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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Division I-A Coach of the Year Ralph Friedgen

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The Big Man knew. The Big Man had a plan. Sure, he had plenty of Xs and Os spinning around in that bald head of his, but he also had hopes, dreams, goals and plans. Big plans.

Plans to build a program. Plans to transform a program. Plans to tear down all the old bad habits and all the losing ways and re-teach the right habits, instill a winning confidence from the ground up. Plans to motivate, whether it meant yelling, screaming, prodding, pushing, pulling or hugging. Plans to win, and keep on winning, until someone noticed that his team was special.

If only someone had noticed sooner. Why did The Big Man have to wait so long? Why didn’t someone give him this chance before he was 54 years old? Why didn’t they see past the expansive waist and the vacant scalp and spot the real deal? Why didn’t they understand that the big man was a head coach just waiting for a time and place to happen.

Someone finally noticed. Some had suspected all along, including American Football Monthly, that the big man would make some football program proud someday. But it took a long time before someone with a desperate football program and a head coaching vacancy finally paid attention to The Big Man inside and gave him the chance he had started to worry would never come.

It took a woman to notice the big man inside The Big Man. Isn’t that like a woman? To look past the outside and see the man inside? You ever see those average-looking guys walking down the street with a beautiful woman and wonder “what does she possibly see in him?” It’s the whole Billy Joel-marries-Christie Brinkley debate, isn’t it? The answers are either: 1) She’s blind; 2) He’s rich; or 3) She sees the man inside.

That’s what Maryland athletic director Debbie Yow saw in Ralph Friedgen.

Yow wasn’t looking for a Ken Doll with a full head of hair and a trim waist. Who cares about thick hair and looking good in a pair of slacks when your team is driving for the winning score in the final moments of a tense game?

Yow wanted someone who cared about the University of Maryland, its past, present and future, its people and its players. Yow wanted someone who could tear down all the losing and construct a foundation for winning. She wanted someone who could bring out the best in the people around him. She wanted someone with plans. Big plans.

She wanted The Big Man.

“I spent four years studying Coach Friedgen,” Yow says. “I watched his games on satellite TV whenever I could, I read everything about him on the Internet. When I met him for the first time, he had a whole outline of what he was going to say, how he was going to build the program. Halfway through it, I said to him, ‘You’re the guy I want.’”

Twelve months later, Yow and the university showed The Big Man just how much they wanted him. On the heals of a 10-1 season, Maryland’s first ACC championship since 1985, Maryland’s first Orange Bowl berth since 1956 and every major coach-of-the-year honor in the game, including American Football Monthly’s college Coach of the Year award, Maryland offered The Big Man a 10-year contract worth $12 million.

Friedgen responded by saying the renegotiated contract “is telling the world I want to be here.”

As if we had any doubt? Maryland is Friedgen’s baby, the child he waited so long to give birth to. In the Bible, Abraham’s wife Sarah was supposed to be too old to have a baby, but it happened. At 54, Friedgen often found himself wondering if he would have ever have a chance to have a program of his own. His resume reveals a long history of success as an assistant coach, but Friedgen always ended up playing the part of your favorite bachelor uncle who never got married and had kids of his own.

It took a desperate program and a desperate athletic director to see The Big Man for who he really is, to give him the chance to be all he knew he could be, if he could just get the opportunity. That chance finally came from his alma mater, a so-called basketball school in a basketball conference, with just two winning football seasons from 1986 to 2000, just one minor bowl trip in that same period and a silly turtle for a mascot. A turtle for gosh’s sake.

Let’s face it. Maryland wasn’t exactly one of the dream jobs in college football. Unless, of course, you’re The Big Man and you love the place with all your heart and soul, because you played there, you coached there, and you saw something special in the place, just like the place saw something special in you.

“All those years, no one picked you,” Friedgen told himself. “I applied at Duke, South Carolina, Maryland twice, Clemson, North Carolina twice. Know what I’m saying? Some of them didn’t even respond. That’s what I was thinking. People didn’t think I could coach. I knew I could.

“It’s really been unbelievable. I had about given up having an opportunity to become a head coach, and I didn’t anticipate this happening. The whole year’s been a whirlwind.”

