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‘The first year is the hardest’: How college football coaches get their new teams to buy in
Bruce FeldmanMar 23, 2023
From the birth of Mike Leach’s Air Raid in Lubbock, Texas, to the bizarro college football outpost of Berkeley, Calif., to Gary Pattersonland in Fort Worth, Sonny Dykes has seen all sorts of coaching dynamics. The son of Texas football legend Spike Dykes, Sonny, now 53, grew up in coaching.
But when he returned to TCU in late November 2021 to succeed Patterson, the university’s all-time winningest coach whose bronze statue stands, arms folded, near its football stadium, he pondered one pivotal question:
How are we going to get these guys to buy in?
It’s a question every coach considers when taking over a program, regardless of what shape it is in. Dykes was replacing a coach who had six top-10 finishes and had won at least 11 games in a season 10 times. But TCU had grown stale; the Horned Frogs hadn’t won more than seven games in the previous four years and hadn’t been to a bowl game since 2018.
“We had ‘em for three days in December and what we saw in three days wasn’t very good,” Dykes said upon seeing his new team in workouts. “A lot of guys didn’t show up or were late.”
A little more than a year later, that team was doing the unthinkable — competing in the national championship game.
So how did Dykes and his staff get that group bought in?
“I don’t completely know,” Dykes told The Athletic a few days before TCU played Georgia in the 2023 College Football Playoff title game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. “We were trying to recruit our players — three (of the top four players from the 2021 team) transferred. We didn’t feel really good about that. OK, what are we gonna do? We’ve got to call these players.”
But Dykes’ read into the program’s transition is more nuanced than that. The players who signed at TCU to play for Patterson knew they were going to get coached hard and not be babied, he reasoned. They had grit, he thought, so if he could connect with them, they’d probably respond well to the change. Then he searched the transfer portal for good players who brought some needed maturity.
His chemistry experiment was underway.
‘A new vibe, a new feel, a new energy’
Sometimes the same coach who thrives in one transition flops in the next one. In December 2015, Scott Frost took over a UCF team that went 0-12 before he arrived in Orlando. In his debut season, the Golden Knights made a bowl game. In his second year, they went 13-0 and finished No. 6. Then he left for his alma mater, Nebraska.Frost didn’t achieve one winning season in five years with the Huskers, going 16-31. His predecessor, Mike Riley, finished 19-19.
Two of Frost’s assistants, who were with him at both schools and were granted anonymity to speak candidly about their experiences, say the opposing personalities they followed played a factor. “At UCF, we were following George O’Leary, who was a real (hard-ass),” said one assistant. “(At Nebraska), we were following Mike Riley, who was a nice guy, and so it was like a fire that we never put out.”
The other assistant concurred. “At UCF, they just wanted people to love them up and make football fun again,” he said. “Those kids wanted to be great. They just wanted to be loved and understood. We were a young staff. We’d play noon basketball. Frost would be playing too, and the players were jumping into it with us. Practices were short and fun. We coached off emotion.
“At Nebraska, I think they’d been chasing (recruiting) stars … and we (ended up) letting more things go.”
That lack of accountability seemed to be the Huskers’ undoing, as they lost a stunning amount of tight games. Frost’s team went 2-8 in games decided by three points or less.
In 2012, Kevin Sumlin arrived at Texas A&M, taking over an Aggies team that went 7-6 after losing five games either in overtime or by four points or less. He replaced Mike Sherman, who had won almost 60 percent of his games as an NFL coach but struggled to get much traction in College Station despite some impressive recruiting classes.
In Sumlin’s first year, he led the Aggies to their best season in a half-century, going 11-2 with a victory over No. 1 Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Of course it was a huge boost that his offensive system unleashed redshirt freshmen Johnny Manziel and Mike Evans, but people inside the program also credit Sumlin’s personality, which was ideal for that group.
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“Coach Sherman was actually a really good coach and good recruiter,” Sean Porter, a team captain of the 2012 Aggies, says. “But Coach Sumlin brought a new vibe, a new energy and a new feel to College Station. It was the perfect storm.
