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AFM Magazine


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.”






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