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AFM Magazine


Offensive Minded

by: Gene Frenette
Florida Times-Union
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When University of Kentucky athletic director C.M. Newton was searching for a football coach after the 1996 season and called Florida's Steve Spurrier for suggestions, the Gator boss didn't throw out any names. Just a formula.

"I told him to go after an offensive-minded guy because that's how you move the ball up and down the field, win games, win championships and put fans in the seats," said Spurrier.

In other words, somebody like, well, himself.

Newton took Spurrier's advice to heart and hired former Valdosta State head coach Hal Mumme, an intuitive play-caller who made an immediate impact as a Spurrier clone. Mumme jazzed up the Wildcats' offense behind quarterback and No. 1 NFL draft pick Tim Couch, energizing a mediocre program and taking it to a New Year's Day bowl game in his second season.

It hasn't gone unnoticed that this coup was pulled off by a head coach who also served as his own offensive coordinator. Caretakers of major college football, both in administration and coaching, apparently like the results of those taking on this dual role. The 1999 season features 15 Division I-A head coaches, including five in the Southeastern Conference, who hold both titles.

That's a dramatic increase from just four years ago when Spurrier and Nebraska legend Tom Osborne, who faced each other in a national championship game won by Nebraska at the Fiesta Bowl, were the only I-A coaches serving in both high-profile jobs.

While some college head coaches stay heavily involved in play-calling even when somebody else is the coordinator, the trend is that more head coaches prefer double-dipping. As they move up the professional ladder and into head coaching jobs, many see no reason to abandon the coordinator role that enabled them to become marketable in the first place.

"I think when college football started getting television dollars in the 1970s, you saw head coaches acting more like chairmen of the board," said Mumme. "The game was becoming more corporate and they just delegated everything. What you're seeing now is head coaches going back to what they do best and that's being teachers."

Especially if those coaches happen to be weened on the offensive side of the ball. Mississippi hired David Cutcliffe, the offensive coordinator on Tennessee's national championship team, as its head coach. Duke wasted no time in luring Spurrier's long-time assistant,Carl Franks, to replace Fred Goldsmith.

Both of them will serve as their own offensive coordinator, as willfirst-year coaches June Jones at Hawaii and Chris Scelfo at Tulane. In contrast, North Carolina's Carl Torbush is the only Division I-A head coach who has retained his previous title as defensive coordinator.

"I think Spurrier's success at Florida is a factor with a lot of people out there," Cutcliffe said. "Not just coaches, but the athletic directors who do the hiring. Plus, with the situation we're in, it'd be better off if I was running the offense because hiring somebody elsemeans that person would have to learn our system.

"I've been calling plays for six or seven years. That's one of the reasons I got this job. You develop this skill over a long period of time. To not do it just because you become a head coach doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

Cutcliffe was given total autonomy on play-calling by Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer, a luxury offensive coordinators don't usually get because most head coaches -- like Florida State's Bobby Bowden -- exercise their veto power at times during a game. But once those coordinators move into the boss' chair, they have to decide whether to keep the offense in their hands or pass it on.

In Spurrier's case, that was never a question. He has called every play in his 15 combined seasons with the USFL Tampa Bay Bandits, Duke and Florida, where he has captured five SEC titles in nine years. And he has no plans of ever giving that up. The only time he lets assistants call plays is in the Orange and Blue spring game.

"When (athletic director) Tom Butters hired me at Duke, he told me he wasn't hiring me for my organizational skills," Spurrier said. "I encourage my assistants to offer suggestions if they see something.

"During a game, I might say, 'Keep reminding me about this playbecause I don't want to forget about it.' And they'll remind me later.But the offense is my responsibility. That's the way it's going to be."

Mumme is emphatic about running the offense his way, adding: "I want to put my coaches in roles that suit them best and I'm going to start with me. I enjoy calling plays. That's the fun part of coaching."

At Nebraska, second-year coach Frank Solich, Osborne's long-time assistant, watched his mentor guide the Cornhuskers to three national championships and 13 conference titles by taking charge of the offense. Solich saw no reason to mess with that formula and last year's subpar 9-4 record has done nothing to change his mind.

"Coach Osborne never turned over play-calling in games," said Solich. "I was up in the (coaches') booth, but he was always open tosuggestions. Sometimes he'd use them immediately, sometimes he'd bank them for later and sometimes he wouldn't use them at all.

"One of the reasons I do it is because I'm an offensive coach andI feel I'm capable of making the calls. If I thought there was a betterguy out there to lead our system, he'd be the offensive coordinator."

Taking the heat

While the number of head coaches running the offensive show is on the rise, it is by no means a consensus in how to run a football program. There are still 99 I-A schools out of 114 who have someone other than the head coach as the offensive coordinator, with many of them calling the majority of plays.

