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AFM Magazine


Climbing to the Summit

The path to the top of the coaching profession is well-defined... but is it correct?
by: Richard Scott
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He's coached at the high school level, at the small college level, and the major college level for the past 24 seasons. Along the way, he's been an assistant head coach, an offensive coordinator, a running backs coach and a receivers' coach. Someday, Woody McCorvey would like to be a head coach on the college level.

That's why McCorvey is a position coach at the University of Tennessee. He knows being a coordinator or an assistant head coach might be the most obvious path to a head coaching job, but he also knows that there's more than one way to climb that mountain to the big corner office.

After eight years at the University of Alabama, where he served under coach Gene Stallings as an assistant head coach and offensive coordinator, McCorvey was a receivers coach at South Carolina in 1998 when he got an offer to become an offensive coordinator at a struggling Division I-A program in a major conference. At the same time, Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer called with an offer to coach Tennessee's running backs.

For some, the chance to become an offensive coordinator would have been too tempting to pass up. For McCorvey, the decision to go to Tennessee was placed within the context of a bigger picture.

"My thinking at the time was with the opportunity I had here as a position coach or being a coordinator at (the other program), that I would have a better opportunity to become a head coach here," McCorvey says. "This is a very successful program, we've got a chance to win every year, there's excellent exposure, and all that might help put me in the mix of maybe one day having an opportunity to be a head coach."

McCorvey's move goes against the grain of many coaches on the way up the job ladder, but his point is something to consider for coaches, administrators and anyone involved in the hiring process to consider.

Successful coaches come from many different career paths, and realistically, one path isn't any more valuable than the others for a good coach who has worked hard to prepare himself for a head coaching opportunity. That path can take a coach through a coordinators' position, an assistant head coach's role, or a position coach's function and responsibility.

However, over the past decade, the trends in hiring new head coaches from the ranks of assistant coaches have increasingly favored coordinators (usually offensive coordinators) above assistant head coaches and position coaches. That continued to be true last year, with offensive-minded head coaches or offensive coordinators moving into 25 Division I-A head coaching jobs.

Of those 25 jobs:

Six went to current head coaches (including New York Jets head coach Al Groh taking over at Virginia).

Five went to offensive coordinators (including Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Gary Crowton taking over at BYU)

Four went to defensive coordinators.

Three went to assistant head coaches.

Four went to position coaches. NFL assistants John Bunting (North Carolina) and Les Miles (Oklahoma State) claimed two of head coaching jobs, but the other schools to hire college position coaches were Bowling Green (Notre Dame receivers coach Urban Meyer) and Buffalo (Syracuse quarterbacks coach Jim Hofher).

Two went to former head coaches, Pete Carroll (USC) and John Mackovic (Arizona).

Overall, 15 of those coaches came from the offensive side of the ball, while 10 came from defense.

"That's probably the most likely way to get a job these days," says first-year Boise State head coach Dan Hawkins, the Broncos' assistant head coach/recruiting coordinator/tight ends coach when he was promoted to replace new Arizona State coach Dirk Koetter. "Defensive guys will get those jobs periodically, but for whatever reason they don't get as many jobs as offensive coordinators. I'm not saying that's right by any means.

"A lot of it is just the perception that offensive coordinators is a little more prepared to do that, but I don't know if that's correct. So much of it is publicity and media attention, and for whatever reason successful offensive coaches tend to get more exposure than the defensive coaches."

North Carolina State coach Chuck Amato, a long-time defensive assistant at Florida State, Arizona and North Carolina State, sees the same trends dominating the hiring process in college football, and wonder if the people doing the hiring are missing the point.

"There's no question that's a big thing," Amato says. "Administrators understand the title of coordinator. An administrator's going to look at it and say 'if this guy's a coordinator, why would I want to hire this other guy?'

"But let's say I've been a coordinator at school X for 10 years and we lose an assistant coach and I come after you and you're really good. You're maybe even a coordinator where you're at but you're not going to be a coordinator at school X. Well, if you come here and do a good job, you may be as responsible for me getting a positive reputation as anybody. You're weren't the coordinator, but that's only because we already had one. You may be an even better coach than me."

Amato points to the example of Marty Galbraith, N.C. State's current offensive coordinator. Galbraith left a job as Marshall's offensive coordinator after the 1999 season to become Amato's offensive line coach, but Amato knew he was getting more than a position coach. Amato knew if he ever lost offensive coordinator Norm Chow, Galbraith, with his extensive college and NFL experience, would be the right man to replace Chow. When Chow left after the 2000 season to become one of the nation's two best-paid coordinators at USC, Galbraith moved up, and Amato won't be surprised if he becomes a head coach one of these days.