A whirlwind? More like a hurricane that came in off the Atlantic and swept through College Park, leveling all the long-held beliefs about Maryland’s place in the college football landscape and forcing the entire program to rebuild from the bottom up, with a fresh outlook based on new ideas and ideals. Friedgen wanted to win, and he wanted to now. He had waited too long to wait five years for a 6-5 season and a Cheese Wiz Bowl bid. He wanted his baby to walk, run, eat solid foods, talk and read – all in the first month, and dadgummit, it was going to happen by shear force of The Big Man’s will. Anyone who got in the way was gonna get wiped out by Hurricane Ralph and have no chance to join the wild ride that take the Terps to the Orange Bowl.

“I’m probably never going to be satisfied,” Friedgen admits. “My wife tells me it’s my nature. Someone mentioned that to George O’Leary (Friedgen’s former boss at Georgia Tech) and he said, ‘That’s just Ralph. He’s never happy.’ I’m not. I’m a perfectionist. I’m emotional and I’m not very patient.”

The players got the message from the very start.

“We had heard about him, but he was almost like this ghost. We didn’t know much because he had never been a head coach anywhere else,” senior wide receiver Guilian Gary says. “Trust me, we got to know what he was about pretty quick.”

“He made it clear that it was his way or the highway,” senior center Marvin Fowler says. “We were going to have to change and make sure we did it his way.”

The Terps, especially the seniors didn’t really have to do it his way. They could have protested with their silence and lack of cooperation, undermining all his hopes and dreams with poor attitude and selfish behavior. But they wanted this, needed this, almost as much as Friedgen. They needed a change, a reason to run, lift and work in the offseason. A reason to go out to practice everyday. A reason to believe they could actually win on each and every fall Saturday.

And the more they learned about The Big Man, the more they saw The Big Man for who he really is.

“He is never going to sugarcoat you. He’s going to tell you the way it is, and that’s what we need, someone to be honest,” says running back Bruce Perry, who has rushed for 1,151 yards this season. “Some people will sugar-coat things so they will get you to go out and do something, but you can tell that they don’t really believe it themselves. With him, he only tells you what he believes.”

“The main thing about Coach Friedgen is, I don’t think he tries to say the right things,” linebacker Aaron Thompson said. “He just says what he feels in his heart. That’s why it means so much. You can see in his face he means it. I’ll play all my life for a guy like that.”

The Terps gave The Big Man a chance and he ran with it. They had come so close to a winning season and a bowl bid in recent years, going 5-6 in 1999 and 2000, but they always came up short by “missing just two or three plays, here or there, and not getting done in,” running back Mark Riley says.

One of Friedgen’s first acts was to simply eliminate the number six from Maryland’s vocabulary.

“I think by having your goal be winning six games, you start looking at the schedule and picking out who you can beat, who you can’t beat, and I didn’t want that,” Friedgen says.

Instead, Friedgen wanted the Terps to think bigger and better, to look past the immediate goal of winning six games and accept his vision for the bigger picture.

“He said we don’t need to worry about getting the six to go to a bowl, we need to worry about what bowl we’re going to,” Perry recalls. “That’s the statement that really got to me. That sold me. Because we were always just the 5-6 team, and he came in and saw something else. We figured, if he believed that much in us, we might as well believe in ourselves.”

Friedgen gave them plenty of reasons to believe, starting with the kind of consistent discipline they could rely on as soon as they realized the demands were meant for their own good.

“He told us the whistle blew at 5:45 a.m. and you better be ready to run,” Gary says. “I can say there were a lot of guys who weren’t very happy.”
Friedgen didn’t stop with early morning workouts. In fact, The Big Man was just getting started. All of his Terps had to live on campus. All of his Terps had to eat their meals together. None of his Terps were allowed to drink alcohol during the season unless Friedgen gave special permission. None of his Terps were allowed to hang out at four popular bars near campus. All of his Terps were instructed to attend class or else. Or else meant meeting Friedgen earlier in the morning than the rest of the team to run the stadium steps.

In The Big Man’s first months at Maryland, players also learned why Friedgen demanded so much off-field discipline. He wanted that discipline to carry over into their on-field habits – whether they were blocking, tackling, running routes, taking handoffs, throwing passes or learning assignments, Friedgen not only demanded perfection but he also showed them, time and time again, how to strive for that perfection.

“You can’t be just a horse’s rear end – you have to love ‘em up, too,” Friedgen says. “And you have to be fair. I’m responsible to those kids, and if I lose their trust, it’s over, forget it.”

