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Adversity? What adversity?

Gary Barnett\'s journey from Northwestern to Colorado is a riches to rags story. Is he complaining? No way.
by: Brent Schrotenboer
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Gary Barnett never thinks about what could have been.
No way, Barnett said. What's done is done.
The Rose Bowl season in 1995?
No time to think about it.
All the job offers he got in 1996?
His answer is a resounding, "No. I made the right decision.''

Even after he inherited the nation's toughest schedule this year in his second year at the helm of Colorado, Barnett talked only about how much he and his team liked the idea of facing the best of the best.

Call him a glutton for punishment, if you want. One month after his team opened its murderous schedule in September, Colorado wasteetering on the brink of disaster, giving critics reason to question whether Barnett's heyday in college football passed him by in 1995.

His colleagues, though, say just the opposite. Passed him by? Not a chance. To them, Barnett is better than ever.
Better than Northwestern.
Better than the Rose Bowl.
The reason is simple: adversity.
Gut-checking adversity.
And lots of it.

"I can see it just in the way he handles himself and the maturity he has,''said Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association who has worked with Barnett on various committees. "The truth of the matter is you are a better coach based on the adversities you've faced.''

For Barnett, adversity has become a way of life since performing a seemingly impossible task in Evanston, Illinois five years ago. After taking the once-lowly Northwestern program to back-to-back Big 10 Conference championships in '95 and '96, Barnett compiled a combined 15-25 record during his first 40 games since the '96 Citrus Bowl.

In 1997 and 1998, his teams finished 5-7 and 3-9. First, came the problems. Then, came the losses. During his last two years at Northwestern, Barnett faced the challenge of season-turning injuries on his team, rising expectations, lots of inexperienced youth, and the hard-to-coach-against perception from players that winning would somehow come easy at Northwestern after two straight years of highly-publicized fortunes.

One year later, the tide turned again. This time, Barnett took a new job at his old school with a new set of challenges and lots of old problems to fix as the new head coach at Colorado.

Though the task might not have been as difficult as it was when Barnett first took over at Northwestern in 1992, his obstacles remained fierce during his first two seasons on the job in Boulder. You name it. Barnett faced it and tried to cope.

Here's a list, in no particular order:

• His co-defensive coordinator, Tom McMahon, was stricken with lung cancer.

• His 2000 schedule at CU was deemed "the schedule from hell.'' A month into it, CU was 0-4 with just seven scholarship seniors on its roster.

• The facilities at Colorado remained substandard and behind the rest of the league in the rising "arms race'' of stadium upgrades in the Big 12 Conference.

• When he took the job, he had just two weeks to compile a recruiting class to sign before February 1999. He then faced a tougher-than-usual transition period between him and his predecessor at Colorado: the younger, less fiery Rick Neuheisel, who had abruptly left for the head job at Washington.

• Then, this year, highly regarded freshman running back Marcus Houston suffered a potential season-ending hip injury during the third game of the season against Neuheisel's Washington team, causing Barnett to wonder if anything else could go wrong for him in Boulder.

"The biggest obstacle (in 1999) was coming into a situation where there was such a transition,'' said Barnett, an assistant coach at Colorado under Bill McCartney from 1984-91. "There's always going to be a transition period between coaches, but I think the transition in our case was a little bigger because of the two different coaching styles. It created a situation where the players weren't really trusting us until the second half of the season.''

Barnett faced each challenge at Colorado with his own personal perspective and solution. What he did in each case is what makes him an increasingly better coach in the minds of those who work with him, know him and have seen him face nearly constant adversity since 1997.

To provide a more comfortable transition for his players in 1999, Barnett went to the homes of all the players he inherited from Neuheisel to "see what they're made of, what their families were like and the support they had at home.''

The purpose was to avoid the pratfalls of a hard transition as much as he could. The policy may have helped, but still couldn't really smooth things out completely until the seventh game of the season last year against Iowa State, when the Buffaloes pulled out a 16-12 win in Ames, Iowa.

"At the beginning of the season, we were expected to be better than what we played,'' senior CU defensive end Brady McDonnell said. "The trust factor kind of kicked in then. Coach Barnett came around and said, 'I've been doing this for 17 years.' It just took us a while to believe in the system. We had a transition to believe in ourselves and buying into the system.

Barnett's system, as it's called, has been used since his first college head-coaching job at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., in 1982.

From a football standpoint, the system is defined by a balanced offense, a 50-50 run pass ratio when possible, a physical "smash-mouth'' style of play and more than enough motivational ability to take the laughingstock of the Big 10 to the Rose Bowl in 1995.

From a personal standpoint, the system is about caring and "genuine'' concern for others, according to his coaches and colleagues.

"He has an attitude that you have to have caring people around you who have a genuine concern for others,'' said John Wristen, a longtime assistant of Barnett's at Colorado and Northwestern. "He always talks about that, and he carries that over to the squad.''

Barnett's "system'' went 3-3 in his first six games at Colorado before the transition started waning off from the Neuheisel system of 1995-98, when Colorado ran a more pass-friendly offense and suffered from a perceived lack of discipline, critics said.