"He's a very smart coach and I hired him with the idea that if anything happened to Norm, Marty was going to be my next coordinator," Amato says. "Marty's not a better coach now than he was last year just because he has a title, but that's what people look at a lot of times when they do the hiring."

Galbraith will gain valuable experience as an offensive coordinator, but the question remains: is it the best path to a head coaching job? Maybe for him, but not for everyone.

There's no doubt that being a coordinator can be excellent preparation for the responsibilities that come with being a head coach. Just ask Ole Miss head coach David Cutliffe or Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville.

"I certainly think it helps because if you're a coordinator you're making a lot of decisions, and it's all about decisions when you become a head coach," says Cutcliffe, a former Tennessee offensive coordinator. "You've got accountability for managing people and taking your role seriously, and managing people is critical for a head coach.

'If I'm an AD and I'm looking to hire a head coach from the assistant coaching ranks, I'm going to look toward a coordinator."

Tuberville, a former Miami and Texas A&M defensive coordinator, says, "When you're a coordinator, at least you have an opportunity to learn and use organizational skills, and learn to be in charge of a group. I think it would be very hard to not be a coordinator and then go in and be a coach right off the bat, because there's already so much difference between being a head coach and a coordinator, and the difference is even more if you've never organized a group or called plays."

But what about assistant head coaches? Are calling the plays and establishing the game plan the most important prerequisites for a head coach in today's college football environment?

"Today's head coaches are a lot like CEOs now, because there are so many demands on their time, particularly at the Division I-A level," says Scott Downing, the assistant head coach/special teams/running backs coach for Joe Tiller at Purdue. "The head coach ends up organizing things and setting the philosophy of the program and then hiring the coaches who will work within his philosophy, be it offense, defense, recruiting or whatever.

"Some of the things you do as an assistant coach, administratively, dealing with the inner workings of the program, they really give you insight to all the things a head coach has to take into consideration."

That proved to be true for Frank Solich, who spent eight years as an assistant coach and seven more as assistant head coach to Tom Osborne at Nebraska before taking over as the head coach in December, 1997.

"I was in charge of coaching the Nebraska running backs, recruiting and helping to prepare the offensive game plan, along with being responsible for doing anything else the head coach wanted me to do," Solich says. "In my case, some of those tasks were administrative tasks, and others were more involved with the public and the media. For example, at bowl games, I was asked to represent the program at functions such as press conferences or at booster functions. I just had more responsibilities than other position coaches, and I was expected to do more to get our team ready to play from week to week.

"The extra responsibilities that I had as an assistant head coach, especially dealing with the media and the public, along with those extra administrative duties, helped me understand all the things that went into being a head coach. Also, the involvement that I had with game preparation and breaking down film and recruiting made me well-prepared to be a head coach."

The one thing Solich didn't do was run his own offense, but he doesn't believe that has hurt him as a head coach.

"Coach Osborne was always the head coach and offensive coordinator, but I knew what to expect by helping him prepare our offensive game plan, and I knew the commitment that it took to be the head coach and call all of the offensive plays," Solich says. "I don't think my lack of experience calling the plays limited me. Calling the plays is a part of the game that I really enjoy. I see advantages and disadvantages to being the offensive coordinator and being the head coach. Not a lot of head coaches around the country do both. They designate the assignment and basically just coordinate those responsibilities through the assistants.

"Right now, I like being the offensive coordinator. It is more time consuming, and there is more preparation time that goes into developing the offensive game plans in order to know which plays will work against certain teams, but I enjoy the challenge."

The experience was similar for Amato, who spent 14 of his 18 years at Florida State as Bowden's assistant head coach. Amato was a defensive coordinator at N.C. State from 1976-79, but did not coordinate the defense at FSU. However, in addition to his experiences working with Bowden, Lou Holtz, Bo Rein and Larry Smith, Amato is thankful for the lessons he learned as an assistant head coach at a successful program.

"I did a lot of the day-to-day duties, especially if Coach Bowden wasn't there. Things ran smoothly because it was my job to make them run smoothly," Amato says. "I ran the camp, set up the office-duty schedules, took care of the spring and summer responsibilities because he was gone doing a lot of fund-raising stuff. I would even do fund-raising stuff when he couldn't make a trip and I also served as a buffer for him with a lot of those boosters. He knew that when he left in the summer things were going to be fine.

"I also see myself as a very good recruiter and I recruited in South Florida, in Miami's backyard. We always knew the team in this state that controlled South Florida won, and we would always have 16 to 22 players on our squad from South Florida, and that's a quarter of your football team. So my recruiting experience was another advantage.

"So I got exposed to a lot of different responsibilities in my time there, and that's helped me here (N.C. State). You learn to deal with a budget, and administrators and work with other coaches. A lot of people really don't know that there's a lot more to the job than Xs and Os and that's something I had to learn."

