by Monte Burke
Joe listens to his coaches talk about Clarett for a while, then suddenly stops them. “Look, I have confidence in your decisions as coordinators and coaches. That’s why I hired you. But Maurice is different,” he tells them. His face, which reddens easily, is doing so now. “This guy’s been in friggin’ jail. I visited his mother. He moved his family here. I had to talk to his probation officer. He wants to do better. We are not turning our back on this guy. This is not an excuse, however. He still has to live up to his commitment to us.
“When I hired you, I asked you if you bought into this program. You all said you did. This goes right back to our core values. We’re in the business of motivating and inspiring people. People continually remind me that this game—pro football—is a business. I gotta say, I’m sick of hearing that. I know this game is a business. I think I know a thing or two about business. And the most important thing to know about business is that it’s about people. That was true at TD Ameritrade. That’s true in football. This is a people business. We will never turn our backs on that.” This is the lesson he learned from his mother.
Joe has taken responsibility for Clarett. He intends to live up to it. Clarett is on the team. He will get only a handful of carries in actual games, and will primarily be used as a cover man in special teams and as a scout team running back in practice. He will accept this role on the team with the eagerness and gratitude of a drowning man who has been thrown a lifeline.
And at precisely the moment when Joe needs him the most, Clarett will richly reward his loyalty.
The team of fifty-one is set for its first game, against Schottenheimer’s Virginia Destroyers. Leading up to the game, there are reports that Hurricane Irene has damaged some of Virginia’s practice facilities. Some coaches believe that’s a good thing. Joe’s not so sure. “If we’re going to beat someone, I don’t want it to be because God interfered with something like a hurricane,” he says. “Now, if He wants them to lose an untimely fumble, that’s a whole other thing.”
On a chilly and wet night in Omaha, the Nighthawks win the coin toss and decide to kick the ball. The kickoff coverage team takes the field, wearing the team’s imposing all-black uniforms and helmet adorned on each side with a stencil of a flying F-115 fight plane (known as the “Nighthawk,” of course). On the back of the helmet, just above the player’s number, is the acronym “B.A.M,” the same three letters found all over the walls of the team’s practice facility, the locker room, and at the bottom of every piece of paper printed for the organization. It stands, of course, for Joe’s daily reminder to each member of the team to “Be A Man.” Two of tonight’s referees would have a difficult time doing that: they are female. Just before the opening whistle, the scoreboard reads “VD vs. ONH” momentarily, until someone wisely changes it to “VA vs. OH.” Then the ball is kicked off.
Omaha forces a punt on Virginia’s first drive and takes over possession at its own 18-yard line. The offense, the primary source of concern in the Nighthawks two-week camp, takes the field.
But Crouch, in his first live game since 2006 (then with the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts), eases that anxiety somewhat on the team’s first drive, quickly moving the offense into Virginia territory with four pinpoint passes. But the drive stalls, and the Nighthawks punt.
The first quarter goes back and forth like this, with Olivadotti’s defense holding against his former boss’s offense, and the Virginia defense doing just enough to keep Omaha’s offense—which is moving well behind both Crouch and Masoli—from scoring. Omaha’s biggest problem is itself: on offense, there are dropped passes and numerous penalties for false starts, holding, and illegal formations. The special teams are having penalty problems of their own, flagged for being offside and for having twelve men on the field.
Schottenheimer spends the game expertly working the refs—jawing, cajoling, smiling—particularly one of the women, who is on his sideline. Joe is calm on the sidelines. He talks into his headset and occasionally huddles with Andrus and Kent. (Olivadotti coaches from a box high above the field from which he feels he can see the action better.) Joe spends a few minutes early on standing away from the players and coaches, near the 20-yard line, observing his team from a distance, striving, it seems, for some perspective. The light rain continues to fall, turning the stadium’s grass a luminous green. The crowd of sixteen thousand is very attentive and very loud.
The first quarter ends in a scoreless draw.