CU then finished 4-2 in its last six games of 1999, including a 33-30 loss to Nebraska, a 20-14 loss to Kansas State and a 62-28 win against Boston College in the Insight.com Bowl.

"At the end of the season, we reached our goal of play, absolutely,'' Barnett said. "It was just a matter of players and our leaders just saying this is the way it's going to be. We didn't start our way at 3-3.''

Needless to say, Colorado didn't start the way it wanted to this year, either. The Buffs lost their first three games by a combined 10 points before starting the conference season with a jarring 44-21 loss against Kansas State at home Sept. 30.

After the game, Barnett told reporters his team had hit "rock bottom'' and proceeded to install tougher, more physical practices, giving his team the same kick in the pants he used to give his teams at Northwestern in the Big 10. On the Tuesday after the loss to Kansas State, Colorado then announced that Houston would be out three to eight weeks with a torn hip flexor muscle. The news was rattling to say the least. In a season that seemed to peter out from the start, Barnett wasn't even going to be able to play for the future of the program with his prized freshman recruit from Denver.

It could have been a breaking point, but it wasn't. Far from it, in fact. Asked if anything else could go wrong this year, Barnett told reporters, "I don't know'' but kept trying to tweak his renowned system of motivation.

"Remarkably, he's stayed pretty even-keeled this season,'' said Dave Plati, CU's assistant athletic/media relations director. "You see a little bit of tension, only because he's frustrated. He just wants to return the program back to where it was in the late '80s, early '90s, and it's going to take a little time maybe more than he even thought.''

Though Colorado has more winning tradition than Northwestern, some might liken the rebuilding process at CU to the construction process Barnett engineered during his first three years in Evanston, when the Wildcats won just eight combined games.

In relative terms, Colorado's and Northwestern's facilities ranked near the bottom of their respective leagues. Case in point is the stadium. Folsom Field remains one of the Big 12's smallest and oldest venues while the rest of the league pours millions of dollars into increasing stadium capacities and upgrading their facilities. A $100 million athletic renovation program remained on the drawing board at the beginning of the season.

Don't expect Barnett to harp about it too much, though. To him, substandard facilities can be a recruiting obstacle, but they've never held him back before.

"We won the national championship at Colorado (in 1990) with the worst facilities in the country,'' Barnett said. "We won two Big 10 championships with the worst facilities in the country (at Northwestern). That's not what wins games. It creates programs, but that doesn't put substance in your programs.''

Right now, that's the key for Barnett: continuing to put substance in his program despite the outpour of adversity. So far, he's done his part. His 2000 recruiting class ranked among the best in the nation, according to the evaluations of recruiting analysts. More substance will then come from how much character his team builds after its hard-luck start in 2000.

Colorado loses just seven scholarship seniors from this year's team. Houston and freshman quarterback Craig Ochs are expected be the staple of the program for years to come, painting a brighter future for Barnett, a coach who never looks back.

Call him the anti-sentimentalist. Barnett is so forward-thinking that he never even really stopped to think about the magnitude of his accomplishment at Northwestern. "In this business, we spend all our time preparing for the next game,'' Barnett said. "I think I'm still in that mode and have been since it happened.''

In 1995 and 1996, he also received interviews and/or job offers from UCLA, Texas, Notre Dame and Georgia. He turned down most of them, choosing to stay at Northwestern and "never looked back at any of those chances,'' Barnett said. When Neuheisel left CU in 1999, Barnett then said, "I was completely caught off guard. I did not ever think this opportunity would ever come about. This is not anything I could have foreseen. I thought Rick was here for a long time.''

In many ways, it was his dream job. His family was well-connected to the state. He had coached there before. Barnett was coming home again, hoping to return the team to the same dominance he had helped build in 1990.

The only problem was more adversity.

If his colleagues are right, he's a better coach despite it.

"He's matured as a head coach with the ins and outs of being able to manage a team, to administration, to the walk-on players, to recruiting the best running back in the country,'' Wristen said. "He asks more questions instead of shooting first and asking questions later. That's where he's matured: understanding where somebody's coming from and being able to relate to it.''

Barnett's answer to this year's adversity has been more of his trademark motivation. Before the Kansas State game, he brought in members of Colorado's national championship team to speak to the team. McCartney spoke to the team, too, marking one of few times McCartney has spoken to the team since his retirement in early 1995. Barnett also continues to pepper his players' itineraries with favorite motivational quotes and threatened to crack a sharper whip in practices in the aftermath of the loss to Kansas State.

"Any time you reach a high level of success and, particularly, unexpected success like he did, it's hard to top,'' Teaff said. "But coaches don't really think in those terms. It's this team now and what can be done now so this team can be successful. I have no doubt he'll turn things around at Colorado. He's a good enough coach to do that.''

Brent Schrotenboer is a regular contributor to American Football Monthly. He works for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

"We won the national championship at Colorado (in 1990) with the worst facilities in the country. We won two Big 10 championships with the worst facilities in the country (at Northwestern). That's not what wins games. It creates programs, but that doesn't put substance in your programs."

