4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  Joe admits that he probably went overboard in his earliest days as a coach, almost as if he was trying to compensate for his young age. “I was a bit like my father,” he says. “I yelled a lot.” But as his four years at Archmere progressed, Joe became less of a screamer and more of a nurturer. He learned from the styles of the older, more established coaches in the state whom he met at coaching conferences, particularly Tom Olivadotti, who was then the head coach at the one of the state’s best programs at the Salesianum School. “He got better as a coach, in his tactics and in the way he handled the kids,” says Pomeroy. “He was always tough, but he added other essential elements as he went on.”

  Archmere went through two more losing seasons before turning the corner. It was pretty clear to his players and coaches that Joe had bigger things awaiting him in the future. “I knew he was going to be a college head coach some day,” says Cylc.

  Joe and Kathe were living on the tightest of budgets in Delaware. By Joe’s third year at Archmere, they had three children. Joe was coaching and teaching and getting his master’s degree in education from the University of Delaware. He was making only $10,000 a year. Their house was in the low-income area of Claymont known locally as “Fort Apache.” (It has since been torn down.) Joe wore clothes he picked out of the school’s lost and found. “We would go scouting in his yellow car and we’d empty our pockets for change to buy some ice cream,” says Pomeroy. “We’d have enough for the ice cream, but not for sprinkles.”

  When Joe’s brother Johnny first visited him in Delaware, he says he brought bottles of booze and wine from his bar, “because I wanted to drink them.” But he quickly realized that money was so tight for his brother’s family that they were eating pasta every night. “I started bringing steaks when I came,” says Johnny. “It was cheap meat, but I figured the kids needed some protein.”

  At the end of the 1974 season (in which the team posted an 8-1 record), Joe took the head job at Penncrest High School in Media, Pennsylvania. He left the Archmere program in excellent shape, having completely turned around a formerly moribund football team. The year after Joe departed, the team went 9-1. They would go to the state finals for the next eight straight years. He left an impression on his players, too. “There aren’t too many other men who have made a bigger positive effect on my life,” says Cylc.

  Penncrest was a bigger school than Archmere, and they played in Pennsylvania’s prestigious Central League. But like Archmere before Joe showed up, Penncrest had a downtrodden football program and had been getting routinely crushed in the league. In fact, it was in even worse shape than Archmere had been. Taking a job there was the high school equivalent of taking the Vanderbilt job in the Southeastern Conference. But it was another rung on the ladder Joe was trying to climb.

  “The school had an absolutely terrible football legacy,” says Dennis Roccia, who was an assistant offensive coach there under Joe. For the Penncrest players, who were mostly from an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, losing had become a habit. Joe set out to change that.

  As he had at Archmere, Joe first focused on the players’ off-the-field lives. “Be a man” and “treat others with respect” became daily mantras. He wanted to reshape and mold the kids. “He instilled in them these fundamental beliefs that football was more than a game. It was this manifestation, really, of a way of life,” says Roccia.

  He adds: “It’s funny. I’ve since seen Joe on CNBC twenty times. He gives the exact same speech now, almost forty years later, as he did then.”

  Joe taught the Penncrest players a sense of aggression, coupled with a care and concern for their teammates. He made them greet each other with Roman Centurion handshakes. “He just changed everything we did, our entire outlook on life. And he was fired up about it,” says Pete Alyanakian, a slotback and linebacker on the team. Joe didn’t put on any airs. “He was what he was. He was a coach,” says John Thomas, a lineman and kicker. “I remember him on the practice field, wearing baggy shorts, his hair uncombed, the elastic in his socks all shot.”

  Penncrest is where Joe first employed his somewhat radical ideas on offense. He came to them out of necessity. His team had smaller kids than the other teams in the Central League. His offensive linemen averaged around 150 pounds. So Joe figured, on offense at least, he needed to emphasize speed and quickness as opposed to bulk and brute force.