Early in the second quarter, Omaha’s offense reveals its potential weakness, the reason that coaches in the pro game have shied away from it. Crouch throws a short incompletion, then his receivers drop two passes. The offense is on the field for less than a minute, in real time. The problem with these short possessions is that they result in the opposite of the offense’s intended effect: they tire out their own defense.
After the punt, Omaha has its first lapse on defense. Chris Greisen, Virginia’s veteran quarterback, completes a 73-yard pass. Two plays later, Dominic Rhodes—who gained 113 yards and scored a touchdown in the 2007 Super Bowl for the victorious Indianapolis Colts—rumbles in for a 3-yard touchdown. (In 2011 Rhodes was suspended by the NFL for his third violation of the league’s substance abuse policy. He was free to play in the UFL, though, and would end up the league’s offensive MVP.)
But Masoli responds, leading the team on a 70-yard drive, using both his arm and his legs. The drive ends with his beautifully rainbowed, 20-yard touchdown pass to Chad Jackson.
The ballgame is tied at seven.
But another special teams penalty gives the ball to the Destroyers at their own 40-yard line with eight minutes left in the half. Joe purses his lips into a scowl on the sidelines, the first sign of his mounting frustration with his team’s mistakes. Behind short, effective passing from Greisen and punishing runs from Rhodes, Virginia drives for another touchdown, leaving 1:30 on the clock before halftime. Omaha has the ball. Crouch is under center. Many NFL coaches would have taken to the ground and bled the clock, content to go into halftime down by only seven. But the Nighthawks offense has no other gear. In theory, time on the clock is nearly irrelevant because they essentially run a hurry-up drill for the entire game.
Crouch begins the drive with a twenty-yard pass down the sideline, which moves the ball to near midfield. An Omaha field goal attempt, at the very least, looks plausible. A dropped pass on the next play leaves one minute on the clock. Crouch takes the snap from the shotgun. On the left sidelines, Jackson has sprung free from his defender, and begins to veer toward the middle of the field, near the Virginia 20. Crouch sees him just as a Virginia linebacker, who has shed his blocker, trucks right at him. Crouch fails to set his feet before he lets the pass fly. The ball slips a bit in his hand. The pass is high and wobbly. All heads on both sidelines gaze up into the lights and raindrops, watching the ball reach the apex of its ascent, then come falling back to earth. The ball is well behind Jackson, who tries desperately to stop his forward momentum to get back into the play. But he can’t. Jerome Carter, the Virginia free safety, places his body under the ball and lets it nestle into his hands and chest, the catching motion of a punt returner. He runs the interception back to near the original Omaha line of scrimmage at the 50.
After one long completion, Virginia kicks a field goal as the first half ends. The Destroyers have a ten-point lead, but it somehow feels much larger than that.
Early in the third quarter, Joe’s emphasis on aggressive special teams pays off. Ricardo Colclough blocks a Virginia field goal attempt. But on the ensuing drive, Masoli throws an interception. In the second half, Omaha’s offense stalls. There are several quick three-and-outs, a Crouch fumble, and another Masoli interception, this one giving Virginia the ball at the Omaha 8-yard line. Olivadotti’s weary defense holds Virginia to a field goal. But the Destroyers now lead 23–7 with three minutes left on the clock.
The Nighthawks have one more burst in them. Masoli leads the team on a ninety-two-yard drive that culminates in his two-yard tou
chdown run, to pull them within ten points with a minute to play. But, after a botched two-point conversion and a failed onside kick attempt, the game is over.
Joe and Schottenheimer meet at midfield for the postgame handshake. Schottenheimer’s face appears even more relaxed than it did before the game, perhaps from the relief of not losing a professional football game to a former Wall Streeter. His team had perfectly executed his preferred style of play, known in football circles as “Martyball”—polished and conservative play calling that lulls the other team into mistakes, then takes advantage of them. Schottenheimer will admit after the game that preparing for Omaha’s offense “gave me some nightmares.”
