4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  He did it all with a huge smile on his face. Joe wanted to be a football coach again, and this, he thought, was the first step he needed to take to get there.

  Joe had done something extremely rare in the world of American business: he left at the absolute pinnacle of his career. There was no Securities & Exchange Commission investigation, no personal scandal, no precipitous drop in stock price, no shareholder revolt. Very simply, he took over a company, led it through one of the stormiest periods in the financial world’s history, then left it a much stronger and more profitable place than it was when he started.

  In the summer of 2008, Joe voluntarily walked away from the CEO post at TD Ameritrade. In just eight years, Joe had transformed the company, first by saving it from the disastrous pop of the dotcom bubble, then by building it into one of the most complete financial services firms in the world. Under his watch, TD Ameritrade not only completely skirted the 2008 financial crisis, it actually posted big profits.

  Joe left because there was really nothing else to prove. He was presented with a huge challenge when he took over the company in the spring of 2001. By 2008, he’d exceeded the goals he set out to reach. He’d been in the business world for twenty-five years, and before that in an intense sixteen-year coaching career. Joe had worked since he was ten, when he started doing shifts in his father’s New York City fruit store. Since boyhood, he’d never had any extended time off from work. Now, he had certainly earned it.

  And that was what he thought he’d be getting, some serious time off. When Joe stepped down from his position as CEO in the summer of 2008, he became TD Ameritrade’s chairman, which came with some responsibilities—mainly board meetings—but was a cakewalk, time-wise, compared to his previous job. So Joe played golf and read books. He went to the gym and kept detailed logs of his workouts and weight loss. (“He was starting to get chubby,” says his wife, Amy. “I told him, ‘You can be old or fat, but not both.’ And, well, he wasn’t getting any younger.”)

  The professional world didn’t leave him alone, though. Within weeks of his resignation, he’d had a half-dozen inquiries from folks in the financial and media worlds. (Joe had spent some time guest-hosting CNBC shows during his TD Ameritrade stint.) He responded to all the calls with polite but firm no thank yous. Amy really believed that after what amounted to half a century of hard work, her husband was finally ready to take a breather. “I was really excited,” she says. “Look, I don’t want a guy who’s following me around all the time and asking me what we’re going to do today. But I wouldn’t mind a little of that. I was ready for at least a year of relaxing a bit. He’d worked so hard. We’ve been really lucky. I wanted to enjoy it for a little while.”

  Joe’s daughter Kim also thought that a break would be good for him and the entire family. “He was always driving himself so hard,” she says. “Now he was financially set. I wanted him to exhale. I wanted him to spend more time with us.” Even Joe signed on. “I was in no hurry to do anything. I was ready to try to relax.”

  At least that was the plan. Two months after he left his job, Joe and Amy went to Vermont to visit Joe’s oldest child, Kelly. One night Joe and Amy were in their hotel room getting ready to go to a party at Kelly’s when Joe’s phone rang. It was Charles Johnson, chairman of the mutual fund company Franklin Resources. Joe thought this was just another guy calling to try to woo him back to finance. But Johnson also happened to be a major donor to the athletic program of his alma mater, Yale. He told Joe that the school’s football head-coaching job might be available at the end of the year. He wondered if Joe was interested…in coaching.

  Joe was stunned almost to the point of incoherence. He eventually mumbled something about being flattered that Johnson would even think about him as a potential candidate, especially since he’d been out of the game for so long. He told Johnson he’d think about it.

  “Who was that?” Amy asked after Joe had hung up. They were late for the party.

  “Uh, Charlie Johnson. He wanted to know about a coaching job,” Joe replied. He was still dazed.

  Amy thought little of it. They went off to the party. Joe didn’t tell anyone else about the call.

  But as days went by, Joe began to think about it more and more. The nights were the worst. “I literally could not sleep,” he says. The call had stirred something within him that he thought he had repressed and walked away from forever.

  Joe spent the next few months sitting alone in the office in his Omaha home for hours at a time, thinking about coaching and writing down thoughts and notes on legal pads. He wanted to be completely honest with himself in answering two questions: Was he qualified to coach again? And did he really want to? “The answer to the first one was an overwhelming yes,” says Joe. After all, he’d been a coach before. And he was a leader. He’d managed teams in business that numbered in the hundreds, even thousands. His football-coaching career had been a huge asset to his business career. And now he had twenty-five years of managing, of decision making, of leading in business. How could that not be an asset on the field?

  Answering the second question, however, was a bit more complicated. Joe knew that during the football season, he would end up working even harder than he did at Merrill and TD Ameritrade. Coaches routinely put in ninety to one hundred hours a week. What would Amy think of that? And there would be serious personal and reputational risks involved. Coaches are judged by wins and losses. No extra credit is given for all of the hard work put in. He could fail. He could certainly get fired.

  As he sat in his home office and furiously scribbled notes (he would eventually fill five legal pads), a feeling began to overwhelm him: “It became clear that I couldn’t really live with myself if I didn’t give this a try.”

