https://theathletic.com/931267/2019...g-coaching-influences-nick-saban-jim-tressel/
By Chantel Jennings 3h ago
BOULDER, Colo. — They say you never forget the first time Nick Saban yells at you.
Though the memories surrounding the event might fade a bit — perhaps you deserved the yelling and perhaps you did not, or perhaps you choose to remember it as not — the moment itself remains seared in the memory banks of so many coaches and players. That recognition. That look, nay, that glare.
For Colorado coach Mel Tucker, it was only a few weeks into his first year as a coach. He was a Michigan State defensive graduate assistant under Saban. His playing career at Wisconsin had ended two years earlier and for that time he was doing odd jobs and coaching high school sports, but he had decided to get back into college football as a coach. And now, just weeks later, he was about to be baptized by fire.
Now, he acknowledges he can’t pinpoint every detail of that day. But the Spartans were at the indoor practice facility. There was a random recruit who showed up to practice. Saban spotted the recruit, who happened to be standing near Tucker. Saban’s eyes moved from the recruit, to Tucker, back to the recruit, as if to be putting together the context clues that would set off a chain of events that would end with Saban screaming at Tucker for not letting him know that the recruit would be there.
“I just happened to be in the line of fire,” Tucker said. “He ripped me. Like, ‘I didn’t know that guy was here! You don’t get it!’ It was bad.”
Was letting Saban know which recruits would be at which practices a part of Tucker’s job description as defensive GA?
No.
But as he was learning under Saban, your job is everything, your job is the team, your job is to be a step ahead.
He and the fellow GAs that season, which included now-Notre Dame special teams coordinator Brian Polian, would commiserate with one another when their moments finally came, when they became the deserved or undeserved target of a tirade. For Polian, it came slightly after Tucker’s, when Polian delivered Saban an offensive playbook that only had “Coach Saban” written on it. In the next coaches meeting, Saban threw the playbook onto the table and asked who was responsible for putting that together.
Polian acknowledged it was him.
“‘How am I supposed to know that? All it’s got is my name on it,’” Polian recalled Saban saying. “It went on for five minutes about how if you’re going to put a label on a playbook, you better damn sure tell me what the playbook is, what year it is.
“It was, ‘Be exactly right or you’re wrong.’ … That lesson has stayed with me forever.”
There is a benefit in having your first job be one in which the stakes are high and the expectations are higher, where there is no room for mistakes, where if something isn’t 100 percent right, it’s completely wrong.
And Tucker reveled in that kind of responsibility. He wanted to be a step ahead.
Because Tucker knew that if Saban couldn’t trust him to identify a recruit at practice or properly label a playbook, how would Saban ever trust Tucker with the kind of knowledge that could change a game or a season or a career?
“I knew that what I was experiencing was the correct way to do things even though it was really hard and taxing,” Tucker said. “But there was a solid foundation being laid for my entire career.”
For the first eight years of Tucker’s life, he was an only child (now, he’s the oldest of three with almost two decades between himself and his youngest brother). He and his parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment located in a six-story, 100-plus-unit complex in Cleveland, which his father managed. Of the hundreds of tenants, there were only three other children.
The only time he was really ever around other children was at school or while playing sports. Otherwise, he was with adults and was expected to blend in.
“We took him everywhere with us,” Tucker’s father, Mel Sr., said. “He would just make his own friends.”
And in the complex, those friends were often 40 years his senior. So to make friends with them, he stepped on their turf.
As a very young child, Tucker learned to play backgammon and would play with other tenants in the building. When his dad taught him how to play chess, he started playing that with tenants 40 years his senior, too.
People got so accustomed to him being around that they rarely looked at him as a child and really didn’t censor themselves around him. But because of his lack of life experience (what is a 7-year-old going to add to a backgammon conversation, really?), he learned to observe the way people interacted with one another.
“When you’re the only child for that long … you’re around a lot of adults all the time,” Tucker said. “You learn to be a really good listener when you’re in those settings because you’re not doing a lot of talking.”
And Tucker learned that he gained a lot of knowledge by just observing. He was amazed at how much he could pick up by just watching.
Starting with his first Saban stint at Michigan State (he’d eventually coach with him at LSU and Alabama), there was a Saban-ism that stuck with Tucker: Don’t criticize what you don’t understand.
So as a coach, he isn’t quick to criticize. He takes time to understand, to read. He asks questions. And though he ultimately makes the final decision, he isn’t about to cut anyone short anytime soon.
“I learn something new every day from the people I work with so I’m always looking for an edge. Not necessarily wholesale changes, but at this level, even a slight change can make a huge difference.”
