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Two Hot to Stop

Despite the recent trend of hiring offensive coaches, McMackin and Hunley are future head coaches from the defensive side of the ball
by: Richard Scott
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According to the old cliche, defense wins championships and offense sells tickets, so if the rising number of offensive-related hires in recent years tells us anything, it's that college presidents, athletic directors and major boosters doing the hiring must be more interested in selling tickets than winning championships.

But what factor sells tickets more than winning championships? Just ask the folks at Oklahoma, where coach Bob Stoops and the Sooners are the hottest ticket West of the Mississippi. Did we happen to mention that Stoops was a defensive coordinator at Florida and Kansas State before he became a head coach for the first time two years ago?

That fact didn't get past Texas Tech defensive coordinator Greg McMackin. Then again, not much gets past McMackin. Not in the film room, the staff room or on the football field.

McMackin knows that Oklahoma didn't do Big 12 rival Texas Tech any favors this past season when the Sooners won the national college football championship, but Stoops helped McMackin and every major college defensive coordinator gain a small share of that national spotlight.

"I felt like Oklahoma and Oregon State were the two best-coached teams in the country last year," McMackin says. "There's no doubt that Bob Stoops is a great coach. I get to watch him a lot (up close and on film) and I admire him a lot. Plus, (Auburn head coach) Tommy Tuberville was a defensive coordinator who's made it. He and I worked together at Miami. I also worked at Miami with (Colorado State head coach) Sonny Lubick and he was a great defensive coordinator before he became a head coach."

In a more just and fair world, defensive coordinators would share that spotlight more equitably with offensive-minded coaches. In a more perfect world, the best spots would be reserved for those defensive coaches who stop the other teams' offensive geniuses, take the ball away and either score with it or hand it to over their own offensive gurus. In that same world, McMackin's name would be on those lists of top coaching candidates that every athletic director keeps in his top drawer or the back of his mind.

Get ready to see worlds collide. The time is coming when McMackin and the people doing the hiring will get together and come to an agreement, and that time is coming closer and closer as those people see the offensive undercurrent on his resume.

"It seems like there is a real tendency toward hiring coaches on the offensive side of the ball," McMackin says. "A lot of times the excitement of football for a lot of people comes from the offensive side of the ball, and I can understand that. I think because you can count the numbers and the touchdowns, sometimes offensive guys are hired because offense seems more exciting.

"True football coaches and students of the game know how important it is to have a solid program based on strong defense. But the fortunate thing for me is that I've been with a lot of great offensive coaches in my career - coaches like Dennis Erickson, Jack Elway, Mouse Davis, June Jones - and I've always wanted to work with great offensive coaches.

"For one thing, they're going to be successful when it comes to scoring touchdowns. The other thing is that I've learned a lot from them. I've learned so much from the offensive coaches about how to attack the defense. They allowed me to learn more about defense, but also gave me a great background for offensive football."

If the 52-year-old McMackin is growing impatient waiting for a head coaching job at the major college level, he must be hiding it as effectively as he disguises coverages. Some of that can be traced to his experience with offensive-minded head coaches who entrusted their defenses to McMackin and let him run his own show. Some of it can also be attributed to his attitude and approach toward his work.

"It's not that frustrating for me, really, because I've had a taste of it in a way - because almost everywhere I've been, I've had the kind of jobs where I've been the head coach on the defensive side of the ball," McMackin says. "Just like now, I've got a great situation at Texas Tech. (Tech head coach) Mike Leach and the people there have made it a great situation for me. I love what I'm doing."

A love of football, teaching and communicating led McMackin into the coaching business after his college football career as a defensive back at Southern Oregon.

His ability to turn that passion into experience and expertise helped him climb the ladder. His first experience came as a graduate assistant at Arizona in 1969-70, followed by a head coaching job at Aloha High School and the defensive coordinator's job at Western Oregon State College from 1973-76.

