Despite appearances, the guy trudging off the practice field is not Tom Hanks two weeks into his island stay on "Cast Away."
The guy's face was a combination of weathered tan and thick whiskers. Sweat saturated his gray T-shirt and khaki shorts. The insulin pump attached to his belt, to help combat his diabetes, was the only part of him that didn't appear slightly feral.
Art Valero was ass deep in August two-a-days and looked it.
"I don't see anybody but the players at this time of year," said the assistant head coach/offensive line coach of the Louisville Cardinals, with surprising mirth. "My family doesn't see me, so who is there to shave for?"
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Every head coach who is able to dominate has had coordinators and assistant coaches that have helped put systems together, helped recruit, and done things that the head coach gets a lot of credit for and gets paid a lot of money to do.
Kirk's complete analysis |
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This is the life of the assistant coach.
It's a life where low-profile substance pancakes high-profile style. Where the perks are fewer than the head man's, the hours longer and the contracts shorter. Where most successful assistants put in the relatively anonymous spade work that builds championship teams -- and the rest keep their realtor on speed dial.
The head coach is the face of the program, and the face of the program needs to remain presentable to the public. The CEO can't slum through two-a-days unkempt and unshaven, not with kickoff luncheons and media days and television appearances to make.
If the head coach is the program's face, the assistants are the backbone.
The assistant is the guy who is delegated to be at the stadium at dawn if one of his position players screws up and is ordered to run the steps. The assistant is the guy who gets fired when heat is applied to the head coach after a disappointing season to "shake things up." The assistant is the guy playing golf at the muni, because the head coach got the comp membership at the country club.
|  | | Defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews begins his 18th season at FSU. |
The backbone is made up of guys like Mickey Andrews, defensive coordinator at Florida State. Bobby Bowden cracks the folksy one-liners and gets the seven-figure income, while Andrews is given wide autonomy to instill the fire in a defense that has consistently ranked near the top nationally during FSU's glory run.
"That man wants to win if it was checkers," said former Seminoles offensive coordinator Mark Richt. "He wants to win every drill. And that attitude bleeds over to his players."
Guys like Joe Lee Dunn, defensive coordinator at Mississippi State. Jackie Sherrill might get something permanent named after him in Starkville as the Bulldogs' alltime winningest coach -- but Dunn's attack-oriented defenses have been State's calling card while averaging better than eight wins over the past four seasons.
And guys like Valero, whose three years with John L. Smith in Louisville have been quietly spectacular. Valero has taken a modestly recruited selection of offensive linemen and paved the way for two 1,000-yard rushers (Leroy Collins and Frank Moreau). His lines have also kept quarterbacks Chris Redman and Dave Ragone upright long enough to throw for 10,310 yards in three seasons.
Those three have combined to coach 84 years in college football, and there are many others around the nation like them. Guys who have turned down Division I head-coaching jobs -- in large part because they'd rather win games as an assistant than go to a dead-end job and lose as the boss. But all three hope that their opportunity at a quality program materializes someday.
"I would love to have another shot at it," said Dunn, who was 4-7 as the interim coach at Mississippi in 1994. "Hopefully I'll get it. But I want to have a chance to win.
"I could live the rest of my life here in Starkville and be happy as a pig in slop, as they say."
Said Andrews, a former head coach at Livingston College and North Alabama in the 1970s: "I don't handle losing real well. I just have a hard time with it. To be a head coach at a place where you work your fanny off to maybe break even, maybe go to a bowl once in a while, is not that appealing to me. Knowing you're working with great people and have a chance to win every Saturday, that's pretty special."
Valero had the chance to succeed Smith when he left Utah State for Louisville in November 1997, but declined. He then was offered the head job at San Jose State last winter but passed on that one as well, which eventually went to Arkansas recruiting coordinator Fitz Hill.
"The administration's got to give you a 70 percent chance of winning," Valero said. "I'm not dying to take a head coaching job bad enough to take any opportunity. I like my job. I've got a good job."
Although assistant coaches are still relatively unbothered in the grocery store, their faces have become much more prominent in recent years.
Televised games are awash in cut-aways to the coordinators, and analysts mention them several times each telecast. Their names appear in print more often, and their work is more celebrated and more villified than ever. (Norm Chow is creating more buzz than head coach Pete Carroll at USC, and new defensive coordinator Don Lindsey is all the talk at Mississippi.)
Some even have their own radio shows, exposing coordinators to the domain formerly reserved for the head coach: widespread public second-guessing.
Andrews and a former FSU offensive coordinator once had a call-in show in the mid-1980s, but it was almost immediately after games. Bad idea. Pickled fans and pumped-up coaches were both too emotionally jagged.
"There's probably some things that were asked that didn't need to be asked," Andrews said. "And probably some responses that didn't need to be aired, either."
When Virgil from Dogpatch is on Line One wanting to know what kind of brain-lock spasm resulted in a pass on fourth and one -- that's the one time when it's better to be the low-profile assistant than the big-money boss.
Pat Forde covers college football for the Louisville Courier-Journal.
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