By
Audrey Snyder Jan 10, 2021
At a
hotel in Hagerstown, Maryland, as the three-hour interview shifted from
installing an offense at Division II Shippensburg to whether or not Mike
Yurcich would be willing to uproot his family and move to Stillwater, Oklahoma,
the prospective offensive coordinator stayed calm. He had every reason not to
be.
“That was a strange deal and (Mike) Gundy was digging pretty
deep,” Shippensburg head coach Mark Maciejewski recalled between laughs. “…
That was a unique situation back then, let me tell you.”
This wasn’t just any job interview. Yurcich went from calling
plays at Shippensburg to sitting down with Gundy, who had rerouted an Oklahoma
State recruiting trip to meet Yurcich in that Hagerstown hotel. In the days
leading up to the interview, it finally clicked why Oklahoma State had
requested film from Shippensburg. Gundy believed in the numbers he researched
that offseason as he looked for teams that played fast on offense and had the
yards and points to show for it. He was tired of losing coordinators to head
coaching jobs, thus making a Division II candidate intriguing, even if
unorthodox.
Gundy narrowed his list of candidates down to four or five,
mostly from the Power 5 level, but he kept coming back to Yurcich.
“There are a lot of really good football coaches scattered
across the country in high school, junior college, lower level college ball,
and without connections, they don’t ever get a start, so you really don’t know
about them,” Gundy said. “… I collected video tape on all the candidates and
went through and liked what (Yurcich) did better than the other guys.”
If this didn’t work, Gundy would take the blame. Even if it did,
many wondered just how good Yurcich would be anyway. The divide between
Division II and the Big 12 made such a hire difficult to understand. Some of
the same coaches on Gundy’s staff who wanted the job would now have to work
under the man who was making $52,000 at Shippensburg the previous year.
“That was his biggest adjustment because the other guys had been
there,” Gundy said. “There were a couple other guys that had been there that
wanted the coordinator job, but I didn’t think they were ready and I had not
been fond of hiring guys to be the coordinator that had not been quarterback
coaches. It was a little bit of a risk on my part.”
Yurcich proved Gundy
right. In his six years at Oklahoma State, the offense averaged 38 points and
478 yards per game, finishing in the top 20 nationally in scoring in five of
six years and winning 10 games four times. Yurcich recruited and signed quarterback
Mason Rudolph, a four-star recruit from South Carolina who threw for more than
13,000 yards in his career and became a third-round draft pick.
In an industry that’s notorious for grunt work, attending
conventions and making necessary connections, Yurcich’s path to the Power 5 remains unique. It’s a
success story that continues to be told as his coaching career has taken off
after spending six seasons with Gundy, then one at Ohio State and one at Texas.
Now, as Penn State’s new offensive coordinator,
Yurcich continues to build his résumé.
“Mike’s a grinder,” Maciejewski said. “He was a good recruiter
when he was here and worked very hard at X’s and O’s. And there weren’t too
many people that beat me in the office, and Mike was usually in there at the
same time.”
All of those 6:30 a.m. drives into the office at Shippensburg,
all of the traits that once made him a surprise hire at Oklahoma State, now have him on a path toward
becoming an FBS head coach. The 45-year-old Yurcich might be ready for
such a gig right now, Gundy believes. He’s interviewed for head coaching jobs
before.
“He’s gonna be ready at
any time to be a head coach,” Gundy said.
Should Yurcich one day land a head coaching gig, it’s going to
be because of that offense he’s tinkered with and evolved since Shippensburg
finished the 2012 season No. 1 in total offense (529.92 yards per game) and No.
2 in passing offense in Division II (387.69).
Now, Yurcich needs to make that system work at Penn State.
In the meeting rooms at Oklahoma State, every offseason was
spent fine-tuning the offense.
Yurcich learned Oklahoma State’s system and terminology when he
arrived, but he and Gundy were in agreement that there needed to be some
changes.
They installed a verbiage system in which one word could get the
entire offense on the same page in a hurry. The quarterback would shout it, and
the offense could line up and rip off any play — not just a base play — and
continue to push the tempo.