In early April, a heavy box arrived on Tucker’s doorstep in Boulder from Amazon. Inside were six copies of Trevor Noah’s book “Born A Crime.”
Tucker has never been a part of a book club, but he decided upon his arrival to Boulder that he would start one. He invited a team doctor, associate athletic director Lance Carl, athletic director Rick George, and a few others to join a book club run by Tucker starting during this offseason’s dead period for recruiting.
Noah’s book is a memoir of his childhood and growing up as a biracial child during apartheid in South Africa. Intentionally, Tucker chose this book because it wasn’t related to football.
“My experience has been that anytime I read something or I hear something that is unrelated to football or sports, there is some carryover in some way, shape or form that I can relate to, whether it’s something I’m experiencing in the workplace or my personal life,” Tucker said.
He has done something remotely similar only once before, when he was a secondary coach and co-defensive coordinator at Ohio State from 2001-04. Then-coach Jim Tressel would always assign a book to the entire team to read ahead of fall camp. Typically, the books focused on themes of leadership or self-improvement. Different groups would be tasked with presenting parts of the book to the entire team and there would be discussion and learnings based on what they had read.
“Some coaches were like, ‘This has nothing to do with football,’” Tressel said. “(Tucker) was the opposite. It made perfect sense to him that you would go out and seek information.”
And for Tucker, he can find information anywhere and from any person, be it a book about apartheid or a staffer in the office.
When he initially met the Colorado team, he asked them what pieces of the program they wanted to see changed, big or small. There were obvious changes that needed to be made to the team’s performance, but there were smaller ones, too.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s an intern, if it’s somebody he trusts, then he values their opinion,” defensive coordinator Tyson Summers said. “It’s not that he’s trying to make someone feel better about themselves, it’s that he truly values your opinion once he trusts you. And I think that’s a remarkable thing because some coaches are so into what they know. … He is always willing to search for more information, hear more opinions and ask, ‘Is there a better way of doing this?’”
Quarterback Steven Montez saw a better way to go about feeding players and went to Tucker’s office to ask what could be done about the football players’ food.
“They were trying to do too much in the kitchen with the quinoa and the super healthy foods,” Montez said. “We were like, ‘Um, rice? Chicken breast? Maybe some burgers now and then?”
Later, Tucker’s director of recruiting presented him with reasons for why the social media channels needed to be rebranded. They have been. His administrative assistant wanted to change the way birthdays were celebrated, thinking there might be a way to make athletes feel more special. Tucker took a meeting for it.
A younger employee in the office suggested getting an office dog for group morale. Tucker, who has two dogs of his own, is actually considering it.
It all relates back to the fact he needs to be able to trust that those around him not only do their jobs well, but also that they know their jobs even better. He wants this kind of feedback because, if he’s being honest, he knows that there are people around him who know far more about social media presences, how dogs improve office morale, and yes, even birthday celebrations.
“If you don’t create an environment and culture where people can have significant, valuable input then I don’t think you’ll have a good organization,” Tucker said. “You’ll have bobbleheads sitting there nodding. I’ll never see my blind spots. … Everyone is here because they bring something to the table.”
When Tucker started playing Little League baseball in Cleveland, his father — a former college baseball player at Toledo — was instantly pegged as a potential coach. As Mel Sr. got involved, he learned that coaches would be expected to draft their own teams. Each parent would get their own child, and then they’d be given a list of every other potential players rated on a scale of 1 to 10.
Some parent coaches would try to stack their teams full of 8s, 9s and 10s.
Not Mel Sr.
He would pick 3s and 2s, a few middle-of-the-road players. And when most Little League parents avoided picking the few girls enrolled in Little League, he would gladly put them on his team.
“The concept of stacking a team was never something I thought about because it was something my dad never talked about,” Tucker said. “It was ‘OK, this is our team.’ ”
But the message stayed with him: Having room to grow was good. And every season, the baseball team finished the season better than it started.
And when Tucker took over the Colorado team, there was a pride in Mel Sr. — his son was appreciating a place that had room to grow, he was taking a program that wasn’t stacked with 8s, 9s and 10s.
He thought of his own recruiting class, Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez’s first. How the team went 1-10 his freshman year. He remembered, even in the midst of that miserable season, how Alvarez called Wisconsin a “sleeping giant.”
And as Tucker put together his on- and off-field staff, he thought of the lessons from his own early years — whom could he trust to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks? To make sure all the playbooks were properly labeled? He had spent years observing coaches and how they had gone about their business, never criticizing them for what he didn’t understand — instead, learning more until he understood.
“There is a challenge of bringing it back to prominence, building something, not just inheriting a program that’s already built,” Tucker said. “That’s why I’m excited. I know that once we get this program turned around in the right direction, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of gratification.”
