by Monte Burke
But part of the very reason for the existence of the UFL was as a talent pool and proving ground for the NFL, for many of its players and coaches had been in the NFL and were looking for a way back in. Others had never gotten the chance and were hoping to get into the big league for the first time. The same was true for the front office and personnel staffs, the trainers, the equipment managers, and even the interns in the league. The UFL’s real opportunity came from what it provided to its players and team staff members.
For Joe, the opportunity provided by the league was a bit different. If he succeeded in the UFL, especially against the caliber of coaches he would face, then those risk-averse college ADs would find themselves out of excuses. They could win their damn press conferences.
After Joe was named the head coach of the Virginia Destroyers, he planned to rent an apartment in Virginia Beach for the five-month duration of training camp and the eight-game season. Amy would join him when she could. But before he could even start his apartment search, Jeff Jagodzinski, the head coach of the league’s bottom-dwelling Omaha Nighthawks, was fired by the UFL. And suddenly, Joe was tapped by the UFL brass to be his hometown team’s new head coach.
Joe was happy to be home (and Amy was happy to have him around for a change). But coaching in Omaha came with some added pressure. He would be putting his reputation on the line in a very public setting, as well as in front of family and friends. He was also inheriting a paradox: The Nighthawks were far and away the worst team in the league. But they were also the most popular.
The paradox was easily explainable: that which made the Nighthawks so popular off the field was exactly what made them so terrible on it—their 2010 team headliners, the former NFL stars Jeff Garcia (quarterback) and Ahman Green (a running back who had attended Nebraska). That year, the team had started the season 3-1. Then they completely fell apart, losing their last four games in spectacular fashion, by an average score of 31–9, and finishing last in the league in points scored and in points allowed. Their ineptitude could be traced in large part to Garcia, 40, and Green, 33, who completely ran out of gas in the middle of the season. Garcia started throwing multiple interceptions. Green’s average dropped to a measly two yards per carry.
And yet the Nighthawks sold out every home game—even when they were losing big—to the twenty-four thousand fans who filled their stadium to capacity. People came out to see Garcia and Green. They bought their jerseys (the best-selling ones in the league). They didn’t seem to care about the final score.
But now these fans had a new coach, a hometown boy, a former CEO, a minnow in a sea of former NFL whales who would be assembling a team basically from scratch. It was anyone’s guess how that would all pan out.
For Joe’s first staff hire, he turned to his old friend Tom Olivadotti. The two men first met in 1971 when they were both high school coaches in Delaware. Joe, then twenty-two, was working at his first head-coaching job, at a small private school—Archmere Academy—with a terrible football program. Olivadotti was on the opposite end of the spectrum, the head coach of Salesianum School, a prep powerhouse that would win the state championship in 1972. The duo attended the same coaching clinics around the state and hit it off.
Olivadotti, now sixty-six, is a big bear of a man who walks with the bobbling gait of someone who has spent a lifetime on his feet. He has perpetually bloodshot eyes, a snow-white goatee and mustache, and wears two huge rings on cigar-sized fingers on each hand: a national championship ring from the University of Miami and a Super Bowl ring from the 2000 New York Giants team that lost to the Baltimore Ravens. “I don’t have a safe, so I keep them on me,” says Olivadotti. Given his size and countenance, the rings will be just fine where they are.
Joe and Olivadotti stayed in touch after they both left Delaware. Olivadotti went on to a long and impressive career as a defensive coach. In 1976, he moved from Salesianum to Princeton, where he coached the linebackers. After a brief stint as the defensive coordinator at Boston College, he moved into the same position with the University of Miami Hurricanes under Howard Schnellenberger. While he was with the Hurricanes they won the 1983 national championship against Nebraska, whose coach was none other than Tom Osborne, who was right in the middle of his long tenure there. That victory was one in which Joe had actually played a role.
