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AFM Magazine


The Old Dog Has Some New Tricks

by: Richard Scott
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He's 64 years old, he's been a head coach for 29 years, he's won 223 games, taken six different teams to a combined total of 22 bowls, and won a national championship at one of the nation's most prestigious programs.

He's the first to admit he's stubborn, sometimes to a fault. He didn't have to change his coaching methods. He didn't have to change his offense or his defense or his staff management style. He didn't have to try anything new. He didn't even have to take this job and put his coaching legacy at risk.

But he did, and that goes a long toward explaining why Lou Holtz is American Football Monthly's 2000 Division I-A college coach of the year.

"They (awards) mean a lot to me because they're a reflection of the team's success, the assistant coaches, the players," Holtz says. "I'm just a small part of it. Of course, anytime you do something you'd like to be the best in the country.

"I believe if you create the right attitude, you can win anywhere. We've still got to recruit well. I thought we were able to attract good coaches. We're not winning because of me. Trust me. We have a plan; we try to follow the plan.

"We've stuck to our plan. We didn't fluctuate from what we believed in. Sure, we changed some things on offense and changed our defense, but only because we knew it would allow us to put our players in better positions to have some success. The players have more confidence now. It's been fun to watch their confidence level grow."

Just as any coaching award is never evidence of one man's accomplishments, it's also an indication of more than just the fact that Holtz led South Carolina to a startling turnaround, turning last year's 0-11 into this year's 7-4 and a win at the New Year's Day Outback Bowl.

In reality, the award has more to do with the way Holtz went about reshaping the fragile psyche of a moribund football team in desperate need of discipline, direction and confidence.

That's the situation Holtz inherited when he left his job as a college football TV analyst to return to coaching. Even more important, it's the challenge he yearned for after two years of "retirement" from coaching. After 11 seasons at Notre Dame, Holtz felt like he was simply preserving success, and he hungered for the chance to build, to mold, to teach and preach.

"When I left Notre Dame, I thought I was tired of coaching. I was wrong," Holtz says. "I was tired of maintaining. I should have known better. You can't just sit back and maintain. You've got to reach for that higher level. Keep striving and never remain status quo."

Holtz got the challenge he sought and more when he came to South Carolina in December 1998, to take over a program with only three winning seasons and one bowl berth in the '90s, including a 1-10 finish in 1998 that led to a coaching change. The first season alone was enough to make some coaches question the conviction of their vocation, but it only bolstered Holtz's desire to transform the Gamecocks into a winner.

It wasn't just the 0-11 record, the injuries that forced Holtz to play six quarterbacks and 17 offensive linemen or the total lack of offense that made 1999 so difficult. As bad as things were on the field, they were worse off the field, where Holtz was hit with a number of shots to the heart. First, his son and offensive coordinator Skip spent several days during the season in intensive care for an abdominal infection. Then, his wife, Beth, underwent extensive surgery for recurring throat cancer. On the afternoon before the next-to-last game, his mother died. During recruiting season, a pilot on his way to pick up Holtz died in a plane crash.

Somewhere in all that morass, Holtz never lost his desire for coaching, and his fire caught on.

"We lost 11 games," Holtz says, "but we never lost the team."

During the off-season, life finally took a turn for the better when Holtz and his wife celebrated her victory over cancer during a dinner in Rochester, Minn., home of the Mayo Clinic.

"I felt the world was lifted off my shoulders," Holtz says. "I told her, 'We're going to change the offense, the defense.' ... I had a million ideas that night. I told the doctors that I felt our fortunes were fixin' to turn."

With the 1999 season in the rearview mirror, Holtz devoted most of his time to figuring out how to turn the team around. He now admits that when he came to South Carolina, he misjudged two fundamental problems with the program: talent and attitude.

He tackled those challenges by applying new methods with old-school principles. At an age when some coaches might be unwilling to make major adjustments, Holtz was able to adapt without abandoning the same winning principles he learned as an assistant under Woody Hayes at Ohio State.

Holtz addressed the talent issue by allowing Skip to install a spread offense, using the shotgun and multiple receivers. On the surface, it looked like Holtz had totally deserted his run-oriented offensive philosophy for a wide-open passing offense, but in reality he was simply finding a new way to do the same old things.

In Holtz's first season at South Carolina, the Gamecocks lined up in the traditional I-formation and finished near the bottom of the national rankings in nearly every offensive statistical category because the Gamecocks were too small and too slow to simply overpower people. But Holtz knew he had a potential star in sophomore running back Derek Watson and a solid, studious quarterback in junior Phil Petty. If South Carolina could spread the defense with multiple receivers and move defenders off the line of scrimmage, Watson might have a chance to find some running lanes, and Petty might find some time and room to run a ball-control passing attack.