  Joe reached out to friends to get their opinions, just to make sure he wasn’t totally crazy. One of those friends was fellow Omahan Warren Buffett. Joe asked him to dinner one night. It turned out that he was hugely supportive. “I always tell college students how lucky I was to find my passion very early in life and that they shouldn’t give up until they find theirs,” says Buffett. “Joe’s dream obviously was to coach a top-notch football team and there is no question he would be terrific at it. So I encouraged him to do it.”

  By December 2008, Joe had made up his mind. He was going to attempt to land a head job at a Division I school, at either the FBS or FCS level. (Simply put, the FBS—Football Bowl Subdivision—is populated by the big-time football schools and conferences. The smaller schools and conferences make up the FCS—Football Championship Subdivision. The biggest difference: FBS schools have more scholarships and more money for those scholarships.)

  He broke the news to Amy and the rest of the family. “He just looks at me one morning and goes, ‘You know, I don’t think I can let this go,’” says Amy. “I’ll admit I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t going to take some time off. But he told me that this was his passion now, that he was really feeling it. I wanted him to be happy. So I was like, ‘Okay, here we go.’”

  His kids had mixed reactions. “I just asked him, ‘When will it all be enough?’” says daughter Kim. “But he explained it to me and he said, ‘I feel like this was something I never really finished.’”

  His youngest daughter, Kara, says with a knowing sigh: “He is who he is.”

  His youngest child and only son, Kevin, who bears a striking resemblance to him, says: “I was too young to remember his earlier coaching career, so I was pumped. I wanted to see him out there.”

  No one in the family should have been surprised that Joe was unable to remain idle for long. It was in his genes. His father had worked until he was eighty-two years old and stopped only when his Alzheimer’s disease had become completely debilitating.

  When he told his old colleagues about his decision, they were flabbergasted. John Bunch, who had worked closely with Joe since 2005 as TD Ameritrade’s president of retail distribution, remembers thinking: “Are you crazy, man? Go do something fun with your
money!” Ed Sheridan, Joe’s old Merrill teammate, was skiing in Telluride, Colorado, when he got the call while riding a chairlift. “I initially thought, This dude has lost it. But he explained it to me. By the end of the lift ride, I was sold.”

  Joe called Yale about the job. They never called him back. It didn’t matter. The fire was lit.

  Joe went after a coaching job the same way he’d gone after a Wall Street job as a thirty-four-year-old, divorced father of four—with everything he had. He first hired an agent. He then put together a detailed spreadsheet of college football teams, focusing in particular on losing programs with coaches who had expiring contracts. He started sketching out his plans for recruiting and researching the potential names of his coaching staff. He networked, making four to five calls a day—many of them cold—to conference commissioners, athletic directors, and coaches. Whenever anyone agreed to a face-to-face meeting, Joe jumped on a plane. He met, in person, with the commissioners of the Big Ten Conference, the Missouri Valley Conference, and the Colonial Athletic Association, and the athletic directors at West Point, Fordham (his alma mater), Northwestern, Duke, and East Carolina. He figured he was not a candidate for a big-time FBS program like Notre Dame or Tennessee. Not yet, anyway. But he decided that he did not want to coach anything lower than a Division I team and that he was going to be a head coach or nothing. He didn’t want to take the more traditional route and start as a coordinator and work his way up again. “There was no time for that,” says Joe. And anyway, he was a manager, a leader. That was where his skill sets lay. Joe believed that with his background, he was a perfect candidate for a job at an Ivy or Patriot League school, someplace where a kid desired an education to go along with his football.

  He had his doubters. “A reasonable amount of people told me I had no shot at a job,” Joe says. “But people also told me that when I applied to Merrill. Most of my life people have told me that. I’ve never used that as a motivating factor. I just never agreed with it.”

  But he also had legions of admirers. His quest—the seeming impossibility of it all, the determination to not go gently into that good night—struck a chord with some people, particularly those for whom middle age was in the rearview mirror. They might not be able to throw caution to the wind at age sixty and chase a dream. But it was extremely important—vital, really—to know it could be done. “It’s just such an example,” says Rik Bonness, an Omaha lawyer and former linebacker for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s who had become friends with Joe. “I mean, he didn’t have to do this. He could have retired. But he did do it. It’s a reminder that if you want to stay energized, you have to commit to something and do it full speed and not be afraid of failure.”

  For Bill Campbell, the former CEO of Intuit (and now the chairman) and a member of Apple’s board, Joe’s quest resonated deeply. Campbell had been the head football coach at Columbia before he embarked on his own starry business career. “People ask me why I left football for a career in business,” says Campbell. “And my answer is always the same: ‘Did you see my won-loss record?’”

  In six years as the head coach at Columbia (1974–1979), Campbell never had a winning season, finishing with a 12-41-1 overall record. He says once he left football, he never seriously considered going back. “But if I’d had more success, I probably would have stayed in the profession,” he says. “It was a hard thing to give up, and I still have pangs.”