McMackin moved on to Idaho as the defensive coordinator for three seasons, then joined Elway at San Jose State as the assistant head coach/recruiting coordinator/secondary coach from 1978-84. He followed Elway to Stanford and coached the linebackers for two years before he joined Davis as a secondary coach with the USFL's Denver Gold in 1985.

When the USFL folded, McMackin climbed back on the coaching ladder as the head coach/ assistant athletic director at Oregon Tech. After five years at Tech, McMackin became a Division I-A defensive coordinator for the first time at Utah under Ron McBride. After two years, he spent the next two years at Navy before joining Erickson at Miami in 1993. McMackin went on to spend seven seasons with Erickson with both Miami and the NFL's Seattle Seahawks.

When Erickson's staff was dismissed following the 1998 season, McMackin joined Jones at Hawaii for the 1999 season, where the Rainbows experienced the most amazing turnaround in college football history, going from 0-12 to 8-4 in just one season. McMackin then moved on to Texas Tech, where he accepted a multi-year contract to become one of the nation's best-paid coordinators.

Along the way, McMackin has established a legacy of successful defenses, from the top-ranked defenses of Miami's national championship team to the Seattle defense that rose from 30th in the NFL to one of the league's best in all categories. Even more important, he learned a lot of valuable lessons that come with experience and working with top offensive coaches.

"Jack Elway was the guy who pretty much started it for me," McMackin says. "I learned a foundation from him - his organization, his basics, his recruiting, his methods, his approach to the game."

Of Davis, the coach who made the run-and-shoot offense famous, McMackin says, "There's nobody who gets along better with players than Mouse. I also learned a lot about offense from him, about how to throw the football and read things, and then I turned it around and applied it to the defense."

His experience at Oregon Tech, where he did just about everything but mow the fields and wash the jocks, helped McMackin gain valuable experience in the areas of administration and organization, from operating within a budget to raising funds. He also applied the lessons he had learned on defense to the offensive side of the ball. Having already worked with Davis and Jones (Davis' offensive coordinator in Denver), McMackin knew he wanted to throw the ball in a pro-style offense and his teams went on to break 47 school records and lead the nation in passing

"Even though it was a small college job, it gave me a chance to coach offense," McMackin says. "A lot of coaches, if they have a chance to coach on the other side of the ball like I did at Oregon Tech, will learn so much. When I got that opportunity, I had been defending people all my career and people had been throwing at me, so I threw at them and it was a lot of fun. I had a ball."

With McBride, the lessons were very different, and very helpful. "He taught me about toughness, especially mental toughness and offensive line play, defensive line play, how to win in the trenches," McMackin says. "When we went in there they had been the worst defense in the country for four years, and in two years we led the WAC in defense."

With Jones, McMackin learned a lot about building attitude, confidence and chemistry in a program that had lost 16 consecutive games and had not won a road game in seven years.

"That year at Hawaii may have been the most fun year I've ever had in coaching," McMackin says. "I learned a lot from how he dealt with players, how we got better week to week, how we overcame the ups and downs, got rid of some guys who were really hurting the team's attitude and just turned around the whole psyche of the program and brought the whole team together."

No one has influenced McMackin more than Erickson, a coach McMackin considers his mentor on several levels.

"He's who I would call 'the master coach,'" McMackin says. "I really think he's the best coach in the business. He's got all the facets of the game working for him. He's a great recruiter. He's a great organizer. He deals with players and coaches well. He's the guy I've learned more from than anyone else, on both sides of the ball.

"One of the most important factors that makes Dennis a great coach is the fact that even though he's an offensive coach, he knows how important winning on defense is and how important that is to the scale of the winning concept. He always wanted top players on defenses and recruited that way. Even at Seattle, he always brought in top defensive players because he knew you always had a chance to win if you had great defense."

Now that he's with Leach, who runs the offense and gives McMackin total control over the defense, McMackin continues to learn, grow and apply those lessons.

