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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/sports/ncaafootball/ohio-states-staff-offers-a-mix-thats-unmatched.html?_r=0
The Assistants
The Mensa Member
The first name on Urban Meyer’s list: Tom Herman, now co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, he of the documented high IQ.
The Roommates
Luke Fickell wanted to be a wrestler yet ended up on the football team at Ohio State. Mike Vrabel, his roommate, wanted to coach in Columbus.
The Traditionalist
Ed Warinner, who grew up near Canton, Ohio, and played for Mount Union, embodied the background that Urban Meyer sought.
The Motivator
Kerry Coombs, Ohio State's special teams coordinator and cornerbacks coach, worked at the high school level for 24
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Urban Meyer started with a notepad, the first page blank. He scribbled “OC” and drew a line underneath. Same with “DC.” And “OL.”
Those headers stood for various assistant positions — offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, offensive line coach — and underneath them, Meyer wrote the names of potential candidates. He kept the list on him, in his suit pocket, as he analyzed college football games for ESPN in 2011. He tracked statistics, made notes in the margins, scratched names off.
Meyer figured he would eventually coach again, and he knew that his next head coaching job, his fourth, would be different. His staff would not be stocked with loyal assistants who understood the Meyer Way and its demands.
To that end, he hurriedly assembled a group of relative strangers when he took over at Ohio State and then kept the group intact for a second season. Together, they have won 19 straight games, their next challenge coming Saturday against Penn State.
All that started with his list.
It produced an eclectic mixture, this Ohio State staff, a collection of nine main assistants unlike any other in college football. One offensive coordinator is a Mensa member, although he cannot remember if he paid his most recent dues. The defensive line coach played 14 seasons in the N.F.L. and has three Super Bowl rings. One defensive coordinator was a wrestler who became an interim head football coach. The strength coach doubles as the unofficial staff therapist.
Collectively, they hold more than 200 years of experience, at all levels, from high school to the N.F.L. They took a team ranked 81st in the Football Bowl Subdivision in scoring in 2011 to seventh in 2013, took an offense ranked 107th in yards per game to 20th. They garnered a number of top recruiter awards in the off-season. Their makeup — and the way Meyer stitched them together in a matter of weeks — is one important, underrated aspect of Ohio State’s return to national championship contention.
Meyer, 49, knows their life. He lived it. He made $6,000 a year and drove an old Grand Am and slept for months on a friend’s couch. He saw the size of staffs grow, along with the salaries paid to assistants and their responsibilities and impacts.
“They don’t get enough credit,” Meyer said at his office this month during the Buckeyes’ bye week. “They are more important now than they’ve ever been.”
They spent the bye week huddled around white boards. They diagramed plays and downed coffee and argued schematic changes. They listened to — and for the footsteps of — the boss.
They are: the Assistants.
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Ohio State practices on three fields, two outdoor and one indoor, and sometimes on all three at once. Meyer often stands in the center of the outdoor fields, the Assistants scattered among position groups — the hub of the wheel, then, surrounded by its spokes. They connect Meyer’s philosophy, his grand plan, to the players who will implement it.
Familiarity, the foundation for cohesiveness, is important. This staff had little of that at first.
Yet in 2012, the team had the sixth no-loss season in its history.
In previous stops at Florida, Utah and Bowling Green, Meyer always hired “his guys,” familiar assistants who understood his detailed operation. Eventually, most of his guys became head coaches, including four from the 2005 Florida staff, which Meyer once boldly called the best “maybe in college football history.”
As he assembled this new group, Meyer worried about strangers, about agendas, and he called friends and friends of friends for background checks. Uninterested in doling out seven-figure paychecks, he turned down “big-name guys, like really big names” who inquired about positions. He wanted coaches with local ties, who understood the tradition at Ohio State. He also paid attention to the coaches’ wives. He had seen others “create conflict in our programs.”
His first call went to Mickey Marotti, his strength coach and sounding board, his proverbial right hand.
At every previous stop, Meyer had retained the defensive coordinator and revamped the offense. But even that seemed problematic at Ohio State because the defensive coordinator was more than a coordinator. Luke Fickell was also the previous head coach.
Each assistant received a manual, Meyer’s coaching bible, with tabs for “recruiting” and “schedules” and “weight training,” every detail laid out. He sat down the Assistants the first time they met and went through it all, page by page.
