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From the Coaches Bookshelf - Dream Chaser – 4th and Goal by Monte Burke

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For some, coaching football is simply in their blood. In his new book, 4th & Goal, author Monte Burke tells the amazing story of Joe Moglia, who left coaching to pursue what would become a monumentally successful career in financial services. Moglia has since returned to the sidelines and fulfilled his life-long dream of becoming a college head coach. Here is an excerpt.

Now sixty-two, Joe Moglia is standing on the sidelines of a football field in Nebraska, wearing a headset and a white polo shirt with the words “Omaha Nighthawks” stenciled over the left breast. It is a Thursday night in the fall of 2011, chilly and sprinkling with rain. The stadium lights are aureoled in the mist. Joe can see the vapor from his breath.

Joe has become head coach of the Nighthawks, one of four franchises that constitute the United Football league, a professional minor league in only its third year of existence. Constantly teetering on the brink of obsolescence because of financial troubles, this is a league made up of football players and coaches who, for one reason or another, are currently either National Football League castoffs or wannabes. The UFL provides them with a chance to get back into the biggest, most powerful sports league in the world, or to make it there for the first time.

The league provided Joe an opportunity, too. In a life filled with overcoming challenges, he has sought out another in his quest to become a coach again. He had been born and raised in a rough-and-tumble inner city New York neighborhood from which half of its kids never made it out. He was an audacious young football coach who scratched and clawed his way up the profession for sixteen years. After leaving coaching in 1984, he embarked on one of the most remarkable – and unlikely – business careers of the last half century, one that was completely self-made. With no experience or pedigree, he somehow willed his way into a new career on Wall Street. In his seventeen years at Merrill Lynch, he rose quickly to a top management position and, along the way, actually changed the way Wall Street does business.

In 2001, Joe made himself again, shocking the financial world when he left his very comfortable and highly lucrative post at Merrill to take over a money-losing, left-for-dead online broker. In his eight years at TD Ameritrade, he rescued the company from the bursting of one financial bubble, helped it to completely sidestep another, and in the process created one of the strongest financial services firms in the country.

Then, at the top of the financial game, he walked away. Voluntarily. He was almost sixty. Deep inside, Joe knew there was one more task left undone, one more challenge to face. He never had become the head coach of a college team, and now, he decided, the time had come.

This guy is totally insane, said members of both the financial and football worlds, as Joe embarked on his dream chase. When he couldn’t find a job right away, he became at age sixty, an unpaid intern for the University of Nebraska’s football team to regain the experience, the brushing up, he believed that college football athletic directors required to take a chance on him, to prove that he wasn’t some rich Wall Street kook. He did this for two seasons, working eighty hours a week at Nebraska. But it wasn’t enough. Joe got five coaching interviews, and had some nibbles at a few other places. But in the end, no athletic director was willing to stick his neck out to hire a sixty-year-old man who had not coached in a quarter of a century. After all, athletic directors are naturally nervous critters, their own job security hanging on the success of their hires.

For nearly three years, Joe looked for a college-coaching job to no avail. Then came the offer from the UFL. True, it was not a college job, but it was the only job he’d been presented. It would give him the opportunity to prove himself. It was a risk he had to take. If he succeeded here, he believed then those skittish athletic directors would find themselves out of excuses.

Joe has one more thing he thinks will differentiate him from the other UFL coaches: The quarter of a century he spent out of the game. He believes that experience – contrary to conventional wisdom – will make him a better football coach, one with wisdom about life both on and off the field. Football, he tells his players and staff, is just a game. Nothing more, nothing less. But everyone on the team – himself included – has chosen to be a part of it. Thus their actions within the game, how they choose to practice it and play it, are manifestations of the way in which they choose to live their lives. “Be a man,” he reminds them at least once a day. Stand on your own two feet. Accept responsibility for yourself and your actions.

It all seems a little college, or maybe even high school, and, indeed, it is how Joe coached in both of those places. But it is also how he ran businesses. Joe believes that “being a man” is the fundamental principle of life. It’s why he left football in the first place. And it’s why he wants to return. And it is self-serving in a way: he also believes that responsible people make for better football players. s

Editor’s Note: Joe Moglia finished his one season in the UFL with a 1-3 record. He realized his dream in late 2011 when he was hired as head coach at Coastal Carolina. Last season, he led the Chanticleers to a 8-4 record and the Big South Conference Championship. He was also named conference Coach of the Year.

4th AND GOAL: One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream by Monte Burke. Published by Grand Central Books. Copyright 2012. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. 






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