by Monte Burke
Joe spent the first few months with the team acting like the proverbial “good child.” He was seen—at every practice, meeting, and film study session—but he was not heard. “I didn’t make a peep there for a little while,” he says. Instead, he soaked up every detail he could. He noted where the different coaches arrayed themselves at staff meetings; the order in which the playbook was put together; how the team lined up for the national anthem on the sidelines; even how Nebraska fed its players.
At Pelini’s suggestion Joe concentrated on the defense, which made sense given Joe’s history with that side of the ball. In doing so, though, he would also gain insight into the multiple offenses Nebraska would face during the year, which ran the gamut, from the pass-happy pro style of Oklahoma to the run-first philosophy at Colorado. Nebraska that year had a dominating defense, led by future NFL star tackle Ndamukong Suh. The only offenses that really gave Nebraska trouble were the spread option ones, which is one of the reasons Joe grew so fond of the style, and later decided to use it with the Nighthawks.
Joe started off studying with the linebackers, the position from which the Nebraska defense flowed. “He was just there all the time,” says Blake Lawrence, a linebacker on the team in 2009. From there Joe moved to the defensive backs. Soon he was shadowing Carl Pelini, the defensive coordinator (and brother of Bo). During games Joe sat in the coaches’ box above the field with the defensive staff. He listened in on the play calls and the back-and-forth between Bo Pelini and his coaches.
As the season progressed, Joe started to feel more comfortable. But the coaches remained a bit wary. Coaching staffs are like close-knit families. They work grueling hours in an intense atmosphere and in very tight quarters. Outsiders are usually iced out. “There was sort of a sense of Who is this dude? when Joe first got here,” says Doug Colman, then the quality control coach for the Cornhuskers.
Joe kept his head down, but was present for everything. If the coaches were dealing with a problem at 1:00 a.m., Joe was right there with them. Gradually, they began to realize that he wasn’t some weird old wealthy guy just getting his kicks from hanging out with a football team. He was a guy who was there to learn.
By October Joe had been accepted as part of the team. Because of the NCAA rules, he couldn’t actually run players through drills during practice. He was just supposed to observe. But, gingerly at first, he started to become more vocal, on the field and in the meeting rooms. “He just eventually became ‘Coach Joe’ to us,” says Blake Lawrence.
In late October of that year, Nebraska, then 4-2, hosted Iowa State, one of the weaker programs in the Big 12, and a team that Nebraska had not lost to at home in thirty-two years. But Nebraska had eight turnovers in that game, including four within Iowa State’s 5-yard line. The Cornhuskers lost, 9–7. “That was the first time that season that I felt incredible pain from a loss,” says Joe. “That night I had flashbacks to the horrible games I’d had as a coach. Then I said, ‘Hold it. I don’t want to feel like this.’ So I challenged myself and asked myself, had I not learned anything in the past forty years that would help me handle this?” Joe says he stayed up most of the night thinking it through, and eventually felt at peace.
The next day he went to the team’s football offices. Pelini walked in, looking like he hadn’t slept at all. “Bo just looked at me and said, ‘I can’t believe that you want to do this,’” says Joe. “I told him I had a thought for him.”
They went to Pelini’s office. Joe explained what he had wrestled with the night before. And he reminded Pelini that 300 colleges had played football that Saturday, 150 of whom had lost. “We’re not trying to cure cancer here, we’re not protecting democracy and capitalism. We’re playing a football game. And, yes, we love the game and we want to win, but it’s just a football game, and once in a while we are going to lose and we’ve got to keep it in perspective. It’s not the end of the world.”
Says Pelini: “Joe just always had great perspective after a tough loss or a big win, and those conversations were really beneficial for me.”
Joe also started to help with recruiting. Although the NCAA didn’t allow him to visit recruits off campus, when potential recruits came to the university, they all met with Joe, who talked to them about his life and told them why he had chosen the program to help reboot his career. “He really helped with these kids,” says Megan Rogers, Nebraska’s director of on-campus recruiting. “A lot of these kids came from rough backgrounds like he did.”
Joe did all of this while living in a room at the Embassy Suites hotel in Lincoln six days a week, away from Amy and their home in Omaha. He drove the fifty miles back to Omaha on Thursdays to have dinner with Amy. On Friday mornings, he went into the TD Ameritrade offices, then drove back to Lincoln in the afternoon, either to catch the charter flight for games that were played away, or to spend the night in the hotel where the entire team stayed for those that were played at home. He was a sixty-year-old man busting his ass. “I was a bit surprised at how hard he went at it,” says Osborne. But Joe knew he had to prove how serious he was.
Nebraska, behind its defense, rebounded from the loss to Iowa State to qualify for the Big 12 Championship game, where they lost by a point to then-number-one-ranked Texas. In the Holiday Bowl, the Cornhuskers crushed Arizona, 33–0.
Joe learned a lot that season. Yes, the game had changed since he last coached: it was faster, especially with increased use of the no-huddle offense; it was more specialized, with each side of the ball having essentially fifteen “starters”; and there was more emphasis on schemes and less on the fundamentals of tackling and blocking.
