The Way It Used To Be
College football coaching legends share their experiences on the gridiron before laptops, charter jets and mega-million dollar facilities
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If there is one
constant, it is that there are no constants. Over time, everything
changes and nothing remains quite the same. Never is this more evident
than in the profession of coaching college football.
American Football Monthly recently sat down with a few of the game’s
greatest coaches for a peek inside the ever-changing world of college
football. From their first job to their last, their first championship
season to their first losing season, AFM has captured it all –
in their words. Men like Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Barry Switzer,
Spike Dykes and Gene Stallings have provided AFM with an exclusive
journey down memory lane. Maybe you can’t walk in their shoes,
but perhaps you can at least try them on. Over the course of the
next few months, AFM will feature several of these “firsts”
in each issue. So sit back and enjoy the game of football “the
way it used to be.”
The players ...
Eddie Robinson (Grambling State head coach, 1941-1997)
“The kids are not bad, but you have to stay on them sometimes.
Some of these football players today like to wear earrings. If they
wore it and I saw it, it belonged to me. I told them I would call
their mamas to see if those earrings belong to her. Otherwise, I
would auction them off.
“One time, some of my players were acting silly and I couldn’t
get them to pay attention. So, I went into my office and wrote their
mamas a letter and I invited them to come to practice on a Friday.
Boy, you should have seen those players when they saw their mamas
pulling up in those big cars. Man, they straightened up right quick.
“The players would listen whenever you brought up their mamas.
I would walk into their dorm rooms and they would have these nude
women on the walls of their room. I told them to cover up the vital
parts or I was going to invite their mamas to come to their rooms
and see what you have up and tell me it is OK. Those pictures would
be covered up immediately. But these kids were not bad kids, they
just needed someone to treat them like men – that is exactly
what we did.”
The film room ...
Spike Dykes (Texas Tech head coach, 1986-1999)
“Boy, things have changed. You would go into the offensive
and defensive meeting rooms and you would go through and look at
this stuff and cut it out and use masking tape to hang it on the
wall. And when you had it all hung up, you would have to cement
them together with that glue, which was messier than hell. After
all that, you would have yourself a highlight reel to study. I mean
this stuff was time consuming.
“Coaches did not have the data available back then as they
have today. It was long hours, but there was a certain amount of
being prepared and staying prepared that took time. To be successful,
you couldn’t just sit around all day and watch the flock,
so to speak.”
First Job ...
Johnny Majors (Pittsburgh 1973-76, 1993-96; Tennessee 1977-92)
“During my senior year at the University of Tennessee, my
coach, Bowden Wyatt, told me that if I wanted to coach he would
have a job waiting for me. After spending a year in Montreal with
the Canadian Football League, I called Coach Wyatt and told him
that I wanted to take him up on that offer. He put me on full-time
January 1958. I was doing gopher jobs ... I would do anything the
coaches asked me to do.
“Well, they sent me out all over the state recruiting –
some people called it bird-dogging. There I was traveling all over
Tennessee in my new car and I was single so I was living a pretty
good life at the time. Tennessee had a new student center on the
campus and they had a lot of real good lookin‚ girls. I would
go over there everyday at 10 a.m. for about an hour – or a
little longer – and then I would take another break at about
2:30 p.m. for about an hour and a half to sit around and talk to
the girls or my buddies that were still playing. I would then head
back to my office. After about two months of this routine, Coach
Wyatt left me a business card on my desk that read, 'Johnny, congratulations
on your job, when are you going to start?'
“I immediately got one of the coaches to show me how to thread
a projector ... and I got after it.”
The phone call ...
Bill Mallory (Indiana head coach, 1984-1996)
“I was head coach at Northern Illinois and we had just won
the Mid American Conference, and one night I received a phone call
from Bob [Knight]. Bob is so direct and he just came out and said,
‘Are you interested in the Indiana football job?’ Now,
as a coach you get used to people playing jokes on you, so I was
not certain that this was the real deal. However, even though I
did not know Bob that well, after a few minutes I recognized his
voice and I knew that it was actually him. He had been a real good
friend of Bo [Schembechler] and Woody [Hayes], whom I had a good
relationship with. I asked if Indiana was going to make a commitment
to football and he said that they were. I had always dreamed of
coaching in the Big Ten, so I was interviewed and hired.”