"Mike has given me a great opportunity at Texas Tech and has allowed me to do the things I want to do on the defensive side of the ball," McMackin says. "He's another great offensive coach who helps me understand what's going on with the offensive side of the ball." Add it all together, and McMackin says, "if I ever do get the opportunity to be a head coach at the major college level, all of these guys have helped me create a good offensive package."

In the meantime, McMackin remains a defensive specialist with an offensive attitude toward the defensive side of the ball. McMackin isn't one of those defensive coaches who remain content to just slow down opposing offenses and wait for the offense to make a mistake. Instead, he runs an attacking scheme designed to force mistakes and create scoring opportunities for his own team.

In that way, his defenses tend to mirror the aggressive schemes of the offenses he's been around.

"Every team has a personality and every defense has a personality," McMackin says. "The guys I've worked with have had a wide-open offensive personality, and that's reflected in the personality I've developed for our defenses.

"We teach that wide-open attacking style of defense. We want to be an attacking, swarming defense and we want to make big plays. I think a lot of that comes from the background of the coaches I've worked with and been around.

"For example, we want to score on defense. In the NFL, we set an NFL record with 14 defensive touchdowns in a season. The year before that we had 10 defensive touchdowns. We had seven defensive touchdowns last year (at Texas Tech) and we had eight at Hawaii. Everywhere we've been we've scored on defense."

McMackin's timing couldn't be any better. On the field, college football has never been more wide open than it is today, with offenses spreading the field and throwing the ball in record numbers, and defenses reacting with aggressive schemes designed to stop the quarterback before he can throw - or at least rattle him before he can make a decent read. Off the field, this engaging style of play attracts and empowers young defensive players, making it a recruiting advantage in much the same way college basketball coaches have used pressing defense, fast-break offense and the three-pointer to attract top recruits.

The fundamental elements of tackling, blocking and hard-nosed toughness remain universally true for every team, but coaching at the various levels from high school to the pros, has helped McMackin realize the game can actually be fun to play. That's one major reason why he likes to turn players loose in an aggressive system.

"I still think that's the most important thing - for the kids to have fun," McMackin says. "That comes from my background as a teacher and communicator. I went to a small college, and my whole background has been education and communication, and the coaches I've worked with have been teachers. You have to make it fun and communicate that to your players so they can have fun. That brings out the best in them."

McMackin's experience at various levels of the game has also helped him realize where he wants to spend the rest of his career.

"I've been at every level and it's the same game - you're just playing with bigger, faster, stronger players the higher you go," McMackin says, "but I prefer college over the professional ranks because I still believe you can reach kids and make a big difference in kids' lives at the college level and influence their future.

"I think having fun has a lot to do with that, but you also have to get to know the kids on a personal level and be able to communicate to them."

Whether he's a defensive coordinator or a head coach, McMackin will continue to teach, communicate and have fun, and he's not going to waste any time waiting for the phone to ring with a job offer.

Sure, McMackin still wants to be a head coach, and he's confident he's more than ready and able to be a head coach, but if the "right job" doesn't come along, McMackin already figures he has the right job.

"I've been in some great situations with some great people, so I wasn't really spending any time looking for jobs," McMackin says. "I was with Dennis at Miami and Seattle for seven years and I wasn't looking around at that time. I've got a great situation now at Texas Tech and my family is happy, so it's not like I'm looking to move.

"But being a head coach, that's the last thing I'd like to do. I've pretty much coached every position and coached at every level, and the one last goal I have is to be a major college head coach, if it were the right situation, the right job and the right people.

"I'd like to utilize the thoughts and ideas I have gained from guys like Mike, Dennis, June and Mouse and the other coaches I've worked with. For a long time, I've worked at doing the things that will allow me to be a head coach, and I'd like to be able to use them in the right situation."


"True football coaches and students of the game know how important it is to have a solid program based on strong defense. But the fortunate thing for me is that I've been with a lot of great offensive coaches in my career..."

-McMackin

Ricky Hunley earned his first head coaching job when he was just a kid. It didn't have anything to do with football, but it had everything to do with leadership and winning in a place where losing was a daily fact of life.

