ReportWire

Tag: football coaches

  • How a Sixtysomething Coach from a So-So School Turned Indiana into World-Beaters

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    There was little reason to think that Indiana would turn into the new Alabama—or that Indiana would humiliate the old Alabama in the Rose Bowl, 38–3. Cignetti had been an assistant to Nick Saban at Alabama, but that was nearly two decades ago. He’d left Tuscaloosa for a low-paying job as head coach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school, and then moved on to Elon University; from Elon, he went to J.M.U. When he came to Indiana, he brought many of his assistants and the core of the team from J.M.U. with him.

    He’s toned down the boasts since then. Cignetti has said that he leaned into a more arrogant persona in part to give Indiana fans—which is to say, basketball fans—a reason to talk about the football team. Now he can let his team’s results speak for him. This is the first college-football season to feature a twelve-team playoff. On its way to the title game, Indiana has beaten Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State, and Oregon (twice). It has won the Big Ten, the Rose Bowl, and the Peach Bowl, and is heavily favored to win the championship. It could become the first team to go 16–0 since 1894.

    How? Everyone is trying to figure out the blueprint. Maybe it has to do with Cignetti’s attention to detail, his emphasis on execution and not making mistakes; he obsesses over things like hand placement and how many inches a player should step. Or maybe it’s the culture of the team: Indiana’s coaches tuck in their shirts, and players are expected to have solid handshakes. Or the recruiting: Cignetti used the transfer portal to build a team largely out of overlooked players by focussing on past productivity instead of raw athletic traits—except for those traits that he believes really matter, such as joint mobility. Or maybe it’s his coaching staff: Cignetti has hired coördinators and coaches who are especially good at developing players. Or it could be continuity and experience: Indiana’s starters have, on average, played more than four years of college football, and much of the coaching staff has been with Cignetti for a long time. Or is it accountability? Cignetti is known to have high expectations. Others point to faith: the quarterback, Mendoza, seems to begin every sentence by praising God. Or maybe it’s the doubt from outsiders: the players call themselves a “bunch of misfits” who are proving everyone wrong. Or possibly it’s simply common sense: practices are brief and hyperefficient, because Cignetti has the radical idea that healthy, rested players are better than exhausted, injured ones. (He could be on to something!) Maybe Indiana made a deal with the devil. (Bobby Knight?)

    I like to think that it has something to do with Cignetti’s infamous expression on the sideline. It’s the same half scowl whether his team has just scored or been stuffed at the line of scrimmage. Every once in a while, he’ll pop his left eyebrow.

    It serves a purpose, that face. Cignetti is not unfeeling; he is capable of enjoying a moment. After Indiana beat Oregon, an on-field interviewer took it for granted that Cignetti was already concentrated on beating Miami, until Cignetti told her, “I’m really not thinking about the next game, I’m thinking about cracking open a beer.” His game face, though, serves as a reminder to focus and move on. Cignetti has said that he asks his players to approach every play, from the first one in the first game to the hundred-and-fiftieth of the season, the same way. “I can’t be seen on the sideline high-fiving people and celebrating, or what’s going to happen, right? What’s the effect going to be?”

    It’s possible, of course, that high-fiving people would have a galvanizing effect: players sometimes respond to joy, or to anger, better than they do to stoicism. Just look at Mendoza, Indiana’s quarterback, who is so ebullient that his smile seems to strain with happiness. But part of Cignetti’s power seems to stem from predictability and routine—the same expressions, the same gameday conversations, the same Chipotle order every day (rice, beans, and chicken, no toppings, side of guacamole).

    “Repetition is the mother of learning,” he likes to say. Repetition makes skills automatic. It helps players improve. And the awareness that you have been there, that you have done it before—even if, really, you haven’t—is the best, perhaps the only, way to deal with the uncertainty inherent in football. “I don’t have any idea what they’re going to do,” Cignetti said before playing Oregon in the semifinal, at that press conference with Lanning. “They don’t know what we’re going to do. As I sit here right now, I know everything we’ve practiced, but I have no idea what that tape is going to look like the day after. And that’s every game,” he went on. “That’s football. There are a lot of variables.”