The scheme turned out to be an effective plan for the Gamecocks. With most of the same players back, South Carolina finished fourth in the SEC in rushing offense, with 157 yards per game, and Watson finished third in the conference with 1,066 yards, as well as 5.7 yards per carry and 11 rushing touchdowns. Despite lining up in the shotgun and throwing 58 more passes this season, the Gamecocks still suffered 25 fewer sacks - from 45 in '99 to just 20 this season.

Most important, after scoring only 7.9 points per game in '99, the Gamecocks scored 23.5 points per game in 2000 and found themselves in nearly every game. Two of South Carolina's losses came down to the final seconds against two New Year's Day bowl teams, Tennessee and Clemson.

"The scheme we're utilizing gives our players a better chance for success," Skip Holtz says. "As an offense, we are committed to taking what a defense gives us."

That willingness to do whatever it takes to win has not been lost on opponents.

"Offensively, it doesn't look like Lou Holtz's team," Ohio State coach John Cooper said as he prepared to meet Holtz in the Outback Bowl - a matchup that would ultimately cost Cooper his job. "Lou used to be an option team, a split-back veer team, a wishbone team, an I-formation team, a power running team. South Carolina looks like Northwestern or Purdue or Miami of Ohio or Minnesota.

"They are using four wide receivers, spreading you out all over the field, throwing the ball, the kind of offense I've talked about other schools running in the next few years."

Holtz's best teams have always relied on a quality running game backed by a strong defense, and this year's success has as much to do with defensive changes as the offensive adjustments.

While the South Carolina defense played hard in '99, the undersized Gamecocks often wore down under the weight of bigger, stronger opponents and the lack of offensive support. With that in mind, Holtz turned the defense over to defensive coordinator Charlie Strong and allowed Strong to install an aggressive defense similar to the gambling scheme run at Mississippi State by Joe Lee Dunn.

By adding a fifth defensive back as an outside linebacker, shifting looks, adding more blitzes and taking more chances, the Gamecocks finished with three more takeaways, three more sacks and allowed fewer rushing yards (down from 146 in 1999 to 115 per game), and improved its pass efficiency defense (from last in the SEC in '99 to second this year).

Most important, the Gamecocks led the SEC in scoring defense, allowing only 15.8 points per game after allowing 25.3 points per game in 1999. It's no wonder Strong was a finalist for the fifth annual Broyles Award, presented to the nation's top assistant coach, while secondary coach John Gutekunst was named the Division I-A American Football Coaches Association 2000 Assistant Coach of the Year.

For all those dramatic changes, some things remain faithfully and dependably true for a Holtz-coached team.

"Lou is not going to beat himself. He's going to play sound defense," Cooper said. "Everybody thinks of Lou being wide open and taking chances and all of that kind of stuff. I don't think that's Lou Holtz at all.

"He's fundamentally sound. He'll have a good defensive team. They'll be sound in the kicking game. They won't beat themselves. They won't turn the ball over. They'll make you beat them."

Holtz has seen enough trends come and go in college football to know that adapting and adjusting is all part of the game, so he doesn't see this year's turnaround as any indication of coaching genius.

"What you have to remember is that I was in the lower half of my high school class," says Holtz, using one of his trademark lines. "I wrote a book but most people we're surprised I could even read one and if you ever read the book I wrote, you won't need a dictionary. I'm not that smart. What I did was just common sense."

It required a lot more than common sense for Holtz to fix South Carolina's attitude problems. So while Holtz turned his offense and defense over to his coaches, he immersed himself in the psychological aspects of coaching, seeking to change his team from inside out.

When Holtz and his assistants sat down to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their team, they agreed the biggest problem was a lack of camaraderie among the players.

"I've always thought it was important to build the trust of the team and I didn't think I had it," Holtz said. "I never had this problem before and I wanted to know why. But when we asked them they said they trusted me and the assistant coaches. The problem was they didn't trust each other."

Holtz started over with the Gamecocks by forcing them to pull together. When players arrived in August for preseason practice they were told to turn in their car keys. For the next 13 days, they rode a school bus back and forth between the dorms and the practice fields. Holtz and his staff also insisted that players live together in the dorms instead of living off campus.

Holtz and his coaches also saw that several players clearly weren't accepted by the others. Those players kept to themselves and other players made no effort to get to know them.

Holtz knew the backgrounds and struggles of those players, but didn't feel it was his place to reveal their stories. Instead, he asked the players to stand and tell their teammates about their lives, hoping that once the other players knew the obstacles they had overcome, they would embrace them.

"I knew they'd be fairly tolerant of these young men if they knew what they'd endured," Holtz said. "So, I just asked them to get up and tell their stories."