"We grew up poor - we were always poor," says Hunley, who grew up as one of 10 kids in the projects in Petersburg, Va. "My mom instilled a system of responsibility and accountability in us at a very, very young age. We all had to look out for each other, especially the next child underneath us (in age). Everyone had to take care of someone, and the older you were, the more kids you were responsible for.

"She wanted us to go to college, but we didn't have any money for college, so I figured I'd go to the military and set my goal to be a five-star general. I always wanted to be in charge. That was my nature, even as a kid.

"We'd all be playing outside, building clubhouses and tunnels. I'd have the younger kids looking for bottles and then I'd send them to sell the bottles and get money and bring it all back to me. We'd get butter cookies, crackers, bologna and some Kool-Aid, and we'd have a feast. I was the facilitator of this activity, because my mom taught me how to be a leader."

Hunley's mom must have known what she was doing. Her son went on to an All-American career at the University of Arizona and six seasons in the NFL. Today, Hunley is 39 years old and does his leading as the defensive line coach at the University of Florida. Someday, Hunley will most likely be the leader of a major college football program as a head coach.

Larry Smith, the former head coach at Arizona, USC, Missouri and Tulane, had every confidence that Hunley had what it took to be an effective coach, as both a teacher and motivator, when he first hired Hunley at USC in 1992. Nine years later, Smith hasn't changed his mind, and he's even more convinced about Hunley's future in the coaching business.

"Ricky is the most natural and instinctive player I've ever coached, and on the field he's magical with the kids," Smith says. "He's a leader and the kids really look up to him, not only because of his physical stature and his accomplishments, but also because he cares about the kids and they can see it. He's got every intangible that's required to become a successful head football coach."

And that's exactly what Hunley wants to be someday, sooner than later.

"My first career objective, from day one when I first got into this business, was to be a head coach," Hunley says. "I didn't get into it to be an assistant, or just to have a job.

"Being a college coach today is a lot more than Xs and Os. Being a coach is like being a CEO. You're going to have to do other things besides coaching on the field. You have to be a people person who gets out in the public, someone who works with the alumni, someone who can sell the program. You have to be an organizer, an administrator, a master motivator, an exceptional evaluator of talent, someone who can communicate effectively with the coaches, the players, the parents, and the recruits.

"And yes, you have to know your Xs and Os, but you still have to be able to teach it and present it to the players so they can understand it."

Not that Hunley is spending all his time thinking about the head coaching job he hopes will come his way someday. Instead, he's the type of person who throws himself headlong into the task at hand, whether he's coaching at practice, on the phone with a recruit or spending quality time with his wife Camille and children, Alexis and Kenady.

"Be where you are when you're there - I learned that from my wife," Hunley says. "Being a coach you're away from home so much, and you're away from the kid. Then you come home and you're still making recruiting calls, and it's hard to unwind and put work behind you.

"But she told me, 'I want you to be where you are when you're there. When you're coaching football, do that and give it your complete focus. When you're at home, be into us. If you're reading to the girls, don't be doing other things. Give them your undivided attention.'

"That just makes so much sense, and it's something I teach to my players. When you're playing football, if you're mind isn't on playing football, you're not going to be good at what you're doing. That's when you have poor practices, blown assignments, mistakes. That's something I preach to my kids all the time - when you're on the football field, have a single purpose, a single focus."

Anyone who knows anything about Hunley shouldn't be surprised that he learned such a valuable lesson from his wife. Hunley isn't one to let pride or ego stand in the way of wisdom, and he hasn't left many stones unturned in his career, learning about different facets of coaching from nearly every phase of his life.

"There are so many things I learned in life that are parallel to football - things I learned from my mom, my grandma, my coaches, my wife, my kids," Hunley says. "Each of these are lessons that I pass on to my players now."