  Joe installed a quick-read, spread option offense at Penncrest, similar to the one he would later run with the Nighthawks. His offensive linemen set up on the line of scrimmage one yard apart from each other. The quarterbacks made their reads at the line, deciding whether to run or pass. They threw a lot of short, safe passes in lieu of running plays that would have required bigger and stronger offensive linemen to be successful. The scheme was similar to what Bill Walsh—at the time an assistant coach with the Cincinnati Bengals—was running, which would later become known as the West Coast offense. “No one in the league had ever seen anything like it before. It completely baffled them,” says Roccia.

  But Penncrest had a ways to go before it would become a winning program. In Joe’s first two years, the team went a combined 4-15-1. But things began to jell in Joe’s last year, when the team went 6-4-1, its first winning season in a decade.

  As much as Joe loved high school football and cherished his time at both Archmere and Penncrest, he had his sights set on the next level: college. The problem was that Joe had no idea how to get there. His coaching career had been basically self-made. He had no real coaching mentors, no one to show him the ropes and to give him advice. Bott had helped a bit initially. Olivadotti provided some guidance in Delaware. But, otherwise, Joe had figured things out pretty much on his own.

  In the spring of 1977 Joe befriended Walt Buechele and John Furlow, the defensive coordinator and head coach, respectively, at West Chester University, a Pennsylvania school fifteen miles from Penncrest. They both told Joe that he needed to start networking if he wanted to crack the college game. “I thought I could just get there by proving myself as a high school coach,” says Joe. But he found out that in the college ranks, a lot of it was whom you knew.

  So Joe decided to take their advice about making and cultivating contacts—starting with them. That spring, he helped out with West Chester’s practices, coaching the secondary. While there he made an impression. Buechele and Furlow recommended Joe for the secondary coach position at Lafayette College that same spring. Joe got the job and packed up Kathe and their now four kids (Kelly, Kim, Kara, and a new baby—their son, Kevin) and moved to Easton, Pennsylvania.

  A Catholic priest who was a friend of the family had married Joe and Kathe in a quiet ceremony on a Wednesday night. The only people in attendance were their immediate families. “In those days it wasn’t the thing to do to get pregnant before you were married,” says Kathe. “So everything was hush-hush.” To save money, the two nineteen-year-olds decided to move into the basement of Kathe’s parents’ house in Yonkers. Kathe was very attached to her own family, but she immediately loved Joe’s mother, too (“She was a very special lady”) and at least understood his father (“I always felt sorry for him because in my eyes he was never able to show his family any love”). Kathe would have preferred to stay in Yonkers (or move to Inwood) to raise their children, because roots and family were more important to her than anything else.

  But roots were hard to establish when married to an ambitious football coach like Joe, who was constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to advance his career. That, of course, meant lots of moves. Kathe always supported Joe’s coaching career. “I was so proud of him. He was an amazing coach and had such great influence on his players,” she says. But the constant uprooting took a toll on her. “She would be just settling in to a new place, then, poof, Joe would get a job somewhere else,” says Paul Pomeroy, who remained friends with the Moglias after they left Archmere. “I think she would have preferred that Joe stay in one place, that he would sort of install himself somewhere like Archmere and
coach there for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t Joe.”

  That said, the first few years in Easton turned out to be the time the kids look back on as their favorite part of their childhood. The family was together, a unit. The Moglias lived in a small house on the Lafayette campus, right next to the president’s mansion. “It was a really nice neighborhood that had kids all over the place,” remembers Kelly. “Mom had a good support group. We were happy there.”

  Kathe was naturally shy, the opposite of her outgoing husband. “She was never comfortable at big parties,” says Kelly. “She preferred hosting small dinners.” Her tight-knit group of friends in Easton allowed for plenty of that.