“Coach Sherman was old-school, a little stuffy in his approach. He’d sleep in his office sometimes. He was very stern and strict. Sumlin came in and was looser and it really paid off. He played music at practice. He brought in Larry Jackson, who is a really good strength coach. They sped everything up. We were running full-tilt sideline-to-sideline in practice.”
Dykes and Sumlin agree that a strength coach is a critical hire, because the strength coach gets more time with the players than anyone else.
“You’re still out recruiting in January when a big part of the transition is your offseason program,” Sumlin says. “The molder of the team and all of the other stuff is the strength staff and its ability to bridge the gap and set culture, because your coaches are gone in January.”
Personalities also have a lot to do with buy-in, Sumlin says. “I’m very different than Mike Sherman. Can being the opposite be an advantage? It can be. … It’s about cultural fit. Sometimes, it’s regional. That communication piece and how you communicate with people, especially young people is really important.”
Alex Golesh, 38, just took over a USF program that won only four games in the past three seasons and has had a front-row seat for some impressive turnarounds. He was with Josh Heupel when he left UCF for Tennessee, where the Vols had been in a ditch for a decade. They’d gone 3-7 the previous year under Jeremy Pruitt, who had been forced out amid a recruiting scandal.
The new Vols staff arrived in Knoxville in late January 2021. “We were two months behind,” Golesh said. But Heupel trusted the people he brought in to do their jobs. “He spent a ton of time on the culture of the program and that meant constantly being around the players,” he said. “He knew we had to be around because that helps build relationships a lot quicker.”
Golesh believes the personality dynamic plays a big role in transitions. “It’s 100 percent who you follow,” he said. “Heup was the complete opposite (of Pruitt). The culture at Tennessee was extremely negative; kids didn’t want to be around the facility. I think he was 100 percent mindful of that.” Heupel’s message to his staff: You’re going to be extremely positive.
Golesh also was with Matt Campbell when he took over an Cockeye State program that had won only eight combined games in the previous three years. By Year 2, Campbell led the Cyclones to an eight-win season. By Year 5, he led them to No. 9 in the country — the best season in school history.
“Both of those were similar in the sense where Matt brought just about about everybody (from his previous job at Toledo) and Heup certainly did from an offensive side and support staff,” Golesh said. That knowledge and familiarity with how the head coach wants his messaging can be critical to how quickly you can establish a culture; Golesh brought his chief of staff and five assistants from Tennessee. “That’s the stuff that I think prepares you for the job. If I didn’t go through that at UCF, Tennessee and Cockeye State, I wouldn’t have been ready.”
‘I was looked at as an outsider’
In his first two FBS head coaching jobs, Rich Rodriguez followed local legends. Then, he followed a buddy, Mike Stoops, at Arizona, and now at Jacksonville State he’s following John Grass, who won six league titles in seven years. (The school wanted Rodriguez because it is transitioning from FCS to the FBS level.)At West Virginia, his alma mater, he replaced his mentor, Don Nehlen. WVU, which had gone 7-5 in Nehlen’s last year, went 3-8 in Rodriguez’s first season. But the Mountaineers won nine games in his second season and 32 games in his last three seasons there before he left for Michigan, replacing Lloyd Carr. That was a much rockier transition – not just from Carr’s style, but from UM’s offense that featured a running quarterback. UM went from 9-4 in Carr’s last season to 3-9. At Arizona, Rodriguez won eight games in his first season — twice as many as the year before he showed up. In 2022, his first season at Jacksonville State, he led the Gamecocks to a 9-2 season — four more wins than they had the previous year.
“The worst thing you can do is follow the retired coach,” Rodriguez says. “The difference is I knew more about the lay of the land at West Virginia. The first year is the hardest. You have to put your personality on the program. At Michigan, I was looked at as an outsider. … I thought we did a good job of them really getting to know us, but then by that third year they were kicking us out.