Over time, The Big Man gained that trust, and it grew, blossomed and produced a crop that the Terps harvested in the fall.

“As we went the attitude on our squad changed completely,” Gary says. “You’re doing something together as a group, and you really become stronger because of that. And it toughens you up, I can guarantee you that.”

The Terps proved how tough they were in the 2001 season opener, beating North Carolina 23-7 with tough defense, resilient offense and strong fundamentals, sending an emotional Friedgen to the stands to lead Maryland fans in the school fight song.

“I’ve waited so long for this,” Friedgen said afterward. “I always thought I could do this. So many times I was disappointed. ... Yeah, this is special.”

But if anyone thought Friedgen was satisfied, well ... they don’t know The Big Man. Maryland was just getting started, following the North Carolina win with a 50-3 win over Eastern Michigan, a 27-20 win over Wake Forest and a 32-20 win over West Virginia in the kind of game the Terps would have found a way to lose in the past few years.

The next week, Friedgen prepared for Virginia by showing his game films of several of the Terps’ eight consecutive losses to the Cavaliers, and Maryland responded with a dominating 41-21 win. Maryland followed that with a 20-17 overtime win over Georgia Tech, Friedgen’s former team, and the nation was finally starting to take notice of the transformation taking place in College Park.

In the process, The Big Man started making the most of his skills as a motivator. His pep talks became fiery orations capable of triggering a raging inferno in his players.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when everybody is working together for a common goal. It’s more ‘we’ than ‘I.’ You become very strong and very efficient when you do those things.

Gary says Friedgen became “borderline crazy” on game days, even head-butting helmeted players after a big play. As Maryland trailed North Carolina State 9-3 at halftime on Nov. 17, Friedgen sensed that his team’s head and heart were not in the game, and he wasn’t about to let it slide.

“I was talking to them, and they had this blank, deer-in-the-headlights stare,” Friedgen says. “I wanted them to get going. I said, ‘Damn it. I’m a damn competitor. What about you?’ And I threw a chair over their heads. They still kept looking at me, so I threw it again. The second one got them fired up.”

Maryland responded with a 23-19 that clinched an outright ACC title and a trip to a Bowl Championship Series bowl.

But Friedgen isn’t all chair throwing and head butting. Sometime he’s nurturing and compassionate. Before each game, he takes time to shake each player’s hand, one at a time, and reminds them that he is proud of them. He also formed a players’ council comprised of four seniors, three juniors, two sophomores and a freshman and seeks their input on a number of issues and concerns. When a tornado tore through the Maryland campus and killed two students this fall, the players council came to him and asked him to postpone practice that day, and Friedgen agreed.

Those qualities came through in a big way for The Big Man when it came to kicker Nick Novak, who had made just three of 10 field goals during the season before Georgia Tech called a timeout just as Novak lined up to kick a 46-yard field goal attempt to force the game into overtime.

Friedgen had already tried lighting a fire under Novak with criticism and sarcasm, but The Big Man eventually saw that Novak needed more support and confidence. Friedgen gave it to him guaranteeing Novak that he would remain as Maryland’s kicker.

When Novak missed a third-quarter field goal, Friedgen told him, “‘Forget it. You are going to have to make one to win the game, so just relax.’”

As Novak prepared to take the field goal after Georgia Tech’s last-second timeout, “I just made a joke to him and tried to loosen him up,” Friedgen says. “The last thing we did on Wednesday before we went down to Atlanta was kick a long field goal, and he stroked it, (from) about 50 yards. I just said, ‘Hit that one like you hit the last one. I know you can do it. Just go out there and kick it. Just stroke it.’”

“He told me he had total confidence in me and he knew that I could make it,” Novak recalls. “When I saw that in his eyes and the team, how they were counting on me, I knew I had to do it.”

Novak not only nailed the field goal, but then kicked the game-winner in overtime.

“There is no one way,” Friedgen says. “You just have to feel the pulse of the team and know what strings to pull, what buttons to push, who to encourage and who to get on.

“There are a lot of ways you can motivate. You can motivate by fear. You can motivate by encouraging. You can motivate with confidence and setting goals. I think I have used every one of them. The key for me is to try to get them up every week. I try to find some theme and something that is tangible that they can look to and isolate for that one game.”