One player told his teammates about how close he and his father were. Then one day, his father committed suicide, and he discovered the body. Another player talked about how his mother died of cancer when he was 11 years old. He didn't have a father, but he still had two brothers. While one was in jail for selling drugs, the other one, whom he idolized, was willing to take care of him - until he died in a car accident. When that brother died, he was sent to live with an uncle. The uncle was killed in a bar fight.

"Imagine being 11 years old and basically having no one," Holtz said. "But these were things no one knew about it. The players didn't know what he had been through. But when he told them, they reached out and enveloped him."

Just like the offensive and defensive, this plan also worked. It brought the team together in a common struggle.

"It's just common sense," Holtz said. "If you get to know each other through personal contact, if you get to know each other's backgrounds you're going to form a strong bond."

While this team-building exercise was new for Holtz, it held true to a philosophy that has worked throughout his coaching career.

"I know you can't win without honor and respect among the team," Holtz said. "We had to develop that. How do you develop trust as a team? You have to understand where your teammates have been and where they're coming from."

That newfound unity was evident on the field this season, in the passion that allowed the Gamecocks to compete with teams of superior size, talent and depth.

"They are a hungry bunch," Florida coach Steve Spurrier says. "Man, they play hard. When I watched them on tape against Mississippi State I said, 'Man, if we can get our players playing this hard, we'd have a chance to be pretty good this year.' We're trying to get our guys to play as hard as those South Carolina guys play."

For all that has been accomplished this season, his work is far from done. The Gamecocks are young, with only 10 seniors among the first 44 players on the depth chart.

"It's a continual process where we're starting to become a team," Holtz said. "They're barely bottle-fed. They're young, but they're coming together. They're going to be even better next year. I don't think anything can stop them."

The worst thing that could happen is for the Gamecocks to forget where they came from, assume success as a given, and lose the discipline they bought into this season.

If Holtz has anything to do with it, the Gamecocks will remain disciplined, hungry and resilient, regardless of their win-loss record.

Holtz compares his coaching style to a dog owner who is willing to go the extra mile to ensure his dog is the best it can be. Using an analogy about two people who buy dogs, Holtz talks of one that showers the dog with love, and another that puts a choke-collar on his dog and teaches it how to respond to commands. The first owner knows he can never let the dog run outside because the animal has never been taught discipline. The second owner eventually lets his dog loose in the neighborhood, and everyone loves it because it is disciplined and knows the rules.

"Sometimes a players doesn't have a choke-collar put on him when he's young and he doesn't understand why I have to put one on him," he said. "When they're juniors, we take the collar offs and watch them run. They perform well because they knows their limits, they knows the rules and they're disciplined."

"I'm old and I believe we live in a selfish society of undisciplined people," Holtz says. "Football is an unselfish game played by disciplined people."

That's why Holtz, his staff and the athletic department at South Carolina have worked to instill a sense of community in the Gamecocks. Instead of allowing the football players to separate themselves from the rest of the world, Holtz wanted his players living in the dorms so they would have to walk to class, eat with the other students and ride the bus across campus to practice.

In the process, the team's academic rating has improved, and the players have taken an active role in "Team Gamecocks," a department-sponsored mission that has made its mark on the local community through a wide variety of projects and events such as visiting children in local hospitals, adopting classes at local schools, collecting food for local food banks, and taking part in the annual "Pigskin Poets" at a local library, reading stories and playing games with children. Last spring, the losing side from the annual spring game held a car wash to benefit an agency that works with abused children. During this past season, the Gamecocks ate at local school cafeterias for National School Lunch Week.

"If we find out about kids in the hospital, I know all I have to do is post a sign in the football locker room and I will get volunteers," says Kara Montgomery, who coordinates "Team Gamecocks" for the South Carolina Athletic Department. "It's just so easy to get our football players to do anything we ask them to do, and we really get a lot of support from coach Holtz and his whole staff. These are great kids. I have two messages on my erase board on my office door right now, from two football players who want to do more."

Those football players also want to do a lot more on the field, and Holtz has them convinced it can happen.

"People took us lightly going into the season," cornerback Rashad Faison says. "But we knew we could do it. We are going to be a force in the SEC for years to come."

And Holtz, even at 64, plans to being there to play a part in South Carolina's future success.

"I didn't come to South Carolina because I thought I had something to prove," Holtz says. "I came because the people here had a dream, and they wanted me to be part of that dream.

"We aren't where we should be, but thank God we aren't where we used to be. We only have five senior starters. We'll be a much, much better football team in the future.

"How good can we be? We want to bring a championship here."

Richard Scott, a regular contributor to American Football Monthly, is the college football editor and a columnist for SportsWritersDirect.com and a correspondent for Football News.






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