From McCorvey's perspective, his experience as an assistant head coach weighs more than his time as an offensive coordinator.

"I think the experience being an assistant head coach under Coach Stallings was the best experience for me," McCorvey says. "It gave me an insight to what he saw from a day-to-day experience. A lot of times when you're the coordinator on either side of the ball, whether it's offense or defense, you're kind of tuned in to the game plan and the day-to-day preparation and practice.

"But I got a chance to see first-hand some of the other things Coach Stallings had to do, like handling discipline problems, dealing with the academic end of it, meeting with the media, the speaking engagements and all the things that come with being a head coach."

Those are lessons Downing is learning on a daily basis at Purdue. He's been an NAIA-level head coach at Sterling College in Kansas in 1982-83, but has since followed the coaching path as an assistant coach at Nebraska, Wyoming and Purdue.

"As an assistant head coach, you get to be involved in the administrative process. You can help take some of the pressure off the head coach. I run our four summer football camps. I also deal with player housing on campus. We have a football chapel and I help organize that and work with our team chaplain. Sometimes I'm the liaison between our staff and some of the other departments on campus, whether it's the business office or the travel committee. A lot of things just come up and Coach Tiller assigns me those tasks as they come along."

Like many of his peers, Downing has seen the trend towards coordinators in the hiring process, but Downing believes that athletic directors, university presidents and other people involved in the hiring process will see the value of assistant head coaches as viable head coaching candidates.

"It's a natural steppingstone to being a head coach," Downing says. "Coordinators are getting hired and doing a good job, too, but it all comes down to whether or not you fit the profile of the athletic director or search committee looking for a new coach.

"Joe (Tiller) always says if a guy's interested in getting a head coach or move up in the coaching world, it's all about timing and fit. When people are looking to fill a head coaching, they want to know if the candidate fits their profile, and I think the title of assistant head coach lets people know you've been around the block a couple of times, you've got some experience, the head coach trusts you to take care of things. I think that gives people a signal that this guy is a guy you should look at."

So which path is the best route to the head coaching job? Having been a head coach, defensive coordinator, offensive coordinator, special teams coordinator and assistant head coach in his career, Hawkins believes there is more than one way for a potential head coach to reach his destination.

"They're all valuable in their own way," Hawkins says. "As an assistant head coach, you're more exposed to some of the things you don't like in coaching, such as the paperwork and the administrative side of the business and some of the other unseen things a coach has to do. When you're a coordinator, you have the experience of taking the pressure, taking the heat and organizing a group of people to get something done."

While the attributes of coordinators and assistant head coaches can be obvious, there's also something to be said for qualified assistants working with experience on successful coaching staffs.

That description fit Tony Samuel when New Mexico State hired him to be its head coach in 1997. Samuel had been a defensive end at Nebraska before joining Osborne's staff as a grad assistant. He went on to work at Western Michigan and Stanford before returning to Nebraska as a full-time assistant in 1986.

Throughout that time, Samuel never worked as a coordinator or assistant head coach, but he benefited from his exposure to a successful program and a solid coaching staff.

"I was surrounded by great coaches and a great system, and I was able to be part of it from the ground up," Samuel says. "I was a member of Tom Osborne's first recruiting class there. I played there, did the grad assistant thing there, did the part-time thing there, left for four years and then came back and put in 11 years as a full-time assistant. So I was able to see everything from every level, as part of a lot of different aspects of the program, not just as a coach, but from an organizational point of view as well.

"We coached by committee at Nebraska, and yes, someone had the title of coordinator, but everyone's input was important and everyone had their own major responsibilities. So I wasn't a typical assistant coach without a lot of responsibility, and that really helped prepare me."

Samuel took over a tough job at New Mexico State, inheriting a situation that suffered from a lack of tradition and resources. He opened this season by playing four "money" games among the first five games, with games against Louisville, Texas, Oregon State and Kansas State sandwiched around a game against in-state rival New Mexico, but Samuel has done a commendable job of building a competitive program that should compete for championships in the new Sun Belt.

"I came in here very prepared to be a head coach and I was fortunate to put together a staff that had experience with the Nebraska system that would help do the things we all felt very strongly about," Samuel says. "A lot of people are still waiting for the wins all in line, but we've become a very competitive program in our time here."

Samuel got a chance because a university looked beyond mere titles and found the qualities it sought in a position coach. Ultimately, that should be one of the important rules in the hiring process: the right title doesn't make the man right, but the right man can make the title right.
Nebraska's Frank Solich spent 15 years as a Cornhusker assistant prior to taking over.



Auburn's Tuberville thinks being a coordinator is a big advantage for prospective head coaches.






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