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    Louisa Thomas

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  • Bill Belichick’s Carolina Train Wreck

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    In November, the fact that Carolina beat Stanford was overshadowed by a nugget, in the Post, that a beef between Hudson and one of Belichick’s daughters-in-law, Jen, had reached a point where Jen had screamed at Jordon in Bill’s office, calling her “batshit crazy” and accusing her of “fucking twisting” Bill’s brain. Shortly thereafter, Belichick was seen attending an adult-cheerleading event where Hudson, wearing a high pony and a red scrunchie, was competing. A photo of him sitting in the audience, looking miserable, went viral.

    WRAL was now reporting that nearly twenty per cent of U.N.C’s players had been ticketed for reckless driving or speeding, and that a “significant” number of them were Belichick’s recruits. One, Thad Dixon, a star transfer who had played under Belichick’s son Steve at the University of Washington, was cited for doing ninety-three in a fifty zone. At a presser, Belichick wearily said, “We’ve addressed it.”

    Generations of reporters have learned that it is nearly impossible to extract personal insight from Belichick. His memoir, “The Art of Winning,” which was published in May, reads like somebody made him write a term paper about leadership. The monotony of his curmudgeonly gray flame and supposed aversion to distraction is part of why Belichick scholars went on alert when he uncharacteristically surfaced on social media, with Hudson, playing mermaid angler and yoga daddy. What, I wondered, would Belichick’s best-known biographer, the late David Halberstam, have made of all this?

    Halberstam edited the Harvard Crimson and distinguished himself young, at the Times, by winning the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for coverage of the Vietnam War. He went on to publish nearly two dozen books on politics, civil rights, and professional sports—Bill Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers; the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry. In 2005, the Patriots were in the midst of a historic run, having won three of the last four Super Bowls. A friend of Belichick called Halberstam to suggest him as a new book subject.

    Both Halberstam and Belichick owned property on Nantucket, but had never met. Halberstam invited Belichick and his then-wife, Debby, whom Belichick had known since high school, over to dinner. As it turned out, Belichick wasn’t sold on the idea of a book, though he did admire Halberstam’s work, especially “The Best and the Brightest,” about Vietnam. According to Halberstam, Belichick agreed only after the project was framed in terms of lineage and learning.

    Much of what we know about Belichick appeared first in that book, “The Education of a Coach.” Belichick’s paternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from what is now Croatia. His mother, Jeannette, was a languages scholar of English descent; she learned Croatian to communicate with the relatives of her husband, Steve. The family worked in “the coal mines of western Pennsylvania, the steel mills of eastern Ohio,” Halberstam once told PBS. Steve “got out and made it because he was a very good, albeit relatively small, high school running back, and that got him to Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, and a coach picked up on him and understood that he was rough, crusty, but smart as could be, hardworking, and that everything you asked him to do, he would do, and more. And the values of that home—of nothing to be wasted, of maximizing your talents—he passed on to his son in a much more affluent America.”

    Bill was born in 1952, in Nashville, where his father briefly worked as an assistant football coach at Vanderbilt University, and he grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where Steve spent thirty-three years scouting for the Navy’s team, a job that he was able to hold for so long, in a profession marked by turnover, because the Naval Academy gave him tenure as a P.E. instructor. Father took son to work; the future Hall of Famer quarterback Roger Staubach tossed the kid passes. Belichick was a small child when he began absorbing the art of breaking down game film. He played football and lacrosse at Annapolis High School, where he met Debby, who captained the cheerleaders. After graduating, he spent a year at Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, to improve his grades and his college prospects. Playing center on the football team, he met Ernie Adams, a brainy senior from Brookline, Massachusetts, who played guard and was a fan of “Football Scouting Methods,” a book, published in 1962, that Steve had dictated to Jeannette with a level of density and detail that only other football obsessives could love.

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    Paige Williams

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  • The College-Coaching Carrousel Is Completely Out of Hand

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    In most states, the highest-paid public employee is a football coach. Lately, more and more of them are getting money to go away.

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    Louisa Thomas

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