  In Easton, the Moglia children roller-skated, swam in the college pool, and played on the nearby statue of a leopard, the Lafayette mascot. At home, Joe settled disputes among his girls by making them wrestle each other (Kevin was a toddler at the time). “If we had a disagreement, it was ding-ding-ding,” says Kim. They also put on dancing parties, where Joe and his girls would sing. “Proud Mary” was a particular favorite. “Dad was always Tina Turner and we were the backup singers,” says Kara. “We were a big singing family even though Grandma [Joe’s mother] was the only one who could actually sing. But Dad had no problem trying.”

  Their lives revolved mostly around football. “We felt like we were part of the team there,” says Kim, who would sometimes curl up in her father’s lap and watch game films at home. The family went to nearly every game, home and away. “For the first twelve years of my life, I never knew Saturday cartoons existed,” says Kelly. “Mom would just put us in the car and we’d go to football games. It was so cool to see our dad down there on the sidelines.”

  “If we won, we would all run down on the field,” says Kim. “But if we lost, everything was somber. Mom would say, ‘Dad needs some time.’”

  Financially, things were still very tight. Johnny remembers visiting his brother in Easton one winter. “Their house was really drafty. Jim [Joe] had the heat set at fifty-five degrees. It was freezing. I asked him to turn it up and told him I’d pay for it. He said no, that it would set a bad example if they only turned up the heat when I was there.”

  Still, the Moglias did find the time and money to go on one-week vacations during the summer. Unlike his father, Joe would actually stick the week out. They usually went to visit Joe’s childhood friend, John O’Leary, at his beach house on the New Jersey shore. “Dad was never really relaxed on vacations, but he was a lot of fun. He rode bikes with us and told us tons of stories,” says Kelly.

  Joe coached the secondary and the special teams at Lafayette, which turned out to be the Leopards’ only strengths. “Our offense was pretty miserable,” says Joe. In the 1978 season the team went 5-3-2 despite having serious trouble scoring points. The defense and special teams carried the squad. In the team’s two ties that year, the scores were 0–0 and 7–7. They won one game by the score of 9–7. Joe’s special teams set an NCAA record with thirteen blocked kicks that year. (One of Lafayette’s kick-blocking specialists was an All-American linebacker named Joe Skladany, who later became an assistant coach for the linebackers and special teams for the Nighthawks.)

  At the beginning of what would be Joe’s last year at Lafayette, things between him and Kathe began to sour. Fights became more frequent, though they were careful not to argue in front of the kids. The fights mostly centered on the amount of time Joe spent on his work. Part of his job at Lafayette was to coordinate recruiting, which, combined with his coaching duties, meant he was totally focused on football for all but a month or two during the year. He was also busy writing a football book. “I wanted some family time, but Joe was too busy making his career,” says Kathe. They tried counseling but it didn’t work. In the winter of 1980 Kathe filed for divorce and took the kids to live with her parents back in New York. But with Christmas around the corner, she and Joe decided to reconcile for the kids’ sake. She returned to Easton after two weeks.

  At the end of the 1980 season, when Lafayette went 3-7, head coach Neil Putnam was fired. A new coach named Bill Russo was brought in. Russo asked Joe to stay on the staff as the offensive coordinator. But Joe had been offered a job at Dartmouth to lead the defense. Though the talent difference between the players at Lafayette and Dartmouth was negligible, Joe believed the Dartmouth job carried greater prestige.

  Joe was now thirty-one years old. He had already been coaching for thirteen years. It was his obsession. He loved the game planning, the repetition of the practices, the molding of dozens of eager-eyed boys into one unified whole. He loved recruiting, the identification of talent, the sales pitch to the player and his family, and the sealing of the deal with the commitment letter. Since age nineteen, he’d had his sights set on one thing: running his own college program. And the Dartmouth job, he believed, was exactly the right step in that direction. Head-coaching aspirants took their licks as assistants for years. If he found success as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, he was sure that doors would open in a big way.

  But Kathe put her foot down. The move to Hanover would have been the family’s fourth uprooting in a decade. She liked Easton. She told Joe that she and the kids were staying put.

