going to help me get better, but it wasn't a case of Walt or any of the coaches sitting me down and teaching me the offense or any of the basics of coaching. They didn't have time for that. It was up to me to find the answers by asking the right questions and making use of all the great resources that were at my fingertips.