But he felt the game had not passed him by. “I mainly had to adapt to the faster pace,” says Joe. The specialization wasn’t that hard to master: it was just different players in the same old roles. And the emphasis on schemes? Joe believed that there was an overreliance on them. The fundamentals still mattered. “Out of old fields comes all the new corn,” Chaucer once wrote.
Joe went back out on the job hunt. This time, he came equipped with some heavy-hitting references—Osborne and Pelini. By now, having watched what Joe brought to the game, both on and off the field, Osborne had become a big fan. “I thought he’d make a great college coach,” he says. When he called fellow athletic directors on Joe’s behalf, Osborne broke down Joe’s candidacy to its bare essentials. “I told them that coaching is not rocket science, it’s not some mystical endeavor. If you work hard, are a good communicator, are well organized, and hire a good staff, you can do it. I told them that Joe had all of those ingredients in spades,” he says. “But I didn’t get anywhere with a lot of them.”
As an athletic director himself, albeit one with a little more job security than most, Osborne says he somewhat understood their reticence. “If you go out on a limb and it doesn’t work out, you are really out on a limb,” he says. “Still, someone should have given him a shot.”
Joe did get a little more traction this go-around. He landed an interview at Cornell, exactly the kind of place he believed would be a perfect fit for him. But they ended up hiring a coach who’d been an assistant at Ole Miss. He had interviews with Princeton and Richmond. The former hired an assistant with the Cincinnati Bengals, the latter an assistant from the University of Virginia.
Like Osborne, Joe understood the predicament he put athletic directors in—to a point. “I knew that the typical AD wasn’t going to hire me. I needed to find one who could make a true risk-reward decision and figure out that the risk in hiring me wasn’t that huge and the reward would be great.”
But folks weren’t buying it. Most of them told Joe that his mission was nearly impossible to accomplish. Mike Bohn, the Colorado athletic director, loved Joe and his story, and had a coaching vacancy. But he couldn’t pull the trigger on hiring Joe. Instead he hired an NFL assistant, and floated the idea of Joe’s taking a “head of football operations” position at the school, where he would have responsibilities for both on- and off-the-field sides of the
program (akin to what Bill Parcells had done with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins). Joe wasn’t interested. He wanted to be the one on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, he was attracting a fair amount of national press for his quest to get back into coaching. It was a great story: Man at pinnacle of his career steps down from powerful CEO position to seek college football job a quarter of a century after coaching his last game. ESPN did a few segments on him. Spots aired on CBS, ABC, and CNBC. Sports Illustrated ran a long story on its website. Forbes ran a feature piece (written by this author). “I would get my hopes up every time one of these stories would hit,” says Joe. “I was hoping some athletic director or some college president somewhere would see it and realize how serious and how qualified I was.”
But every time, those hopes were dashed. Nobody wanted to take the chance.
Then in late 2009 Walter O’Hara, a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Co., called Joe to talk to him about the Williams College coaching job, which was vacant. (Though O’Hara didn’t go to Williams, he had fallen in love with the school and was well connected to its influential alumni.) Williams was a Division III school, which Joe had decided early on he didn’t want any part of. Football just wasn’t taken seriously enough at those small schools. Plus the recruiting was brutal: there were no scholarships, and chances were that if you ever did find a really good player, he’d be snapped up by a Division I school before he enrolled.
But O’Hara worked on Joe, selling him on what a special place Williams was. Chuck Johnson, the coach at Ridgewood High School, a perennial New Jersey prep powerhouse, also called Joe to talk up Williams. Johnson sent a lot of his players there and loved the school, which he said actually did take its football seriously. The two men eventually persuaded Joe to pursue it. “I didn’t want to act like I was too good for this,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t have anything.” O’Hara and Johnson made calls to the school on Joe’s behalf. So did Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball and a Williams alum. Joe followed up with a note and a packet of his credentials.
But he never heard from Williams. He followed up again. He never got a response. The message couldn’t have been clearer: not even a Division III school wanted him.
That year, Joe sent his résumé to sixteen different colleges that had head coach job vacancies. Only three of them had the courtesy to respond with a “no, thank you.”
Joe was left completely stymied.
Faced with no job, Joe went back to Osborne and Pelini. He was not quite ready to give up. One more year at Nebraska, he thought, would do the trick. It had to. He had no idea what to do if it didn’t. Amy wasn’t surprised. “Once he puts his mind to something, he doesn’t give up easily,” she says. He went through the entire process of shadow coaching again: the playbook, the note taking, the meetings, the film study, the practices, the games, and the cookie-cutter hotel room. Nebraska had another good year, buoyed again by their stellar defense. Joe ingratiated himself with the team even more that season. After it ended, the players voted to give him the Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp trophy for leadership and service, an annual award usually given to a player or coach who has demonstrated unselfish commitment to the team. It was an unusual gesture to give it to someone who was not even an official coach.
As the season neared its end, Joe started his job search once more, still hopeful, if a bit unnerved by his previous two unsuccessful attempts. Kent State called. So did the University of Buffalo. But they ended up going with younger guys who had more up-to-date credentials. It was all happening again.