In the winter of 1983, when Joe was in his last year as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, he went on a recruiting trip to Florida. While there, he visited Olivadotti, who was just a few days away from coaching in the national championship game. After dinner, the two retired to Olivadotti’s study to look at Nebraska game film (“This is what coaches do for fun,” says Olivadotti). Olivadotti had been worried about defending Nebraska’s two-point conversion, a play that they had been wildly successful at converting all year, thanks mainly to their three offensive superstars Turner Gill (quarterback), Heisman Trophy winner Mike Rozier (running back), and Irving Fryar (receiver). Olivadotti showed Joe Nebraska’s play, which involved Gill rolling out and either running or passing. Olivadotti had planned on going into tight man-to-man coverage to shut down the throwing lanes. Joe watched the play a few times, and then suggested that Olivadotti bring pressure on Gill with two linebackers coming from each edge of the line of scrimmage, which would inhibit his ability to run. It was one of the strategies Olivadotti says he was considering, “but Joe’s reaffirmation sealed the deal.”
In the 1983 national championship game, the Miami Hurricanes were huge underdogs, not yet the powerhouse program they would eventually become. “We were just so undersized compared to them,” says Olivadotti. His players were very nervous. He tried to calm them down in the locker room before the game. “I’ll never forget, I told them, ‘Hey, they put their pants on just like we do.’” And Rodney Bellinger, who was one of my cornerbacks, said, ‘Yeah, but it takes them a lot longer to reach their waist.’”
The title game went back and forth until the very end. Nebraska scored a touchdown with forty-eight seconds left in the game. All they had to do was kick what was almost a sure-thing extra point to tie the game and, most likely, win the national championship. (Nebraska came into the game undefeated, Miami had one loss, and there was no overtime back then.) But Osborne bravely decided to try to win the game for the Cornhuskers with a two-point conversion. Olivadotti called the defensive play that he and Joe had discussed. The linebackers got just enough pressure on Gill, whose pass was tipped away at the last second by Miami safety Kenny Calhoun, giving Miami the win and the national championship.
After that season, Olivadotti offered Joe a job at Miami as a defensive assistant—with either the linebackers or the secondary—with the agreement that he would eventually run the entire defense. That was the offer Joe declined because he’d come to the conclusion that he had to leave coaching in order to provide for his four young children after his divorce.
As Joe worked his way through his business career, Olivadotti moved into the NFL. He started as a defensive assistant with the Cleveland Browns under Marty Schottenheimer, then spent nine years as Don Shula’s defensive coordinator at the Miami Dolphins. Later, he held assistant positions at the Minnesota Vikings, under Dennis Green; the New York Giants, where he went to the Super Bowl with Jim Fassel; and the Houston Texans. (In other words, he had in fact worked for all three of the big-name UFL coaches whose teams Joe would be competing against, and Tom knew their styles well.) Olivadotti himself became the foremost practitioner of a defensive style known as “pattern read,” which is essentially a scheme in which the linebackers and the defensive backs start in zone coverage, then switch to man-to-man once the patterns of the receivers express themselves. John Fox, the current coach of the Denver Broncos, has run versions of the pattern read throughout his career. So has Alabama coach Nick Saban. Olivadotti says his defense is really just a mass accumulation of his forty-one years of coaching experience. “When you forget where you got something, it’s yours,” he says. Olivadotti had been in semiretirement, runni
ng a few football clinics at home in south Florida, when Joe called about the Nighthawks.
Olivadotti’s vast experience has given him a very laid-back mien and Zen-like attitude. While he expects much out of his players and coaches, he rarely raises his voice to get his points across. A simple shake of the head or a raised white eyebrow usually does the trick. He tends to view his profession in simple, aphoristic terms. The essence of coaching, he says, is “getting good players and not screwing them up.” Throughout the Nighthawks season, Olivadotti would fill the role of Joe’s consigliere. Joe would lean on him for advice and counsel. The two share the same philosophy when it comes to coaching, chewed over during their four-decade friendship. Olivadotti’s calm demeanor and vast experience also help, as does his straightforward style. “Joe knows I’ll never bullshit him,” says Olivadotti.