By Chantel Jennings 3h ago
BOULDER, Colo. — They say you never forget the first time Nick Saban yells at you.
Though the memories surrounding the event might fade a bit — perhaps you deserved the yelling and perhaps you did not, or perhaps you choose to remember it as not — the moment itself remains seared in the memory banks of so many coaches and players. That recognition. That look, nay, that glare.
For Colorado coach Mel Tucker, it was only a few weeks into his first year as a coach. He was a Michigan State defensive graduate assistant under Saban. His playing career at Wisconsin had ended two years earlier and for that time he was doing odd jobs and coaching high school sports, but he had decided to get back into college football as a coach. And now, just weeks later, he was about to be baptized by fire.
Now, he acknowledges he can’t pinpoint every detail of that day. But the Spartans were at the indoor practice facility. There was a random recruit who showed up to practice. Saban spotted the recruit, who happened to be standing near Tucker. Saban’s eyes moved from the recruit, to Tucker, back to the recruit, as if to be putting together the context clues that would set off a chain of events that would end with Saban screaming at Tucker for not letting him know that the recruit would be there.
“I just happened to be in the line of fire,” Tucker said. “He ripped me. Like, ‘I didn’t know that guy was here! You don’t get it!’ It was bad.”
Was letting Saban know which recruits would be at which practices a part of Tucker’s job description as defensive GA?
No.
But as he was learning under Saban, your job is everything, your job is the team, your job is to be a step ahead.
He and the fellow GAs that season, which included now-Notre Dame special teams coordinator Brian Polian, would commiserate with one another when their moments finally came, when they became the deserved or undeserved target of a tirade. For Polian, it came slightly after Tucker’s, when Polian delivered Saban an offensive playbook that only had “Coach Saban” written on it. In the next coaches meeting, Saban threw the playbook onto the table and asked who was responsible for putting that together.
Polian acknowledged it was him.
“‘How am I supposed to know that? All it’s got is my name on it,’” Polian recalled Saban saying. “It went on for five minutes about how if you’re going to put a label on a playbook, you better damn sure tell me what the playbook is, what year it is.
“It was, ‘Be exactly right or you’re wrong.’ … That lesson has stayed with me forever.”
There is a benefit in having your first job be one in which the stakes are high and the expectations are higher, where there is no room for mistakes, where if something isn’t 100 percent right, it’s completely wrong.
And Tucker reveled in that kind of responsibility. He wanted to be a step ahead.
Because Tucker knew that if Saban couldn’t trust him to identify a recruit at practice or properly label a playbook, how would Saban ever trust Tucker with the kind of knowledge that could change a game or a season or a career?
“I knew that what I was experiencing was the correct way to do things even though it was really hard and taxing,” Tucker said. “But there was a solid foundation being laid for my entire career.”
For the first eight years of Tucker’s life, he was an only child (now, he’s the oldest of three with almost two decades between himself and his youngest brother). He and his parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment located in a six-story, 100-plus-unit complex in Cleveland, which his father managed. Of the hundreds of tenants, there were only three other children.
The only time he was really ever around other children was at school or while playing sports. Otherwise, he was with adults and was expected to blend in.
“We took him everywhere with us,” Tucker’s father, Mel Sr., said. “He would just make his own friends.”
And in the complex, those friends were often 40 years his senior. So to make friends with them, he stepped on their turf.
As a very young child, Tucker learned to play backgammon and would play with other tenants in the building. When his dad taught him how to play chess, he started playing that with tenants 40 years his senior, too.
People got so accustomed to him being around that they rarely looked at him as a child and really didn’t censor themselves around him. But because of his lack of life experience (what is a 7-year-old going to add to a backgammon conversation, really?), he learned to observe the way people interacted with one another.
“When you’re the only child for that long … you’re around a lot of adults all the time,” Tucker said. “You learn to be a really good listener when you’re in those settings because you’re not doing a lot of talking.”
And Tucker learned that he gained a lot of knowledge by just observing. He was amazed at how much he could pick up by just watching.
Starting with his first Saban stint at Michigan State (he’d eventually coach with him at LSU and Alabama), there was a Saban-ism that stuck with Tucker: Don’t criticize what you don’t understand.
So as a coach, he isn’t quick to criticize. He takes time to understand, to read. He asks questions. And though he ultimately makes the final decision, he isn’t about to cut anyone short anytime soon.
“I learn something new every day from the people I work with so I’m always looking for an edge. Not necessarily wholesale changes, but at this level, even a slight change can make a huge difference.”
In early April, a heavy box arrived on Tucker’s doorstep in Boulder from Amazon. Inside were six copies of Trevor Noah’s book “Born A Crime.”