  Joe went anyway, believing—hoping—that she would follow. He signed a contract to become Dartmouth’s new defensive coordinator for a starting salary of $30,000 a year. He found a place to live on his own, a little green house on Prospect Street in Lebanon, a neighboring—and cheaper—town.

  Kathe and the kids did eventually move up in the summer. But Joe and Kathe’s relationship continued to deteriorate. Dick Maloney, then the offensive line coach at Dartmouth and now the head coach at the University of Chicago, says one night in October of that year, just a few games into Joe’s first season, all of the coaches were in a meeting, going over the game plan for their next opponent, when Hanover’s sheriff walked in and asked to see Coach Moglia.

  “We thought there was a death in the family,” says Maloney.

  Instead, the sheriff served Joe his divorce papers. “Joe just took them, then quietly returned to the table and put them under his seat and we continued the meeting,” says Maloney. Joe was deeply embarrassed but he tried not to show it. “He was very private and he never talked about any trouble at home, but we all knew what was going on,” says Maloney. “But he never brought it to the field.”

  Indeed, on the field, Joe was working near miracles. Joe Yukica, Dartmouth’s head coach, gave Joe freedom on his side of the ball. Joe ran a base 3-4 defense, meaning he usually started with three linemen at the line of scrimmage. But his defense was based on flexibility. They could easily jump into a 4-3 (with four down linemen). They had as many as fifteen different coverages. “What he did so well was adapt the defense to the skills of the players he had,” says Ed Simpson, a linebacker on the team. “We weren’t big at all, but we were fairly smart and coachable. He taught us discipline and responsibility.”

  Although Joe had toned down his yelling, he worked everyone very hard. “He had this uncanny ability to grind the kids and, at the same time, convince them that he had their best interests at heart,” says Don Brown, a graduate assistant on that Dartmouth staff and the current defensive coordinator at the University of Connecticut. And “he had great positive energy. If we lost, he never dragged his tail, and that rubbed off on the players. He made them feel good about themselves.” This was a critical part of his coaching strategy, because he knew he had to get his defensive players to believe that they were good, to believe that if they played together as a true unit, they would succeed, despite their lack of size and speed.

  And it worked. Led by Joe’s defense, which was the top-ranked one in the East, the Big Green tied for the Ivy League Championship in 1981. That same year, Joe published his first book, The Perimeter Attack Offense. The book was based on the thesis that the key to a great offensive attack is the ability to create an exploitable moment of doubt, a hesitation, in the minds of the linebackers, cornerba
cks, and safeties—those players responsible for stopping both the run and the pass. Basically, it was the type of offense that had given his defenses trouble over the years.

  In December 1981 Joe and Kathe decided to separate. Kathe hadn’t pushed the divorce proceedings along, but they both realized that they could no longer live under the same roof. Joe made plans to move into the unheated storage room at the Davis Varsity House, over his team’s locker room, when he returned from his Christmas break recruiting trip. They decided Kathe would tell the kids while he was away.

  Joe says the day he left for that trip—knowing that he wasn’t coming back to his family—was “the hardest single day of my life.” He kissed his kids good-bye, walked out into the freezing New Hampshire winter day, and got into his car. “I remember looking back at the house as I pulled out of the driveway,” he says. “And there was my little girl, Kara, with her face pressed up to the window, watching her daddy leave.”

  “We had no idea he wasn’t coming back,” says Kelly.

  A day after he left, Kathe gathered the children together in the kitchen. Kara and Kevin were too young to recall much about that day. But the older two children remember it well.

  “We were all in the kitchen,” says Kim. “I was sitting in a chair. I remember how my feet barely touched the ground as I swung them under the chair.” Kathe told them that she and Joe were separating because they didn’t want to fight so much anymore, and that Joe would no longer be living with them. “I had this sense of panic,” says Kim. “The room went white. I thought then that he was never coming back.”

  Kelly remembers walking upstairs and seeing her mother packing up her father’s clothes. When she asked her mother what she was doing, Kathe replied, “I told you he’s not coming back.”