Next Joe went shopping for an offensive coordinator. What he had in mind was a progressive, attacking plan for offense. Although Joe had been a defensive coach during his career, he had thought a lot about offense. In fact, while coaching the defense at Dartmouth, he had penned a book about the offensive strategy he believed was best suited to attack his own defense.
For the Nighthawks, Joe wanted an up-tempo, no-huddle scheme that would tire out defenses, something akin to what the University of Oregon had been running in recent years. This offense would be his differentiator, he believed, as the other coaches in the UFL, given their histories, would probably be running more conventional pro offenses, with drop-back passers and a steady dose of I-Formations.
Joe found his man in Bart Andrus. The fifty-three-year-old native Californian wears his dark hair slicked back, starting from his high hairline. He has a patrician nose, downward-pulling lips, and a prominent chin. With a powdered wig, he’d make a spot-on George Washington impersonator. Andrus had played quarterback at the University of Montana, and had been coaching in the collegiate and professional ranks since 1984, the year Joe left the game. He started as a graduate assistant for the Brigham Young team that won the national championship under coach Lavell Edwards, one of the early implementers of the pass-happy attack that would later become known as the West Coast offense. Andrus went on to tutor Steve McNair as the quarterbacks’ coach of the Tennessee Titans from 1997 until 1999, when the Titans lost the Super Bowl to the St. Louis Rams. He then coached the Amsterdam Admirals in NFL Europe for seven years, winning the 2005 World Bowl.
In 2009, however, Andrus’s coaching career took a nosedive. He became the head coach of the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts, but had trouble adjusting to the strange Canadian version of the game, which included 110-yard fields, three downs instead of four, and receivers who could get a running start at the line of scrimmage before the snap. Under Andrus, the Argos had a disastrous season, finishing 3-15. His unemotional style never meshed with his team. After the season, one of his players told the Toronto Star that Andrus treated the CFL “like a summer beer league.”
Andrus had been out of football for a year when Joe called. He offered Andrus a shot at redemption. Andrus was game.
What Andrus and Joe worked out for the offense was the first of its kind in American professional football: a read-option, no-huddle spread attack in which the quarterback, contrary to the current prevailing NFL style (Tim Tebow excepted), was actually encouraged to run as much as he passed. Based on his read of the defense before the snap, he could either run or pass on any given play. (Thus, the “read-option” moniker.) Andrus had once gotten Jeff Fisher, his head coach at the Titans, interested in this offense. Fisher ran it a few days during training camp one year, but eventually lost his nerve and went back to a more traditional style. Joe’s rationale for running this offense with the Nighthawks was fairly simple: In the NFL, most offenses are designed to protect the quarterback, who is generally one of the highest-paid players on the team. That offense made total sense if you had a quarterback, like Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, who was worth the money and thus the protection. But, as Joe reasoned, how many teams have a truly elite passer in the NFL? Five? Seven, maybe? He certainly wouldn’t have one in the UFL, where quarterbacks, though they were the highest-paid players, still made only $7,500 a game.
So, Joe figured, why not find a quarterback (or preferably two, because of the higher chance of injury from the hits taken while running) who could throw and run and play to those strengths? After all, those were the types of quarterbacks who had given Nebraska’s great defense fits. If he executed well, this type of quarterback could do the same to the UFL’s pro-style defenses, which were more accustomed to traditional drop-back passers.
To the naked eye of even the most hardcore football follower, the most startling part of this offense was the line. Joe and Andrus would require their linemen to maintain three- to four-foot gaps between them at the line of scrimmage. What these pronounced splits did, at least in theory, was spread out the defensive line, thus creating big passing and running lanes. “In the NFL, everyone is so tight on the line. You could blow up an entire offense with one grenade,” says Andrus. “With this offense, we will create space all over the field.”
At first blush, the offense would look fairly easy to attack—just send a defender right through the splits. “The defense will try that at first, for sure,” says Andrus. But it’s not quite as easy to shoot the gaps as it seems. Offensive linemen can quite simply pinch any rusher. Andrus knows that these professional defenses, run by experienced coaches, will eventually make adjustments. But they will have to get out of their base formations to do so. “And that’s half the battle,” says Andrus. “We want them to be uncomfortable. We want them to have to practice something entirely new the week before they play us.”