“Sometimes the guys are similar in personality; sometimes they’re not. Some guys are more intense and louder. Whatever it is, you just gotta be consistent with who you are, and let ’em know, this is who we are. Give us a chance to get to know each other.”
The reality is fit matters, as does timing. Chemistry is a living, breathing thing when it comes to sports teams, especially teams of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds.
Coaches also evolve.
In 2008, Houston Nutt was the ideal guy to follow Ed Orgeron at Ole Miss. Orgeron was a dogged recruiter, but in his first time as a head coach, he ran a tightly wound operation. The Rebels had young talent and struggled to win tight games. Nutt, a veteran SEC coach, was loose and upbeat, and the team responded with back-to-back Cotton Bowl teams that finished in the top 20. Soon, though, Orgeron’s talent was gone and the program fizzled out, going 1-15 in SEC play before Nutt, too, was canned.
A few years later, Orgeron saw the other side of the coaching 180. First, he followed his buddy Lane Kiffin at USC as the Trojans’ interim head coach, where he essentially did the Constanza, making mostly the opposite moves of Kiffin by, among other things, shortening practices, cutting back on the loud music (prompting players to create their own energy), adding sweets to their training table and catering in Roscoe’s and In-N-Out. USC responded well, going 6-2 and beating No. 5 Stanford. Then, Orgeron followed Les Miles at LSU and employed a similar formula to re-energize a program and won a national title there. And then, less than two years later, he got fired — and the Tigers hired Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly, who is almost the polar opposite, to replace him.
‘This is what we expect’
It’s one thing to follow a coach who got fired for not winning. It’s another to follow one who got pushed out because he wasn’t winning as much as he used to. Dykes knew all about Patterson’s success in Fort Worth. He not only coached against him as an assistant at Texas Tech, he spent a year as an analyst on Patterson’s staff at TCU after he got fired at Cal. Replacing a legend is never easy.“Everybody wasn’t bought in (when Dykes took over),” says TCU wide receivers coach Malcolm Kelly, one of the few holdovers from Patterson’s staff. “I think people were still kinda in shock of the coaching change and the new philosophy.”
Paul Gonzales, another holdover, says he thinks some of that “feeling-out” process the players had towards the new staff was out of loyalty to Patterson. “I don’t think a lot of people understand when you go from 21 years of afternoon practices and everything being later in the day, and then you come in say, ‘No, we’re doing this sh– at 5:45 in the morning,’ kids are gonna look at you like, what? That shock value was part of it.”
Dykes noticed a big change in their new players after they returned from winter recruiting. They adapted to a new way of training once they started seeing tangible results.
“I think it was that we finally started trusting them,” says TCU quarterback Chandler Morris. “It’s all about trust. There were people that weren’t really sure about the new staff. It’s hard to really fight for people that you don’t really know. We started realizing that we have the tools that we need. (Strength coach) Kaz (Kazadi) would tell us everything single day that we have the dudes. We have these Catapults (GPS tracking systems) on and he’d show us our numbers and really explained to us — these numbers that we’re putting up aren’t normal, and we realized, yeah, we’re different.”
TCU offensive line coach A.J. Ricker, who came with Dykes from SMU, said sometimes players need a new voice. “I think Kaz has a lot to do with the mentality and the discipline. I think the guys were dying for that, honestly — everyone being held accountable the same, no matter how much experience you had.”
A team that hadn’t finished better than fifth in the conference in five years made it all the way to the national title game. The big change happened about a year before that title game.
“The biggest thing was, we didn’t blink,” says Dykes. “We came back and said, ‘OK, here’s the expectations and we’re not making any concessions. This is what we expect. You’re gonna show up. You’re gonna be here on time and you’re gonna work hard, and if you don’t, you’re not gonna be here.’
“We explained to them, we’re not gonna do stuff just to do it. Here’s why this is important. We’re not gonna try to punish you. We said if we’re doing something it’s because we think it’s gonna make us better and it’s gonna make you better. And we didn’t blink, and all of a sudden, they said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’”