He talked about alignment, one of his favorite words. He detailed his philosophy. He brought his staff out to the practice field and practiced how they would conduct practice. He cared little, through the spring of 2011, about schemes and actual plays.
“Last I checked, Urban Meyer is a pretty demanding guy,” said Stan Drayton, the assistant head coach for offense and the running backs coach. “He doesn’t trust real well. There has to be a series of events that confirm his feeling on something. That took time.”
Meyer hired two assistants who were previously interim head coaches and two assistants with vast high school experience; eight of his assistants had Ohio ties. He told them he did not plan to change what worked, only to enhance it. He wanted to avoid some of the problems from his time at Florida, where he won two national championships but where so many players were arrested that the local newspapers kept a database. He gave his Ohio State staff office hours, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. He scheduled a family night, in which players ate with the assistants’ wives, each Thursday, attendance mandatory.
Meyer then took them on a retreat, one of his annual traditions. No cellphones. No cell service. Just Meyer and his nine main assistants, sitting around talking football. They cap the weekend with a wives’ dinner. Meyer speaks, and the wives receive a gift, usually jewelry. The Last Supper, Meyer calls it.
For all that remained the same at Ohio State, Meyer changed, too. The health issues that sent him away from Florida and into broadcasting altered his approach. He knew this staff less, yet he delegated more. He had to. Or he tried to, anyway.
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To coach the coaches, Meyer relied on the handful of “his guys” he brought to Ohio State. That group included Marotti, Drayton, Brian Voltolini (director of football operations), Mark Pantoni (director of player personnel) and Zach Smith (receivers coach).
Smith interned under Meyer at Florida, where he slept on an old black couch inside the football stadium that was so dirty he simply covered it with towels. That was before the size of staffs ballooned in college football, before each Ohio State assistant received his own intern, not to mention the presence of graduate assistants, various coordinators for recruiting and operations and a small army of student volunteers.
“The workload wasn’t smaller,” Smith said. “The work force was.”
The Meyer disciples joined hires selected from his list. Like the tight ends and fullbacks coach, Tim Hinton, whose family has had Ohio State season tickets since 1950 and who worked as a graduate assistant with Meyer at Ohio State in 1986. Like the co-defensive coordinator Everett Withers, once North Carolina’s interim head coach.
At first, though, they all failed. The Buckeyes stumbled the first month of the 2012 season. They won each game, but as Meyer noted, “Alabama-Birmingham was beating us.”
“I was convinced up until that point that I was going to blow the whole thing up,” he said. “Lose five or six games, get my own guys in there and build a program.”
As Meyer addressed his team during this season’s bye week, he twice noted the date Sept. 29. That was the staff’s first trip together, the day Ohio State played Michigan State and the players bought in and the tension dissipated. The day this staff became “his guys.”
Looking back, Meyer is convinced that the disparate viewpoints, all the different schemes and philosophies and opinions, actually benefited the Buckeyes more than the traditional one-mind hiring approach would have. The staff he stitched together held Ohio State together through what should have been a transition but hardly resembled one.
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Preparations continued through the bye week. The Assistants packed the meeting room, which included quotations from Bill Belichick, the Bible and the former Buckeyes great Cris Carter. They walked past clocks that counted down to the Iowa game — a game they hung on to win, 34-24 — and to the Michigan game, past the sign out front that read, “Due to N.C.A.A. rules, we cannot accept items to be autographed.”
The offensive assistants debated a self-assessment report titled “Ohio State Basic Tendencies.” They wanted to involve certain players more. The table they worked around was covered in coffee cups, creamer, sugar, white board cleaner, an Ohio State visor, empty Gatorade bottles, dip cans, Coke cans, pens, game plans. Their white board was a mass of scribbles and formations and charts.
“We have so many plays, we’re running out of letters,” Tom Herman, a co-offensive coordinator and the quarterbacks coach, said.
“Can I get an ampersand?” Smith, the receivers coach, asked.
The defensive assistants huddled in their own room. At one point, Fickell, Withers and Kerry Coombs, the cornerbacks coach and special teams coordinator, stood at separate portions of the white board, scribbling away.
Coombs yawned and reached for the nearest coffee cup.
“We’ll get this right,” he said as he erased one formation and started on another.
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I wanna go to where the martyrs went
the brown figures on the walls of my apart-a-ment...
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