As a player, Hunley proved to be more than just a jock in a football uniform. He did more than just lead Arizona in total tackles in each of his final three years, earn the Pac-10 co-player of the year award in 1983 or earn consensus first-team All-America honors in both '82 and '83. Hunley also used the time to grow and learn as a student of the game, absorbing knowledge from his coaches and film sessions and applying them to his time on the field.

Through six NFL seasons, Hunley continued to add knowledge and experience with the Denver Broncos (1984-87), Arizona Cardinals (1988) and L.A. Raiders (1989-90). Each stop brought him in contact with new ideas, philosophies and methods.

The influences are many and diverse. From head coaches such as Smith, Gene Stallings, Mike Shanahan, Art Shell and Dan Reeves to veteran assistants such as Tom Roggerman, Dave Adolph, Joe Pascale, Jim Johnson, Merle Moore, Joe Collier, Tony Mason and Moe Ankney, Hunley took it all in and tried to make it his own.

To this day, Hunley uses the production sheets used by Adolph when he evaluates his players. For years, he would take Smith's "Tip of the Day" (usually an inspiring thought about attitude or effort) and share them with his players each day. He even sent those tips to his recruits, and would later go out on the road recruiting and find those same tips taped to refrigerator.

"I had some excellent coaches, and I still use so much of what they taught me," Hunley says. "I don't know if there are any truly original ideas out there, so you have to accumulate them and grab the ones that work. I'm a firm believer that there are a lot of people in this world who've been where you've got to go, so it's always smart to get as much information as you can from them."

Once Hunley completed his pro career, he spent a year at home being a full-time dad to his daughters, weighing his options while his wife began her career as an attorney. A good friend wanted to join him in the business world and offered him a lucrative opportunity, but Smith had always told him Hunley he would make a good coach and offered him a chance to coach at USC.

"Coach Smith told me to just try it for a few days, and if I didn't like it, I could always take other route," Hunley says. "I went out there for a few days and got bitten by the bug. I fell in love with it. I was hooked. It was still an extension of playing the game, just like I figured it would be."

Hunley went to work in 1992 and spent two seasons helping Roggerman, his former linebacker coach at Arizona, and found that he had almost instant credibility with the players.

"Coach 'Rogge' told me, 'you played college football, you played pro football, you played in the Super Bowl, you played under great coaches and you're not so far removed from the game that the players don't know who you are, and you're still close in age with these guys and they look up to you and respect you,'" Hunley says.

"That really helped me make the transition. The toughest thing about going from playing to coaching is learning how to be a teacher. That was something I had to learn and grasp, to take all those lessons from so many people and apply them."

Another step in his formation as a coach came when he joined the Pittsburgh Steelers in the summer of 1992 as part of NFL's Minority Fellowship Program. Hunley has since gone on to participate in two other NFL internships, with the San Diego Chargers in 1997 and the Philadelphia Eagles in 2000, and will spend part of this summer with the Buffalo Bills.

With the Steelers, he worked with Marvin Lewis who threw him into the fire immediately and forced him to draw from his own pro experience to teach pro linebackers.

"Marvin said, 'I know you can play the game, you know what to do,'" Hunley says. "So, with a little instruction and guidance here and there, he got me out there coaching Hardy Nickerson and Greg Lloyd, and here I was, some rookie G.A."

After his first year as a G.A. at USC, Hunley was actually set to become a full-time assistant coach when Smith was fired and replaced by John Robinson. Robinson retained Hunley as a G.A. for another year, but as soon as Smith was hired at Missouri in 1994, Hunley was one of the first two full-time assistants he hired.

"Missouri had had something like 14-straight losing seasons, and the first thing Coach Smith did was send me out on the road recruiting," Hunley says. "I knew I had to put together some sort of game plan to sell them on Missouri.

"How do you sell a losing program to a top athlete who wants to go to a winning program? The first thing I knew I needed was people skills. The year I sat out from football I was involved in a multi-level marketing company selling NuSkin, and they teach you all about selling, cold-calling, how to get in and talk to people, and that's exactly what I had to do in recruiting. I used their sales book as an example and put together a sales book about all the good things you could say about Missouri."