“By the end of that first year, we had like 35 of those plays,
and that became what our offense was the next three or four years until Mike
left,” Gundy said. “Of course, we still do it here now, but that’s the one
thing we started at Oklahoma State when he was there as the coordinator that
was different than what everybody else in the country was doing. That’s kind of
his legacy and I’m sure he took a lot of that with him to Ohio State — I know
he did because I watched them play. … I know at Texas I saw it, and I know
that’s who Mike is and that’s what he wants to do.”
The verbiage helped Oklahoma State continue to be a prolific
offense, and Yurcich had done something similar at Shippensburg too. While it
wasn’t grabbing headlines and showing up on national television broadcasts, the
beauty of that Shippensburg offense and the tempo it used still isn’t lost on
Yurcich’s former quarterback, Zach Zulli. Zulli won the Harlon Hill Trophy
under Yurcich in 2012, an honor awarded to the top player in Division II.
Almost a decade later, Zulli still remembers running up to the
line, shouting “money” and watching as the rest of the offense morphed into
action.
“His whole offense was based on animals,” Zulli said. “Let’s say
we were running a power play, think of a powerful animal. Or, let’s say we’re
running a fast play, a speed play, think of a fast animal. That’s how
everything was coded and it made everything so much easier because you put the
diagram with that play and then with that animal and we all connected and
jelled. …
“The guy could teach a freaking ant.”
The way in which Yurcich presented the offense made it easy for
Zulli to digest. Yes, the quarterback had five reads on every play, but every
play was designed based on coverages, Zulli said. With Penn State now on its
fifth offensive coordinator since 2014 and Yurcich being the fourth coordinator
quarterback Sean Clifford will have played under, implementing a new system and
new terminology will be an offseason-long transition. It took Zulli a summer of
prep until he started to feel at ease with it.
“I was triggered in that way to be like a robot,” Zulli said.
“If I saw that coverage, I go left. If I saw this coverage, I go right. And I
would go through smaller increments of the play. And because our offense ran so
fast, the defenses weren’t even set half the time. … I spread it around to
every single person because that’s what the offense was supposed to be. I
promise it was not me. It was not me at all. It was the way he coached me. It
was the way that he coached the team and the way that he led the team.”
Yurcich’s attention to detail meant sometimes it took the
Shippensburg offense an hour in the film room to get through six plays, Zulli
said. No play on the practice field was complete unless all 11 players executed
it properly. They’d run it over and over again.
“It was easy once he taught you it,” Zulli said. “It was like
saying your ABCs. It was really that easy. If the defense was in this coverage,
I would throw here. If the defense was in that coverage, I had a 1-2 read here.
If the defense was sitting back, you had your checkdown. If there was a blitz,
you threw to the blitz. Like, it was so simple because of the way he explained
it.”
Yurcich’s ability to
connect with his players made him a father-like figure to
Zulli. He wouldn’t say a word to his quarterback at breakfast on game days or
during pregame. He entered a “silent assassin kind of mode,” as Zulli recalled.
“Oh, he got a little fiery, just so you know,” Zulli said. “… He made our team so freaking
good that there was no issues. Everyone loved playing for him. I’m not
gonna lie, I almost cried when he told me he got the Oklahoma State job.”
As time marched on and Yurcich solidified himself as a bright offensive mind,
he never forgot the quarterback who brought his offense to life and paved the way
for him to eventually bring Rudolph to Stillwater, go to Columbus to coach
Justin Fields and go to Austin to coach Sam Ehlinger.
“He called me a couple years later, and was like, ‘Listen, I got
here because of you,’” Zulli said. “He said that to me probably about five or
six times, and I take that to heart.”
When Gundy gave Yurcich a ringing endorsement to Penn State coach James
Franklin last winter, he did so in part because of what came
up in hours two and three of that initial interview with Yurcich in Hagerstown
several years ago.
Beyond the scheme and the bright mind, the concepts and the
ability to teach them, Gundy wanted someone who was going to be loyal to him
and his program. It’s that same trait Franklin has mentioned countless times
over the years, even describing himself on a few occasions as perhaps “loyal to
a fault.”
Yurcich’s answers to Gundy that day held true over time as they
grew together and built an offense together. They still stay in contact as
Yurcich continues his coaching journey.
“I told (Franklin), Mike
is a great teacher, he’s highly intelligent, he’s a hard worker and he’s
extremely loyal,” Gundy said. “There’s your four keys to being a good coach,
and he’s got all of them.”
(Photo: Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)
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