  Joe reached out to Campbell for advice when he decided to go back to coaching. Campbell is a big fan of Joe’s, but even he had his doubts about Joe ever finding a college job. “The problem is that as good a manager as he is, an athletic director still has accountability, to his trustees, his alumni, the players, the students. All these groups will say to the AD, ‘You took a guy who hasn’t coached a game in twenty-plus years?’ Joe is fighting long odds. Someone will have to see how energetic, bright, and enthusiastic he is. Someone will have to overcome fear and take a chance on him.”

  Joe knew all of this. He realized he could fail. “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith,” wrote the theologian Paul Tillich.

  When Joe met with the coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners, he told each of them his personal story, starting with his inner-city childhood, then his coaching career, then his painful decision to leave the football field, then his business career. (Rare is the occasion when a conversation takes place with Joe when he doesn’t tell a story. He is a natural storyteller. But as they say, stories happen only to those who can tell them.) Joe made it very clear to everyone he talked to that he was dead serious about this. He was well aware that his money, instead of being an asset in his search, could instead make it harder for people to take him seriously.

  Most important, though, Joe sold himself, trying to turn his quarter century away from the game from a potential negative into a positive. He gave all of these football people his pitch: A head coach is the CEO of his program. He’s the leader. He’s a recruiter of talent. He’s organized. He’s an ambassador for the program and the school. Joe had run teams at Merrill for seventeen years. He’d run an entire company for eight years. Ameritrade, when he got there, was no different from the type of foundering football program that needed a coach like him. And look what he’d done there! He knew how to lead, how to delegate, when to coddle and when to castigate. And imagine the sway he would bring to recruiting, especially with Ivy League kids. He could appeal to the kids’ own sense of their future, and to the parents’ hopes and dreams for their children, too.

  With the kid—and his parents—sitting right there, Joe said, this is what he would tell them. “I will help you stand on your own two feet and accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. I will help you be a man. At some point in time—next year, after college, after ten brilliant years in the NFL—your football career will come to an end. What will you want to do? Become a doctor? A lawyer? A businessman? Chances are that I can provide greater insight on that, on your future career, than any other coach in the country.”

  Then Joe would end his sales pitch with what he believed to be his clincher. His voice would inevitably rise a notch or two in volume. “And the bottom line is that I know my football! I was a coach!”

  Someone out there had to give him a chance.

  As it turned out, only one school did. The University of Massachusetts, in need of a new coach, called in late 2008. Joe flew in for an interview with the athletic director, John McCutcheon. But right away he could tell that the interview was really more informational than serious. UMass ended up hiring someone with more recent coaching experience.

  By the following February, the college football hiring window had closed. Joe was jobless. He’d heard the same thing from nearly everyone he’d talked to: Great story, Joe. Really inspiring. But after so long out of the game, no one is going to hire you as a coach. No one.

  The problem was with the athletic directors, who, as Bill Campbell had anticipated, were naturally risk-averse. After meeting Joe, Terry Holland, the AD at East Carolina, said: “He is an impressive leader and would have all the skills necessary to be a head football coach at the college level, except for his lack of recent experience actually coaching a team. But I could not hire him here as our football coach. The number one rule for athletic directors is to ‘at least win the press conference.’ It would be difficult for any AD to make a hire that would be likely to generate more questions than it answers.”

  Kevin White, the AD at Duke University, a college not known for its football excellence, also met with Joe in early 2009. “He would be a non-traditional hire. A university would have to see him as a risk that makes sense to take.”

  And none of them did.

  Clearly, as Terry Holland noted, the lack of recent experience was crippling Joe’s job search. He would have to find a way of getting that experience in order to buff up his résumé.

  Tom Osborne is a demigod in the state of Nebraska. He’d coached the University
of Nebraska Cornhuskers for twenty-five years—during the football program’s glory days—and won three national championships. He later served for six years as a U.S. congressman for the state. Then, in 2007, with the football program in disarray, Osborne was called back to the university, this time as the athletic director, where his sage-like, grandfatherly presence eventually righted the ship.

  Osborne and Joe were casual acquaintances. Nebraska is a small state, population-wise, and most of its movers and shakers have run into each other at one time or another. Osborne had been one of the people Joe had talked to right after he made his decision to try football again. “At first I thought he wasn’t thinking very clearly,” says Osborne. “It was a very unusual move. But he gradually convinced me that he was dead serious. And he sure did have a lot of passion for it.”

  When Joe didn’t find a job in 2008, Osborne came up with a suggestion: why didn’t Joe do an internship as a “shadow coach” with the Nebraska football team? Osborne said he’d have to clear it with the fiery, young head coach, Bo Pelini. Joe was game. So, it turned out, was Pelini: “I was like, ‘Why the hell not?’ The guy obviously had organizational skills and knew how to run a team.”

  Joe joined the Cornhuskers as an unpaid intern in July 2009. By NCAA rules, he couldn’t actually coach (thus his official position: “executive advisor to the head coach”). “I will always be grateful to Tom and Bo,” says Joe. “They gave me a chance.” As part of the deal, Joe agreed to be a “life coach” to the entire athletic program. Joe ran seminars for student athletes, counseling them on personal finance and job seeking, similar to what he would later do with the Nighthawks players. But what he really did at Nebraska was concentrate on reacquainting himself with a game he had left two and a half decades before.