This is just what Joe intended, but the words offer little solace. Though the Nighthawks outgained the Destroyers both on the ground and through the air, and had six more first downs, they lost both the critical turnover (3-0) and penalty (11-2) battles. With few exceptions, the offense had been herky-jerky all night. The special teams had been plagued by mental gaffes. And even the defense had given up a backbreaking big play. Joe had lived his life based on the mantra that mistakes happen, but they should only happen once. In the short time they had all been together, Joe had drilled this into his team. But the Nighthawks lost the game because, ultimately, they failed to live by this creed. “That’s my fault,” Joe would say later.
After the game, in the funereal Nighthawks locker room, Joe addresses the team. “I feel bad that in our first game together as a team we played badly and made mistakes,” he says in a low rasp. His voice then rises, the words becoming more distinct. “I feel good, though, that we never let up. We have a good team. Let’s correct our mistakes. Let’s have a great season, men.”
Joe leaves the locker room and retreats into the silence of his coach’s office, out of sight from his players and staff. There, the pain of losing begins to manifest itself physically. His eyes are bloodshot. His red hair shoots out from his head at odd angles. He looks totally spent as he sits down in his chair, stares into middle space, and, with a deep sigh, seems to sink into himself.
At this moment, he seems to forget his admonition to Bo Pelini about this just being a game, about being able to handle defeats. This loss hurts.
The Nighthawks suffer two big injuries in the game. One of the team’s best linebackers, Pat Thomas, tore both a knee ligament and a hamstring on the opening kickoff. Somehow he managed to play the rest of the game. But he is done for the season.
And Crouch tore the meniscus in his knee on a routine running play on which there was no contact. Though he, too, played for the game’s duration, he will also be out for the remainder of the season. His football career is very likely over. He had set out to play this season to prove that he could be a professional quarterback. His stat line wasn’t pretty: while sharing snaps with Masoli, he completed 9 of his 24 passes for 124 yards and one interception, and ran for 32 yards on six carries. But he had moved the team well. And he had been a leader since day one.
Because of scheduling quirks created by the new UFL schedule, the Nighthawks now have a bye week immediately after the Virginia game. “Nothing like having a whole extra week to stew over a bad loss this early in the season,” grumbles Olivadotti. Joe gives the team the entire week off because, well, he has to. The UFL does not pay its players a cent during a bye. Though most of the coaches stick around to prepare for the next game, against the Sacramento Mountain Lions, most of the players go home for the week.
Bye weeks are generally fairly mellow by design, a chance to catch up on sleep and heal the body and mind. Not for Joe, however. He intends to use the week not to sleep, but to try to figure out ways to avoid another disastrous loss. The pressure is building on him. The season—his trial run, and perhaps his dream—has only five more games left.
Chapter Eight
Young Father, Young Coach
Joe started his coaching career at age nineteen, the same year he married Kathe and became the father of a green-eyed little girl named Kelly. He was a sophomore at Fordham University. Joe was only a few years older than some of the players he coached on Fordham Prep’s JV squad.
After a season with the JV, Prep’s head coach, Bruce Bott, elevated Joe to the varsity to coach the offensive line and linebackers. “He just had this intensity about him,” says Bott. “He would go through things instead of around them.” Bott was also impressed with how well he related to his players. “He could be street-wise with the tougher kids, but he was also smart enough to reach the valedictorian.”
Joe could yell with the best of them, and he had no problem grabbing a face mask to get a player’s attention. But he connected with the kids because he was first and foremost a teacher. He immersed his defense in the proper techniques, training his cornerbacks to swivel their hips at just the right time as they ran with a receiver, and showing his linebackers how to hold their lanes on running plays. But, more than anything, he taught his players to love football, the game that had helped saved him from the fate of those in his neighborhood who weren’t fortunate enough to have something like football to love.