Joe had one more wrinkle he wanted installed in his offense. It was something he called “powerball.” Unlike the spread offense, which was a relative novelty, powerball harkened back to football’s origins as a running game. These days in football, the first step made by offensive linemen is usually a lateral one, in which they pass block to a designed side, or block to where a running back is supposed to run (known as “zone reads”). In powerball, the offensive linemen blast straight into the defense with angled blocks, double teams, traps, and cross-blocks. (It would still be run from the wide splits.) The advantage of powerball, Joe believed, is that it would have the same effect as a baseball pitcher’s changeup. A defense that was constantly being shown a read-option offense would, all of a sudden, face something completely different. It would be useful on the goal line and in other short-yardage situations. But it could be used at any spot on the field to keep the defense guessing.
In late January 2011 Joe was asked to coach a team in the Eastham Energy All-Star Game in Arizona, an end-of-the-year showcase game for draft-eligible collegiate players. (Former Texas Tech and current Washington State coach Mike Leach interviewed him for the gig. Leach, an offensive innovator, loved Joe’s proposed scheme on that side of the ball.) Joe jumped at the opportunity to do what in effect would be a one-game coaching dry run for the Nighthawks season. It also enabled him to stage a tryout for his coaching candidates for both the offensive and defensive lines. Don Lawrence, a seventy-four-year-old who had been the head coach at the University of Virginia and the tight ends coach of the Buffalo Bills back in the 1990s when the team went to four straight Super Bowls, was the potential offensive line coach. He’d been in pro football for fifty-two years, most recently in NFL Europe. The defensive line candidate was Brandon Noble, a big, blue-eyed thirty-eight-year-old who was a former defensive lineman in the NFL (Cowboys and Redskins) and, at the time, the coach of that position at West Chester University, a Division II school in Pennsylvania. Though Joe’s side lost the all-star game by six points, he was impressed with both Lawrence and Noble. He hired both of them.
On the player personnel side, Joe kept Rick Mueller, the Nighthawks’ 2010 general manager and a former talent evaluator for the New Orleans Saints. Mueller assembled his own staff made up of seasoned NFL scouts: Matt Boockmeier,
Byron Ellis, and Greg Mohns.
Starting in late March, the Nighthawks hosted a series of national tryouts for the team, in Omaha, Jacksonville, and Dallas. A couple hundred wannabe players showed up at each spot and forked over sixty dollars each to show their stuff. No attendee came close to making the team’s training camp roster. But that was okay with Joe. The tryouts had to be done, just in case the next Lawrence Taylor was out there on the street.
Joe had another purpose in mind for the tryouts anyway. By then, he had pretty much filled out the rest of his coaching roster. He wanted to use the tryouts to see how his staff meshed. He had assembled a mix of youth and experience. For his chief of staff, Joe had hired a sixty-nine-year-old named George Glenn, an old friend going back to his Delaware high school coaching days. Brock Olivo, a former running back and special teams maven for the Detroit Lions, was the running backs coach. (The squat and muscular thirty-five-year-old had the added bonus of looking like he could still play the position in a pinch.) Robert Hunt, a big, bald thirty-six-year-old former NFL offensive lineman, was brought in to assist Don Lawrence at that position. Kevin Daft, a studious-looking thirty-five-year-old who was the third-string quarterback under Andrus at the Titans, was the wide receiver coach.
To coach the secondary, Joe chose Marvin Sanders, forty-three, an outspoken man who had been in that position at the University of Nebraska. Pete Kuharchek, a pot-bellied, longtime NFL Europe head coach, was the linebackers coach. The sixty-three-year-old had developed many current NFL players while in Europe, including the Pittsburgh Steelers’ tempestuous star linebacker, James Harrison. Lastly, for what Joe considered one of the most important positions on his staff, he chose Richard Kent—a skinny, fidgety fifty-five-year-old Southerner with an ever-present pinch of Copenhagen snuff tucked in his lower lip—to coach the special teams.