Q&A

Tough schedules, tattered stadiums, tight-fisted administrators - it's all in a day's work for Gary Barnett

Q: Your mentor, Bill McCartney, had an aggressive approach to schedule-making at Colorado. He liked to schedule tough cross-sectional games for the non-conference part of the schedule. This year, your team's non-conference slate might have been the toughest in the nation with Colorado State, Southern California and Washington. Do you favor a tough non-conference schedule, even though some say it hurts your team's chances?

A: I do. I have an aggressive approach. It's the only part of the schedule you can control, and I believe you're more fair to your players and more fair to your fans when you schedule that way.

Q: Your Big 12 Conference schedule began with Kansas State, Texas A&M and Texas, three of the toughest teams in the Big 12. Some Big 12 coaches, such as Texas Tech's Mike Leach, believe that the conference schedule is tough enough in its own right to discourage overly ambitious non-conference scheduling. How do you feel about that?

A: I think the tough part is when your conference schedule ends up like ours did this year. Now you have to look at it like, if you spread those three teams out, it entices you to play that kind of (non-conference) schedule. But when you bunch them together the way we have it, it discourages it.

Q: At Northwestern and Colorado, you've enlisted two coaches to serve as co-defensive coordinators. One of them, Tom McMahon, oversees the pass defense. The other, Vince Okruch, oversees the run defense. You don't see co-coordinators often in college football. Why do you do it?

A: It's two sets of eyes. I like to have two sets of eyes working together because they see different things and can pick up different things.

Q: How is the challenge of rebuilding the program at Colorado similar to the building process you engineered at Northwestern from 1992-1998?

A: Every place has its drawbacks and problems. Every place has its issues. At Northwestern, it's perceived that it's academics. When I left there, I didn't feel that was an issue. It was more an issue of perception than reality. At Colorado, most of the kids you're going to get there over the last 10 or 15 years are from 1,000 miles or further away, and that's tough recruiting. We're trying to focus more on in-state players and eliminate some of that. Still, most kids you're going to bring there have to come a distance.

Q: When you took Northwestern to the Rose Bowl in 1995 and Citrus Bowl in 1996, some considered it a miraculous feat. It might go down as one of college football's most incredible stories. Five years later, how to do you perceive this accomplishment?

A: I don't think until I get out of it, when I decide not to coach anymore, that I'll truly be able to spend time thinking about what we were able to accomplish there. We're trained in this business to not spend a lot of time thinking about what's happened in the past. We spend all our time preparing for the next game.

Q: You're among nine of McCartney's former assistants who have gotten Division I-A head-coaching jobs, including Maryland's Ron Vanderlinden, Washington's Rick Neuheisel and East Carolina's Steve Logan. How do explain the effect McCartney had on his assistants?

A. Mac had a knack for hiring good people. He had the ability to attract good people. Every one is a different coach. (Former LSU head coach Gerry) DiNardo had a varied background, but he recognized something in his work habits and that kind of thing. I don't know if there was anything Mac did. He had a knack for finding people.

Q: You've recently coached in two of the top conferences in the nation. What's the biggest difference between the Big 10 and Big 12?

A: In my experience, the No. 1 play you had to defend in the Big 10 was the inside zone. No. 2 was the isolation play. In the Big 12, the No. 1 play in statistical numbers is the inside zone. No. 2 is the option. If you saw the option five times a year in the Big 10, that was unusual. Here in the Big 12, virtually every team runs the option. It's more speed-oriented. There's more quickness and there's not as much concern about size in this conference. In the Big 10, the cornerbacks were 6-2, 200 pounds. All the running backs were big in size. In this conference, I don't think there's a back over 200 pounds It's more of a speed conference.

Q: You were the hottest candidate in football after you took Northwestern to the Rose Bowl in 1995 and the Citrus Bowl in 1996. You received several offers and were courted by Notre Dame and Texas. Looking back, how did you handle it?

A: I examined every one of those opportunities and compared them to what I had at the time. In each case, I made a decision that was best for me and my family and lifestyle. I never looked back at any of those chances. I did not ever think this opportunity would have come about (at Colorado). Each one of them had tremendous attraction in its own right with real positives. I weighed each one separately, but I don't think one stood out more than others.

Q: Football programs compete off the field in an effort to outdo each other with facilities and stadiums. This is especially true in the Big 12, where Texas, Texas A&M and Nebraska seem to keep pouring money into their facilities. At Colorado, changes have been slower to come. How do you deal with this?

A: I think that's the mentality: It's an arms race from the perception of fans who watch college football. As an assistant coach, you feel you don't have it and what everybody else has is better and that it hurts you. But in reality, there are a lot of great facilities out there, and they're not in the top of the league (in wins). It's the substance that lasts that gives you success.

Q: Coming into the season, your staff of nine assistants ranked seventh in the Big 12 in combined salaries. You've voiced your displeasure with this. How do you raise the bar at your school?

A: I have an AD (Dick Tharp) who's very resourceful and very aware. Our goal is to be in the top 25 percent of all college coaches. Dick will find a way to do that. He's made in-roads since that information came out. Sometimes, it's not a matter of going to the athletic director and asking him for more money. Sometimes he can't access some of the money there because of the academic structure. Each place has its peculiarities about salaries.






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