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Updated Jan 12, 10:57
AM; Posted Jan 12, 5:05 AM
Sometime during 29-year-old Mike Yurcich’s
second year as a graduate assistant on Gerry DiNardo’s Indiana Hoosiers
football staff, the two were talking about the young coach’s future.
Specifically, DiNardo believed he had one in a business that often eats its
young.
The former Notre Dame All-America lineman,
longtime major-college coach and now television analyst recalled the moment
during a Monday phone conversation from his Florida home:
“The part I remember most is, he was one of
the best I ever had. So, I can remember having this conversation with him,
basically telling him how good I thought he was. And that I didn’t think he had
any ceiling.
“He was very appreciative. And I was very
sincere in what I said; I didn’t say that to a lot of guys.”
By this time in a young G.A.’s tenure, the
veteran head coach could tell if a twentysomething had what it took to stick in
an occupation that demands 70-hour weeks as a matter of course, that requires
unconditional love with no guarantee it will be requited:
“Now, we worked a lot. So maybe this was me
damaging the coaching profession. In fact, I used to say to a lot of young
guys: ‘When you’re done working for us, you’re really gonna know if you wanna
be a coach.’ I’d say 50 percent of my [G.A.s] said they didn’t want to be a
coach. Because of the way we worked. You gave up a lot.”
Grad assistants were paid little to nothing
depending on their status as volunteers or minimal employees. And the chores
were unending. Maybe driving DiNardo on recruiting trips while he worked in the
backseat. Breaking down video – not of the upcoming opponent but that of the
following week. Meeting with the scout team and going over the script of plays,
maybe taking the scout team out to the field and walking them through it before
practice. Making certain the scout team was lined up correctly and was
motivated during practice. And if they were assigned to a particular position
coach, they were at that assistant’s beck and call.
Maybe, if
they earned cred over time by connecting with players and mastering the
playbook and schemes, they could do a little teaching during practices, too:
“The
better they were, the more I let them coach.”
And
Mike Yurcich was one of those guys. He proved he could be a grinder. Which is
no tap-in for a kid who was used to an NAIA job at St. Francis (IN) College.
DiNardo was impressed:
“Our
hours weren’t crazy [by major-college standards]. I was in at 5, the staff was
in at 7. We stayed until 10 most nights and one night, if you wanted, you could
recruit from home.
“I
mean, I was crazier before I got to Indiana. I would say my routine was what 95
percent of Midwestern coaches did.”
And
DiNardo quickly noticed how Yurcich seamlessly blended in with the rest of the
staff:
“I
thought he was really smart, I thought he really knew the game and I thought he
was very mature. If you were sitting in our staff room and you didn’t know
anybody in our staff, just observing body language, who was taking notes, who
was paying attention, you wouldn’t know that Mike was a G.A.”
So,
in that one-on-one moment, DiNardo gave his young charge that rare personal
endorsement. And Yurcich then responded in a way DiNardo didn’t fully expect:
“He
kinda looked at me and said: ‘Y’know, I don’t want this life.’”
DiNardo
was a bit surprised:
“I
just think he had never been exposed to it. He did a great job at it. He never
complained. I just think he was looking at it from 10,000 feet. He was single
and I think he looked at the rest of his life and asked himself: Is this what I
wanna do? Do I wanna be working seven days a week?”
Some
irony would follow that statement.
DiNardo
was fired after that 2004 season and all the Indiana coaches were cut free.
That was his last gig. At 52, after 30 seasons of coaching that spanned seven
teams and stretched from Maine to Colorado, it was he who
took stock and decided to quit the profession. He bought DeAngelo’s Italian
restaurant in Bloomington with wife Terri. Simultaneously, he became a college
football analyst with ESPN, then a studio analyst in 2007 for the fledgling Big
Ten Network.
Eight
years passed. DiNardo lost track of Yurcich. Then one day, he heard that Mike
Gundy had just hired his old G.A. who was then an offensive coordinator at
Division-II Shippensburg – the one who said he didn’t want the nonstop grind of
being a major-college coach – to be his offensive coordinator at Oklahoma
State.
So,
the head coach who had embraced the Mad Men major college football rat race got
out. And the young assistant who initially said he couldn’t embrace it ended up
doing exactly that.
DiNardo
could not resist needling his old protégé:
“I
remember I was driving from Chicago where we lived down to Bloomington and I
called him up and said, ‘What’s up with this?’