Joe had one fairly serious problem to overcome in his early coaching days. The single most important trait a good coach must have is the ability to communicate—directly, succinctly, and quickly—during both games and practices. But just as Joe started to coach, his stuttering problem, which he’d for the most part managed to hide, resurfaced, in a bad way. “He would drive me nuts on the sideline,” says Bott. “He’d start to tell me something was happening and it would be the end of the first quarter before I understood him.”
But Joe worked on it. He practiced play calls at night in front of the mirror. He wrote down all of the words that he had particular trouble getting out and, beside them, wrote down easier-to-pronounce synonyms. He even changed the pronunciation of his last name—dropping the proper silent “G” in “Moglia” in favor of a hard one—to make it easier on himself and his players. At the end of the 1970 season, Joe told Bott that he wanted to be the keynote speaker at the team banquet. Bott was wary, but he agreed to let him do it. Joe spent twenty hours rehearsing his five-minute speech. “To his credit, he went right through it,” says Bott. “Knocked it right out of the park.”
By the time Joe graduated from Fordham, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life: he wanted to be a college football head coach. But he knew he had to start at a lower level. He was audacious enough to believe that he could jump from being a twenty-one-year-old high school position coach to a twenty-two-year-old high school head coach. He sent out 180 applications to schools around the country. Only one of the schools responded. And that one hired him.
That place was Archmere Academy, a private Catholic school of four hundred kids in Claymont, Delaware, a suburb of Wilmington. In 1971 Joe was hired by Archmere to coach the football, wrestling, and freshman baseball teams, and to teach economics, political science, and European history. At age twenty-two, he became the youngest head coach in Delaware high school history. He had a Herculean task ahead. The school had a terrible football program, and it was populated by fairly well-off kids who were, to put it in blunt football terms, soft. They’d had a decade of losing seasons. “The program had been adrift for a while,” says Paul Pomeroy, who was working at Archmere when Joe arrived and who eventually became his assistant coach. Joe had to break it down completely and build it back up from scratch.
Joe arrived in the summer, in his mustard-yellow Plymouth Belvedere, with Kathe and Kelly in tow. He called a team meeting the day before training camp, and as he was doing the roll call, “kids were just sort of trickling in late the entire time,” says Pomeroy. Whenever a kid came in late, Joe would simply stop what he was doing and say “that’s ten.” No one had any idea what he meant.
At the end of the meeting, Joe told the team that thirteen kids had been late, which meant that the next day—during their first practice—the team would do 130 wind sprints, ten for each late arrival. His message was clear: this is a team
, not a group of individuals. “In previous years, we seemed to have an annual rash of flat tires, traffic jams, and broken alarm clocks,” says Pomeroy. “But strangely, all of that cleared up when Joe showed up.”
Joe issued each member of the team a thick playbook. Half of it was taken up with things unrelated to football plays. There was a section on “being a man.” There was another on how the players should carry themselves off the field that included the proper ways to address young women in the school hallways. “When Joe showed up, it was like someone had just stepped off a spaceship,” says Larry Cylc, an offensive and defensive lineman on the team. (Cylc, now a high school football coach himself, still uses Joe’s playbook.)
Practice started eleven days before school opened. Joe made everyone—players and coaches—sleep in the gym. The first of sometimes four daily practices started at 6:00 a.m. Every day the players ran thirty-yard sprints up a steep hill by the football field. “If some kid was having trouble, others would grab him and drag him up the hill,” says Pomeroy. “Everyone had to finish, or they’d all do additional sprints.”
During one particularly long day in camp, a player came up to Joe and told him he was quitting the team. “You can’t quit in the middle of my practice!” Joe replied. “Get back out there!” The kid finished the day.
The players nicknamed the summer practices “the death camp.” Some thrived. Others wilted. “There were people there who deified him and would have followed him to the gates of hell,” says Pomeroy. “There were others who wouldn’t have followed him out of hell.” Says Cylc: “He really challenged your inner workings as a man.”