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GrundleStiltzkin
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WSJ: College Football’s New Coaching Strategy: Coaching
When Mark Richt took the job as head football coach at the University of Miami in December, he was tasked with revitalizing a struggling program that not long ago was perhaps the premier power in the nation.
To do this, Richt is planning to try something that would be considered faintly eccentric by most football coaches: He’s going to coach football.
His decision to actually coach football was not one he took lightly. When he resigned from Georgia after last season, Richt decided there was only one way he would take another job. “I was going to coach QBs again, I was going to call plays again, I was going to game plan again,” said Richt, who delegated playcalling to his assistants for the majority of his 15-year tenure at Georgia. “You feel like you’re just on the sidelines cheering more than you’re coaching.”
There was a time when the idea that a college head coach would abandon game planning or in-game playcalling would have been as far-fetched as calling for a punt on first-and-10. But as big-time college football programs have morphed into billion-dollar enterprises, head coach have ditched visors and clipboards in favor of blazers and business plans.
Today, the preeminent head coaches in the sport are guys like Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, who are more akin to chief executives. They don’t call every play or obsess over every minor decision but instead oversee a network of middle managers who carry out these smaller tasks.
“You’re just overwhelmed with all the things that you’re doing outside of football,” said former Texas head coach Mack Brown, who came to epitomize the CEO style of coaching during his days with the Longhorns. “It’s really, really hard to figure out where you put all your energy,”
In the copycat world of college football, their approach has since been emulated by coaches across the country. But this season, Richt is one of a number of college coaches who, for one reason or another, seemingly woke up one morning and decided to reacquaint themselves with the world of X’s and O’s.
“I’m just going to be a little more hands-on,” said North Carolina coach Larry Fedora, a former offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State who says he will be closer involved in this season’s playcalling. “The tough thing is that you’re pulled in so many directions.”
Auburn’s Gus Malzahn is another coach who has resolved to spend more time coaching this season. When he sat down this off-season to evaluate last year’s disappointing 7-6 campaign, Malzahn realized that he felt too much like a CEO.
“One thing that really hit me pretty hard is that I got to be more active with the daily X’s and O’s and coaching that goes with that,” said Malzahn. “At the end of the day, I’m a football coach. That’s what I look at as my strength.”
For Richt, that means he’s going to be heavily involved in the offensive playcalling and also work closely with the quarterbacks. That might seem like an obvious assignment for a coach who made his name as a highly regarded assistant at Florida State, where he was heavily involved in the offensive playcalling and also worked closely with the quarterbacks.
But many head coaches say that the biggest challenge of leading a college program is coming to terms with the scope of the job. They are responsible for overseeing massive programs that can include more than 100 players and dozens of staff members, plus another 100-plus high-school prospects they are furiously trying to recruit.
The job is so time-consuming, Fedora says, that it takes you away from the area of expertise that was the reason you got hired in the first place.
While the day-to-day responsibilities at a big-time program can take a coach away from the practice field, coaches say something strange can happen on game days: Often times, they realize they actually have very little to do.
With an offensive coordinator responsible for calling plays on offense and the defensive coordinator doing the same on defense, many head coaches say they find themselves with little to do after kickoff other than call timeouts. Mostly, they spend three-and –a-half hours stomping up and down he sidelines and yelling at people.
Coaches like David Beaty of Kansas have come to realize that this is complete lunacy. Beaty plans to take over playcalling this season after handing it off to an assistant in his first year with the Jayhawks, when they went 0-12.
During his first season as a college head coach, Beaty thought there were too many other things to set in order to worry about playcalling. But without that responsibility, Beaty said he often felt like a kid watching toy cars drive around a track but without a remote control to operate one of them. “You want to be driving those cars around, controlling those pieces,” he said.
Exactly how much these coaches improve their teams by taking a more active role remains to be seen, but there is something to be said for the alternative approach. While Saban doesn’t call plays on offense or defense for the Crimson Tide, he occupies his time on the practice field by overseeing Alabama’s special teams.
Even in that limited coaching role, he has found a way to make a pretty significant impact on game day. In last season’s national championship game against Clemson, with the game deadlocked early in the fourth quarter, it was Saban who called for a surprise onside kick. Alabama recovered, scored two plays later and never lost that lead. He was so pleased that he actually smiled. The season ended not long afterward with Saban once again covered in confetti.
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Saban and Urban Legend obsess over every fucking detail there is