In an age where some coordinators are making six-figure salariesand under increasing public scrutiny, each head coach must decide for himself how to structure the position. It's a call that can make thedifference between keeping and losing their job.

"Some of these head coaches don't want the responsibility of being the offensive coordinator," said Spurrier. "Sometimes they have to fire their coordinator and they don't want that to be them. Fans get all over the coordinators now. LSU fans got after their defensive coordinator (Lou Tepper) pretty good last year."

Bowden hasn't served in that dual capacity since he left Samford in 1962. While he took an active role in play-calling for much of hiscareer, advancing age and a cohesive staff that has stayed together prompted FSU's leader to diminish his involvement in the early 1990s.

"I find myself getting more involved with meetings and phone calls where I don't feel like I can keep up with it good enough," saidBowden. "I used to always call plays when we started a new coordinator. One year at West Virginia, we had a terrible year with somebody else calling plays and I took it over. I felt if I'm going to go down, I'm going to go down with me doing it."

It's a delicate balance. Head coaches must weigh two strong considerations that don't always mesh with each other: How to provide what's best for the program and still use the management style in which the coach feels most comfortable.

The quick-fix nature in today's football climate undoubtedly enters into a coach's thinking about whether to serve as his own offensive coordinator. Last season, 13 Division I-A head coaches were either fired or forced to resign. Nearly all of them had someone else in the offensive coordinator role.

In addition, Illinois' Ron Turner and Wake Forest's Jim Caldwellfired their coordinators and have taken over that duty themselves.

"If you look at the whole American society, there's not near as much patience in anything you do," said Georgia head coach and offensive coordinator Jim Donnan. "The ability to rebuild or get programs going, everybody wants to do it quicker than they used to. Sosecure as a head coach."

That's precisely the thinking that went into Cam Cameron's decision to retain the coordinator role when he left the Washington Redskins to become head coach at his alma mater, Indiana. After seasons of 2-9 and 4-7, the improving Hoosiers might finally have enough talent and staff chemistry to get a bowl bid.

And if that happens, Cameron may eventually let quarterbacks coach Pete Schmidt handle the play-calling.

"I was a first-time head coach with a new staff and I wanted to take on the coordinator role because I hadn't worked with anybody here year in and year out," said Cameron. "I knew we'd struggle on offense the first couple years and I wanted to take the heat. A lot depends on how much you trust a guy to call your plays."

Unlike his previous FSU coordinators, Bowden has let Mark Richtcall plays from the moment he assumed that title from Brad Scott in1994. Though Bowden will occasionally invoke executive privilege on a play, he admits his management style has become less hands-on and more delegating.

"I phased out (of play-calling) after we went to that fast-break, no-huddle offense," said Bowden. "You can't call plays from the sideline in that offense because you can't see good enough. That has to be handled from upstairs.

"So much of whether you call plays is built on what kind of offense you run. If it's a simple offense, not as many formations and sophistications to work into it, it's easier."

Of course, Spurrier shoots down that theory. He makes all the calls in an offense that's considered as intricate as any in the nation.

"Steve is just a natural at it," Bowden said. "In the second place, he's not 69-years-old. A lot of people say why don't you do it like Steve does. Well, we've been just as successful doing it our way."

Caldwell, in his seventh season at Wake Forest, has taken the opposite approach. Though he has never called plays on a full-time basis, he decided to take over that responsibility for the first time because he was unhappy with his team's pass-run ratio of 71-29 last season under coordinator Hank Small.

"I'm just taking a more active role because we're not running the ball as well as I like," Caldwell said. "One of the things that can happen to you as a coordinator is you lose patience with a very important part of the game. You lean more toward throwing the football because that's what's working. I'm going to make sure we're more patient with the running game."

Turner's decision to relieve offensive coordinator Buddy Teevens,now the running back coach at Florida, of his duties won't mean major changes at Illinois. Turner had already called the plays, but felt a need to be more involved on a daily basis with his quarterbacks.

"We haven't been able to do a lot of things offensively the last two years," said Turner. "Now we're looking forward to expanding the playbook and being more wide open. The biggest difference is I won't be as involved in defensive meetings and have more interaction with the quarterbacks."

While coaches serving in both roles have met with mixed results,the SEC coaches who have followed Spurrier's lead are off to good starts. Donnan snapped Georgia's seven-game losing streak to Florida in 1997 and appears to be closing the gap between the Gators and Tennessee, the SEC frontrunners. Mumme has revitalized Kentucky and Cutcliffe coached Mississippi to an impressive 35-18 Independence Bowl win over Texas Tech.

At Arkansas, head coach/coordinator Houston Nutt was a Clint Stoerner fumble and a two-point conversion away from an undefeated regular season in his first year.

