Within two days of capping spring football drills in April, Temple’s Matt Rhule was in Blacksburg, Va., meeting with first-year Virginia Tech coach Justin Fuente, one of his closest friends in the coaching profession.
He wanted to follow the Hokies’ practice routine: “I think you get a lot from practice organization,” Rhule said. And he wanted to sit down with Fuente for a mutual meeting of the minds, in the sort of cooperative détente seen among would-be rivals — even if the Owls and Hokies play in different conferences and against different standards for success — during the offseason interlude between spring practice and fall camp.
“I know them so well,” Rhule said. “I want to see behind the scenes.”
There is always something to be gleaned from a backstage tour. A year ago, Rhule traveled to Air Force, meeting with Troy Calhoun and his coaching staff with a long-range goal: Temple will play Army to open this season and potentially meet Navy to decide the American Athletic Conference championship, so Rhule wanted to gather insight into the Falcons’ multiple-formation option offense — a system shared, by and large, with the program’s service-academy peers.
A similar scene is taking place across college football, as coaches from every level of competition meet to share notes, compare styles and discuss plans, schematics and talking points in advance of the coming season. Some meetings occur on campus; others occur between the white lines, such as this month when coaching staffs gather to co-host a slew of satellite camps.
The goal, put simply, is to get smarter — to use colleagues and peers as a sounding board on a wide range of topics, gleaning knowledge on game-specific formations and plays through more general theories on program-building and player development.
“Everything everybody has done, you’ve learned from somewhere,” said Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher. “You’ll pick up screens or certain plays or blitzes. There’s things you hopefully add every year that jump out. It happens almost every year, one or two things you’ve picked up or talked with other people about how they do it or how you do it.”
What coaches discuss — and who they discuss with — is determined in large part by job title. In the recent past, Northwestern has played host to programs such as Rutgers, TCU and Brigham Young; when the Cougars visited last summer, Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald sat down with then-BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall while his assistants were matched by their coaching responsibility, allowing quarterback coaches to analyze that individual position, for example, or defensive coaches to meet as a group.
If assistant coaches talk specifics, head coaches discuss larger trends. “We just talk football,” Fitzgerald said.
“To the head football coach: What do you do? How do you run the program? We don’t talk a whole lot of Xs and Os, the offense, defense and kicking game, but more about leadership. We’re always trying to find ways to get better.”
And there’s significant value to be found in using a head-coach peer as a sharing tool. A single meeting between Wisconsin coach Gary Andersen and Toledo coach Matt Campbell in the summer of 2013 — Andersen is now at Oregon State and Campbell at Iowa State — paid off immensely for Andersen, who said, “I got four of five things out of that meeting with him in a few hours.”
“If I could find the right head coach I’d love to do that every single year and continue to grow and develop,” Andersen said. “Because I take a lot of pride in that, that I don’t know all the answers — that I can be flexible. It’s my job to prepare kids, but it’s also my job, especially at this point in my career, to prepare my assistants.”
More often than not, however, offseason meetings center on what lies ahead. As the head coach at Oregon State, current Nebraska coach Mike Riley opened his doors to Power Five coaching staffs searching for insight into the Pac-12 Conference. Georgia came to find angles to attack Arizona State, and Virginia to study Riley’s blueprint for combating Southern California; more recently, Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio brought his defensive coaches to learn more about Oregon, a non-conference opponent of the Spartans in each of the past two seasons.
There are coaches who meet solely for on philosophical grounds: Auburn coach Gus Malzahn spent time at Baylor, for instance, to share ideas on the up-tempo, no-huddle offense. And there are those coaches — and their respective programs — who opt to be selective, either entertaining only a limited number of competitors or keeping their doors and playbooks closed altogether.
This mindset is selfish, if for practical reasons. Up-tempo teams might be willing to compare notes with programs of a similar bent, if only those from other conferences. For teams rooted in more distinctive styles — say, those that preach an old-school approach amid fast-paced competitors — any tips and pointers gathered during face-to-face meetings might turn the unique into the mundane.
“We’re pretty choosy,” Stanford coach David Shaw said. “We typically do it with guys we know really well.”
For Stanford, that means spending more time during the offseason with teams from the NFL, where Shaw spent nine years as an assistant coach. The Cardinal find greater similarities among NFL teams than their college peers — in “our pass protections, our overall philosophy,” Shaw said.
And cooperative sharing with rivals on the college level has one clear drawback: What you say can — and will, some coaches fear — be used against you in the near future.
“We don’t want to give away the store, necessarily,” Shaw said. “And this is such a nomadic lifestyle that we lead, you go and talk with somebody and a year later that guy is in your conference.”
Oregon, for example, almost never opens its doors to coaching staffs looking to replicate the Ducks’ quick-twitch offense or frenetic practice routine; the most notable coach to bear witness to the program’s approach was Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, who paid a visit to then-coach Chip Kelly during his off-field interval between coaching at Florida and with the Buckeyes.
“I think as a collective we all thought — this might sound a little arrogant — but that we weren't going to learn as much from other people as they would get from us,” said UCF coach Scott Frost, previously Oregon’s offensive coordinator. “I think we were definitely on the forefront and the vanguard in college football, and we believe in what we do; it's a system.”
Most, however, find common ground in a shared pursuit: increasing their knowledge of the more mundane tenets of coaching — practice methods, down-and-distance play calls, positional development — and large-scale habits adopted and embraced by head coaches on college football’s highest level of competition.
“It’s just a constant educational part of ball,” Fisher said.
Contributing: George Schroeder, Daniel Uthman