Hunley sold enough positives to convince some quality players to sign with Missouri, establishing a reputation as an effective recruiter by signing 16 players out of the state of Florida and helping Missouri earn winning seasons and bowl games in 1997 and '98. In 1997, Smith made Hunley his associate head coach and gave him a taste of leadership that only encouraged Hunley's desire to become a head coach.

Coaching at Missouri also taught Hunley some valuable lessons about the patience and commitment it takes to develop young players.

"We sold a lot of young players on the chance to play right away, so we played a lot of young players," Hunley says. "The thing I tried to teach them was, 'when I was a freshman, I made a lot of mistakes, and it's OK to make mistakes, but I won't tolerate is messing up the things you control, like your attitude and effort. That's the most important thing. A mistake isn't a mistake until the play is over, so don't give up. You might make a mistake at the line of scrimmage, but you might come back to make a game-saving tackle if you keep hustling."

Hunley also learned to break the game down into simpler elements that players could grasp on a more realistic level. When Hunley asks his new players about the length of a football game, they always answer with "60 minutes." Makes sense, right? But football coaches know the actual length of a game is much longer, depending on time outs, incomplete passes and other factors. With that in mind, Hunley tries to teach his players to focus their effort and attention on those few seconds between the time the offense breaks the huddle and when the whistle blows to signal the end of the play.

"It's hard to get a kid to understand what it means to play full-speed for 60 minutes," Hunley says. "That's not humanly possible to do anything non-stop, full-speed for 60 minutes. You'd die trying. Look at what (amateur wrestlers) for two minutes at a time? They can't do that for 60 minutes. But I can ask my players to give me everything they've got for five or six seconds. They can see that. They can understand that. They can believe that. I don't want them to ever take a play off. I want them to go hard every play."

Hunley put that philosophy to work this spring when he became Florida's defensive line coach, inheriting a talented group that includes senior defensive end Alex Brown, an All-America who has been labeled an underachiever because of his tendency to take a few plays off in between bursts of effort. Hunley spent the spring getting inside Brown's head and heart by preaching, prodding, pushing and pulling for positive results, and if the spring was any indication, Brown is headed for his best season at Florida.

"I was so pleased with the way he responded," Hunley says. "I didn't know what to expect, but coach (Steve) Spurrier told me it was the best ball Alex had played since he had been here."

That's why Spurrier hired Hunley with a phone call in January. Hunley knew he would stay in coaching when the Missouri staff was replaced in November, and Florida turned out to be the best of his many offers.

"Coach Hunley has a proven track record as a coach at Southern California and Missouri," Spurrier said when Hunley was hired. "He is also an excellent recruiter who recruited the state of Florida for Missouri. We are very impressed with him and believe he is a perfect fit for our coaching staff."

After years of helping Missouri try to build a winner, Hunley is excited about the prospects of coaching for a perennial national title contender, and the lessons that will come with coaching in the SEC. "All I do is teach people what I know, what I've learned from other people," Hunley says. "Coach Spurrier teaches people how to win and he gets results, and that's going to be another positive experience for me."

And, Hunley hopes, Florida will be another positive step toward his goal of becoming a head coach.

"Perception is everything," Hunley says. "Bob Stoops is an excellent example. When he was at Kansas State, there weren't a lot of people pounding the door down to hire Bob Stoops (as a head coach). But when he came to Florida and Florida won a national championship, Bob Stoops became the hottest name out there. But Bob Stoops was a great coach at Kansas State, and he would have been a great coach anywhere he was working.

"With winning comes all the other stuff. I think that will happen, and I'll be ready. And not just any head coaching job. I'd love to have an opportunity like Rick Neuheisel has had. Give me the same tools and the same resources, and I believe I can do the same things."


"My first career objective, from day one when I first got into this business, was to be a head coach," Hunley says. "I didn't get into it to be an assistant, or just to have a job."

-Hunley






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