Tucker has never been a part of a book club, but he decided upon his arrival to Boulder that he would start one. He invited a team doctor, associate athletic director Lance Carl, athletic director Rick George, and a few others to join a book club run by Tucker starting during this offseason’s dead period for recruiting.
Noah’s book is a memoir of his childhood and growing up as a biracial child during apartheid in South Africa. Intentionally, Tucker chose this book because it wasn’t related to football.
“My experience has been that anytime I read something or I hear something that is unrelated to football or sports, there is some carryover in some way, shape or form that I can relate to, whether it’s something I’m experiencing in the workplace or my personal life,” Tucker said.
He has done something remotely similar only once before, when he was a secondary coach and co-defensive coordinator at Ohio State from 2001-04. Then-coach Jim Tressel would always assign a book to the entire team to read ahead of fall camp. Typically, the books focused on themes of leadership or self-improvement. Different groups would be tasked with presenting parts of the book to the entire team and there would be discussion and learnings based on what they had read.
“Some coaches were like, ‘This has nothing to do with football,’” Tressel said. “(Tucker) was the opposite. It made perfect sense to him that you would go out and seek information.”
And for Tucker, he can find information anywhere and from any person, be it a book about apartheid or a staffer in the office.
When he initially met the Colorado team, he asked them what pieces of the program they wanted to see changed, big or small. There were obvious changes that needed to be made to the team’s performance, but there were smaller ones, too.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s an intern, if it’s somebody he trusts, then he values their opinion,” defensive coordinator Tyson Summers said. “It’s not that he’s trying to make someone feel better about themselves, it’s that he truly values your opinion once he trusts you. And I think that’s a remarkable thing because some coaches are so into what they know. … He is always willing to search for more information, hear more opinions and ask, ‘Is there a better way of doing this?’”
Quarterback Steven Montez saw a better way to go about feeding players and went to Tucker’s office to ask what could be done about the football players’ food.
“They were trying to do too much in the kitchen with the quinoa and the super healthy foods,” Montez said. “We were like, ‘Um, rice? Chicken breast? Maybe some burgers now and then?”
Later, Tucker’s director of recruiting presented him with reasons for why the social media channels needed to be rebranded. They have been. His administrative assistant wanted to change the way birthdays were celebrated, thinking there might be a way to make athletes feel more special. Tucker took a meeting for it.
A younger employee in the office suggested getting an office dog for group morale. Tucker, who has two dogs of his own, is actually considering it.
It all relates back to the fact he needs to be able to trust that those around him not only do their jobs well, but also that they know their jobs even better. He wants this kind of feedback because, if he’s being honest, he knows that there are people around him who know far more about social media presences, how dogs improve office morale, and yes, even birthday celebrations.
“If you don’t create an environment and culture where people can have significant, valuable input then I don’t think you’ll have a good organization,” Tucker said. “You’ll have bobbleheads sitting there nodding. I’ll never see my blind spots. … Everyone is here because they bring something to the table.”
When Tucker started playing Little League baseball in Cleveland, his father — a former college baseball player at Toledo — was instantly pegged as a potential coach. As Mel Sr. got involved, he learned that coaches would be expected to draft their own teams. Each parent would get their own child, and then they’d be given a list of every other potential players rated on a scale of 1 to 10.
Some parent coaches would try to stack their teams full of 8s, 9s and 10s.
Not Mel Sr.
He would pick 3s and 2s, a few middle-of-the-road players. And when most Little League parents avoided picking the few girls enrolled in Little League, he would gladly put them on his team.
“The concept of stacking a team was never something I thought about because it was something my dad never talked about,” Tucker said. “It was ‘OK, this is our team.’ ”
But the message stayed with him: Having room to grow was good. And every season, the baseball team finished the season better than it started.
And when Tucker took over the Colorado team, there was a pride in Mel Sr. — his son was appreciating a place that had room to grow, he was taking a program that wasn’t stacked with 8s, 9s and 10s.
He thought of his own recruiting class, Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez’s first. How the team went 1-10 his freshman year. He remembered, even in the midst of that miserable season, how Alvarez called Wisconsin a “sleeping giant.”
And as Tucker put together his on- and off-field staff, he thought of the lessons from his own early years — whom could he trust to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks? To make sure all the playbooks were properly labeled? He had spent years observing coaches and how they had gone about their business, never criticizing them for what he didn’t understand — instead, learning more until he understood.
“There is a challenge of bringing it back to prominence, building something, not just inheriting a program that’s already built,” Tucker said. “That’s why I’m excited. I know that once we get this program turned around in the right direction, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of gratification.”