"I love the strategy and tactics of competing on Saturday," said Nutt. "Why go out and hire a coordinator if the head coach is offensively inclined? Where trouble comes in is when you sit up in the head coach's office and all of a sudden, Saturday comes and you want to be the offensive coordinator.

"It has to be a full-time commitment."

Managing the clock

Donnan admits he made a huge mistake in his first season at Georgia, one that probably contributed to his team's underachieving 5-6 record.

After seven years at Marshall, which produced a I-AA national championship and three runner-up finishes, he didn't take into account the differences of the demands on his time. Being the head coach and offensive coordinator at a major college program took a lot heavier toll on him that it did on the I-AA level.

"To get the program going, I felt like I had to wear a lot of different hats," Donnan said. "That first year, I spent way too much time trying to raise money and things like that. It actually hurt me being the offensive coordinator because I didn't take the time to build the relationship within my team."

Time management is a critical issue for many coaches who insist on being their own coordinator. When Caldwell began double duty at Wake Forest in the spring, he talked to the Jacksonville Jaguars' Tom Coughlin -- one of the few NFL coaches who has that dual role -- about handling the transition. The degree of difficulty varies from school to school, depending on how involved the head coach is in other aspects of the program.

"It's not that big of a deal with managing my time," Spurrier said. "Some head coaches spend a lot of time with academic advisers and big boosters and they call that working. To each his own."

At Indiana, Cameron, a former two-sport athlete who played for Bob Knight, sees it a lot differently. He says he feels as much pressure to see that his players succeed academically as he does to win on the field.

"We've been at a minimum 70 percent graduation rate," said Cameron. "At IU, that stuff is ingrained in me. I'm hands-on in mostphases of the program. That's made it more difficult than (being head coach and coordinator) would be at most schools."

Coaches who do both for the first time quickly learn that they can't be all things to all people. As Donnan did, they must be willing to give up some elements of coaching because the responsibility of being in two demanding jobs at once leaves them no alternative.

"It's not an easy task and I really appreciate much more what Coach Osborne accomplished now that I've been through it," Solich said. "You have to be careful how you spend your time because it can get to the point where you do a lot of things and not a lot of them well.

"I've gotten better over time at just letting coaches coach. When I first took over, I still wanted to throw in a lot of comments on the practice field. You can overshadow your coaches and you don't want to do that. I've backed away from that this year."

Nutt has stopped trying to jump into every defensive staff meeting. Donnan cut down on public speaking engagements and the time spent in individual periods during practice.

"I honestly don't think I can work any more as the head coach at Mississippi than I did as the coordinator at Tennessee," said Cutcliffe. "It's the same amount of time. I just have to shuffle it up now."

The time crunch may be a burden on head coaches who serves as their own coordinator, but in many cases, it's the only way they know. Some coaches just have to have it both ways.

"I honestly wonder if I'd get a little bored if I was just a CEO who delegated everything," said Cutcliffe. "That wouldn't satisfy me as to who I think a head coach should be."

Double Duty

This season, 15 head football coaches in Division I-A will also serve as their own offensive coordinator, including five in the Southeastern Conference. Here's a rundown on the coaches who take on both roles and how they've fared.

Coach —School —*Record —Comment —

Jim Caldwell, Wake Forest, 17-49, Taking over as coordinator for first time in seven seasons; Cam Cameron, Indiana, 6-16, May eventually turn over duties to quarterback coach Pete Schmidt; David Cutcliffe, Mississippi, 1-0, Former Tennessee assistant ignited Rebels' offense in Independence Bowl; Jim Donnan, Georgia, 24-11, Wore both hats at Marshall and saw no reason to change a winning formula; Carl Franks, Duke, First year, A Steve Spurrier disciple would want to run the offensive show; Walt Harris, Pittsburgh, 8-15, Chose to start calling plays again rather than hire a new coordinator; June Jones, Hawaii, First year, Former NFL head coach taking over 0-11 team that averaged 12.4 points per game; Hal Mumme, Kentucky, 12-11, Will enhance his reputation if Dusty Bonner is as productive as Tim Couch; Houston Nutt, Arkansas, 9-3, Dual role made easier with younger brother Danny coaching the running backs; Chris Scelfo, Tulane, 1-0, Former Georgia assistant must retool an offense that averaged 45.2 ppg; Terry Shea, Rutgers, 7-26, His West Coast offense must blossom if he hopes to retain his job; Frank Solich, Nebraska, 9-4, Doing it the Tom Osborne way means always wearing both hats; Steve Spurrier, Florida, 93-18-1, The ultimate offensive strategist would never let anyone else call the plays; Ron Turner, Illinois, 3-19, Until the Illini get better skill players, it won't matter who the coordinator is; Bobby Wallace, Temple, 2-9, Winning national titles at North Alabama easier than jump-starting this offense;

* Reflects only the coach's record at current school






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