Joe grew frustrated. He was accustomed to working hard toward a goal, then actually achieving it. He called friends and vented. “I have exactly what it takes to be a head coach,” he told them in the fall of 2010. “I have the skill sets. I’ve demonstrated myself on the field and in the business world. At this point in my life, I could do whatever the hell I want. But I’ve chosen to become a football coach. I’ve spent four thousand hours at Nebraska. I don’t understand why these folks don’t see that.”
But he never let his frustration show publicly. “What is stunning about him is that he always 100 percent checked his ego at the door,” says Charlie Besser, a TV producer who had followed Joe’s story. “He pitched these guys like his life depended on it and took their ‘I would never hire a guy like you’ in stride. Most CEOs would have had three advance people fly in before the interview and would have made a huge deal about it all. Joe didn’t. He called them himself. He went to them himself. He had this unusual combination of drive and humility, never letting his ego get in the way of his desire to accomplish the goal.”
Despite this ego check, despite the determination and the four thousand hours at Nebraska, Joe still had nothing to show for it. Zero.
He had no idea what to do now. He couldn’t go back to Nebraska again. What was a third year as a volunteer going to do, anyway? He thought he had failed. He thought his dream was now officially dead.
Then in November, he finally got a job offer. It wasn’t from a college. It was from a man named Michael Huyghue (pronounced “hewge”), the commissioner of something called the United Football League.
Chapter Two
Life in the Little Leagues
Joe was originally contacted by the UFL—basically a minor league for the NFL—not as a possible coach but as a potential investor in the Omaha franchise. He politely demurred, telling them he was only interested in being on the sidelines.
Michael Huyghue, a former NFL team executive and sports agent, did some research on Joe and his story and came away intrigued. Maybe this guy was a coaching candidate, he thought. At the time Huyghue had a head coach vacancy with the Virginia Destroyers, based in Virginia Beach. It was called an expansion team, though it was, in reality, the remnants of the Florida franchise, which had been successful on the field but not off it. He flew to Lincoln a few times to meet with Joe. “I grilled him,” says Huyghue. “I asked him what type of offense he planned on running, how he would handle time-outs with two minutes remaining in the game, what type of quarterback he would want.” He was basically making sure Joe had the chops to actually coach.
During one interview, Huyghue brought along Eric Crouch, the former Nebraska star and his former client during Huyghue’s sports agency days, to help suss Joe out. Crouch told Huyghue later that he would “definitely play for that guy.” (No one knew at the time, of course, that Crouch actually would end up playing for that guy.)
Huyghue was sold. He offered Joe the job in November 2010, and Joe accepted. “The UFL was the best opportunity for him,” says Huyghue. “He needed a bridge to cross for his coaching career. That was very hard because most people rely on a set of standard coaching credentials that he didn’t have. For us, we didn’t have any of those obstacles.”
Still, it was an unusual hire, even for the UFL, which had prided itself on the big-name coaches it had been able to attract since its inception. In late 2010, the league boasted an all-star roster of coaches: Jim Fassel, Dennis Green, Jay Gruden (Jon’s brother), Jerry Glanville, and Jeff Jagodzinski.
And now they had a former CEO.
Coaching professional players was something Joe hadn’t even considered when he decided to reclaim his dream. Not that he had a problem with the pro game, but college was clearly where his heart was. He believed his skills fit best there, with the recruiting, the kind of loyalty incumbent upon both the player and the coaching sides in a four-year commitment, the molding of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds into men.
Professional players were more or less already men. They were not wooed the way recruits were. They were designated to teams through the draft or picked up off the free agent market. The pro game, on the personnel side, was a mercenary one, more of a true flesh trade. Pros played for money. And when they got hurt or underperformed, they were swiftly jettisoned and another body was brought in as a replacement. That part of the game didn’t fit Joe’s sensibilities. But Joe was open. He ha
d to be. The truth was, he had nowhere else to go.
There was just one issue about the job that gave him pause: The UFL was losing serious money, to the tune of almost $100 million in its first two seasons. Start-ups, he knew, were precarious entities. When Joe joined the league, he quickly found out that the owners had some financial issues to resolve before the 2011 season could even take place. But he was assured that the problems would be taken care of in time for the start of the season eight months later. Joe didn’t fully realize it at the time, but one of the reasons the UFL had hired him was precisely because of his financial background. They wanted—and needed—his business expertise to help them carry on. The UFL would end up leaning on him for this advice more than he could have ever imagined.
But despite the risks, despite the extra work he would have to take on, Joe gratefully took the job. It was his only chance.
The United Football League was a “league of opportunity” in more than one sense. The opportunity it offered began with the entity of the league itself, which was trying to prove that there was indeed a market in the United States for a high-quality alternative to the $9 billion beast that was the NFL. At the beginning of 2011, the UFL believed it had what was a rare chance to gain some traction and raise its low profile. Because of the expiration of the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, that league looked headed for labor trouble. There was talk of a shortened or even canceled NFL season. With $9 billion at stake, most observers concluded that the chances of that happening were very slim. But it was there. And if it happened, the UFL would be the only professional football in town.