Sometimes you have to reach deep into your comedy act to get a team’s attention, and Friedgen proved he could do that against Duke on Oct. 20. With a 7-0 record, talk of a possible ACC championship and a game against Florida State the next week, it would have been easy for the Terps to overlook winless Duke. “I listed about 10 different reasons why we need to beat Duke,” Friedgen says. “I think I ended with ‘because they’re Duke.’”

The next day, Maryland whipped Duke 59-17. Of course, the Terps did go on to lose 52-31 at FSU the next week, but they also bounced back to finish the regular season with three consecutive wins over Troy State, Clemson and N.C. State, as Friedgen refused to allow the Terps to see themselves as anything but champions.

“I’m a competitor, and I don’t like to lose,” Friedgen says. “I like winning more than anything else in life.”

Along the way, the Terps realized The Big Man had changed everything for the better, that King Ralph had taken their hearts and minds by force of will and turned them into the winners they never knew they could be.

“Before, we’d lose big to a team and then we’d throw a party on Saturday nights,” Riley says. “We knew that no matter what, after the game, we were going to have fun. Now, the game is the thing. We still hang out, celebrate our victories, but really now after a game all we want to do is rest before practice starts for the next one.”

“He has two very special qualities,” Gary adds. “He’s completely straightforward. He tells you exactly how it is. Also, he’s a sports psychologist. He knows kids. He can be really hard on you, but it’s because he believes in you. He’s not degrading. He’s tough, but not mean.”

The Terps aren’t the only people on campus singing The Big Man’s praises these days. “Fridge Fever” has taken over, and it’s become more and more contagious with each win. His weekly open-house breakfasts are open to anyone and well attended, and his fundraising efforts to upgrade the school’s athletic facilities have produced positive results.

Friedgen also overhauled the program’s use of technology. While computers and other technological advances might scare some veteran coaches, Friedgen has embraced them and installed a $1.5 million network (that he arranged to purchase for $700,000) with stations in every coach’s office and meeting room, along with five laptop docking stations, so that the coaches can work more effectively and efficiently.

“I learned (the importance of using computers) when I was in the NFL and saw all these young guys walking around with laptops,” Friedgen says. “I’m smart enough to know when the posse is catching you.”

And smart enough to outrun the posse as well. Among his long list of financial priorities, Friedgen still hopes to raise enough money to fund a $6 million addition to the football facility that will include a dining hall, auditorium and academic support facility. At some point, Friedgen also would like to build an indoor practice facility, add on to the weight room and expand Byrd Stadium with a major overhaul.

“The one thing I feel is gratitude for what he’s been able to do this quickly,” Yow says. “I didn’t expect it in year one. I feel so great for the seniors on this team. I wanted to get it right for them. It’s why I felt I had to make a change.

“We’ve got a core group of loyal fans who have suffered for 15 years. It’s nice to see them now. They’re like little kids. I’m getting such a kick out of it. And this is just the beginning. He’ll be here for years and years. He’s building a foundation that’s going to last a long time.”

Others might see this season as a dream come true, but for The Big Man, the dream is only just beginning. He didn’t spend all those years trying to become a head coach so he could have one big season and then retire or sit back and count his money and shine his trophies. The Big Man has plans, plans that called for long-term success, the kind of winning that proves this season wasn’t just a fluke.

No, The Big Man is just getting started, so climb in, hang on and enjoy the ride. It’s going to be fun ... at least for the Terps.

“The thing I’m really enjoying is just the way our kids have changed, just the way they hold themselves and how proud they are,” Friedgen says. “They were the same kids that were 5-6 the last couple years and seeing them enjoy the success has been thrilling for me. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when everybody is working together for a common goal. It’s more ‘we’ than ‘I.’ You become very strong and very efficient when you do those things.

“I think it’s great for Maryland. We’ve been down for so long. I think there’s an excitement in this state right now that’s probably unprecedented, even back in the 1980s when I was here. I don’t recall the euphoria that’s existing within the state and within the University. I think a sense of pride has been restored. To me, the University of Maryland stands for excellence, not only in academics but also in athletics. That’s what I have always felt and I am proud to be an alumnus of Maryland.

“I think it is very important to use this year to build a foundation for years to come. We can use this season to build on. Hopefully we will get better recruits in here, hopefully build our season ticket sales, hopefully build up fundraising, and hopefully improve our facilities. I know this ... we got a heck of a better start than if we were 1-10 as opposed to being 10-1.”






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