Appreciating the constants in the now transitory coaching profession

Guess how many head coaching changes were made in major college football this year? Not five, not ten, not 20… but 22. Yes, 22 out of the 119 FBS programs are undergoing a new reign. For those that aren’t math majors, that’s nearly 20 percent. What’s even more interesting is that a dozen of those 22 coaches that either left on their own accord or fired were on the job five or less years.
There’s a reason why the Paternos, the Bowdens and the Beamers of the coaching profession are so esteemed. Aside from their innate ability to coach and mentor those under them, they’ve had the sense – luckily by choice – to know when they had a good thing going and remain there for their entire careers. They weren’t keeping one eye on the practice field and one on the wanted ads. We are all competitors by nature who have to constantly battle with a burning ego, but at what point do we not let our egos influence our own comfortability? Perhaps I got my answer when I sat down with two pillars of the coaching profession – Mike Westhoff, the special teams coach of the New York Jets for the last eight seasons and Frank Spaziani, a thirteen-year Boston College assistant who is just starting his post as the new head coach. What I found is that both were influenced by the humility of those that paced the sidelines before them – Westhoff, a discipline of legendary coach Don Shula, and Spaziani, who was among the first class that Joe Paterno coached at Penn State. They were simply coaching the way they were coached, before the big money, big stakes world of competitive football taught them differently. They were strong enough in their beliefs to appreciate stability by balancing their egos and, more importantly, comfortable enough in their own skin to know where they had their bread buttered. It was astonishing just to see the assurance in their eyes when they told me “they were just happy where they were.” It was simply reason enough for them not to look elsewhere.
Not only did our conversations – Westhoff on his system for preventing penalties featured in this issue and a Q and A with Spaziaini featured in an upcoming issue – provide excellent content, but I felt proud that we had two individuals like this in the coaching profession that set great examples. They simply did the best they could where they were and let the results speak for themselves. While it may be pointless to fight human nature – we all look for bigger and better things – we can only hope that the decisions that shape our careers are made by our hearts and not by our wallets.

Yours in football,

Mike Kuchar
Senior Writer
American Football Monthly
MikeKuchar@AmericanFootballMonthly.com