Obviously, he had changed. We got a big laugh out of it.”
Of
course, what really had changed in the interim were a few seismic shifts in
college football revenue dispersal that reshaped the landscape. Being a Power
Five football coach is roughly five to 10 times more lucrative now than it was
in 2004. Ignited partly by the BTN for which DiNardo still works, partly by
skyrocketing broadcast rights fees delivered by ESPN, FOX and CBS, a bidding
war for coaches has sent salaries into the stratosphere, especially in the P5
conferences.
DiNardo,
now 68, got off the train a bit soon to cash in; Yurcich, 45, boarded at just
the right time to hit the honeypot.
DiNardo
is far from bitter but still just as amazed as anyone else:
“I
made $65,000 when I was at Colorado [1982-90 as an assistant under Bill
McCartney]. When I got to Indiana [in 2002], I had a $1 million-dollar budget
for 10 [assistant coaches].”
And
last season, Yurcich signed for $1.7 million by himself as Texas’ offensive
coordinator (busted down to $1.5M by a UT athletic-department COVID-austerity
pay cut). His salary at Penn State has not been announced and likely won’t be
until the university’s annual list of its top 25 highest-paid employees is
released, probably in April. Yurcich most definitely will be on it.
As I
wrote in Saturday’s story on Yurcich’s hiring at Penn State, head coach James
Franklin surely knows that Yurcich will be in the market for suitable head
coach openings himself in the near future – by December if his offense performs
well in the 2021 season.
Some
coordinators prefer to concentrate on their side of the ball and aren’t
necessarily interested in dealing with the CEO responsibilities of a head
coach, no matter the steep salary upgrade. Lately, they are more the exception
than the rule. Yurcich’s predecessor Kirk Ciarrocca is such a case.
Yurcich himself is not. He is known to be
on track for and seeking a college head coaching job soon and was endorsed as a
candidate by his old boss Gundy. Yurcich’s agent is Neil Cornrich (they share
Cleveland as a hometown) whose prime-ticket clients include several
high-powered head coaches – the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick, the
Tennessee Titans’ Mike Vrabel, Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz and Illinois’ Bret Bielema.
It’s all a long way from 18 years ago when
DiNardo happened to get a heads-up from a staff remember – he can’t remember
who – about that 27-year-old assistant in the opposite corner of Indiana at a
tiny college in Fort Wayne. DiNardo then suggested what a fateful moment that
was:
“You’d get literally hundreds of all these
crazy letters: ‘I’ll do anything to be a G.A. I’ll sleep on the couch.’”
A few years before, a G.A. at Cal-Lutheran
named Dave Aranda proved that wasn’t just a metaphor. He had visited Louisiana
State to learn the acumen of Lou Tepper, then DiNardo’s defensive coordinator
when he was the LSU head coach (1995-99). Aranda was too embarrassed to tell
anyone he didn’t have money for a hotel, so he surreptitiously slept in the LSU
offices.
Aranda only told DiNardo the story a couple
of years ago. By then, he himself was the LSU DC, pulling down $2.5 million –
the highest-paid coordinator in college football. Last year, Baylor hired him
away to replace Matt Rhule as its head coach for an estimated $4.5 million
annually. (Baylor is a private university and does not commonly release salary
figures.)
Yurcich is one step away from following in
every one of Aranda’s footsteps.
DiNardo and I had been talking earlier in
our conversation about this monumental TV revenue infusion of the past decade
that has not only sent salaries skyward but made coaches hypermobile and
focused on the monetary prize at the end of their rainbow, some as much or more
as their love of the game. He returned to that point:
“I
would say, generally, these are very highly motivated young people who really
want to get into coaching. The way the thing has changed now is,
there is no question in my mind that, these days, someone like Mike Yurcich
becomes a G.A. fully expecting that he is gonna be a millionaire. He will leave
his children generational wealth.
“Now,
some people will think that, and aren’t gonna
make it. The only thing you wonder about is, if they weren’t making that money,
would they still wanna do it?”
Clearly,
Yurcich wanted to coach or he wouldn’t have spent a combined 15 years slumming
at not only St. Francis and as an Indiana G.A. but later as a coordinator at
Edinboro (under Tepper) and Shippensburg of the unseen Division II PSAC.
So,
now he’s near the top. And yes, he’s clearly adapted to “this life” of the major-college
grinder. Mike Yurcich learned it, but he also earned it – the hard way.
