John Gagliardi Was The Only Good Coach
Drew Magary
John Gagliardi died last week at the age of 91, and if that name is familiar to you it’s likely because Gagliardi is the winningest college football coach of all time. The fact that Gagliardi won all his games at the NAIA and D3 levels, mostly at tiny St. John’s University in Minnesota, means that his record will be enduring but also strangely peripheral, given the cultural and visible dominance of FBS college football. Gagliardi won 489 football games. He won four national titles. He also, remarkably, had a winning record as an ice hockey coach. He even dabbled in coaching the basketball team at Carroll College in Montana in his early years. And yet, all of those little factoids don’t begin to communicate just how much of an anomaly Gagliardi was.
I remember learning about Gagliardi the first time back in the ‘90s, when he was the subject of a College GameDay human interest story, one of those segments where ESPN would send Steve Cyphers—who was Tom Rinaldi before Tom Rinaldi was Tom Rinaldi—out into the field to do a soft-focus piece of reportage from parcels of the college football landscape that were usually too small or obscure to get regular notice. St. John’s, which has an enrollment of under 2,000 students, very much qualified for such treatment.
Gagliardi was already a legend back then, both for his gaudy record and for the unorthodox manner in which he piled up all those wins. Gagliardi famously had no playbook. He never used a whistle. He never recruited. He insisted on being called “John” instead of coach. He banned tackling from practice (the next time a Gruden or a Harbaugh bitches about being hamstrung by practice restrictions, point them to Gagliardi’s record). He held no meetings. Team stretches were strictly a parody of OTHER team’s stretching routines, with players doing the “Head Shoulders Knees & Toes” dance instead of barking out calf stretches at one another. Every senior on the team was named captain. He famously kept a running
list of Nos to adhere to, one of which—No Slogans—I would like printed out and stapled to Mike Lombardi’s fucking head.
Oh, and he never yelled. That’s the thing that threw me when I first saw that Cyphers report. Cyphers asked Gagliardi about yelling at players and Gagliardi responded, “No no no, that’s insanity.” When I was growing up, all of my coaches yelled. It didn’t even occur to me that they might NOT yell. Yelling wascoaching, as far as I was concerned. And yet here was one of the most decorated men in the sport, laughing at its
uselessness. Calling it outright crazy. It took me a very long time to understand just how right he was about that.
Now, I am rightfully cynical when it comes to coaches. These men are not saints, and the second you treat them as such, they usually go the full Paterno. I’m also leery of the
Wooden-ization of coaches, where they become overly revered for paternalistic shit like insisting on teaching players how to tie their shoes correctly. Gagliardi coached over the span of seven decades and remained squeaky clean, but he was able to flourish in part because, through his reputation for winning, he could stock the St. John’s roster with over 150 players, many of whom were overqualified to play D3 ball. And since he was playing small college ball, he didn’t have to worry about money issues forcing him to compromise his methods or his integrity. He hated losing just as much as any of them. His quirks were, in some ways, a luxury.
Or were they? It’s easy to write off Gagliardi’s style as something that could only work in his specific niche of the CFB universe, and yet a handful of his techniques have been replicated at higher levels with considerable success. Mike Leach famously eschewed
having a formal playbook at Texas Tech, preferring instead to teach plays exclusively in person instead of on paper (as Gagliardi once
noted, players never read the things anyway). NFL teams now routinely shorten practices and limit contact to keep players fresh throughout the season. And every college and pro team, save for the University of Maryland, now allows players to have a water break whenever they need it. In some ways, Gagliardi’s methods were before their time.
But, in many more unfortunate ways, they still are. Gagliardi essentially preached a philosophy of anti-coaching, one that prized self-reliance and self-motivation and abhorred cruelty and authoritarianism. These were not bullshit, repackaged, supposedly out-of-the-box ideas like you find coming out of Silicon Valley. Gagliardi’s philosophy was deeply HUMAN, and deeply trusting. It also happened to be highly effective, so much so that similar techniques are now widely used in parenting books, academic teaching, and other fields.
Where you WON’T find that much of Gagliardi’s hands-off philosophy is in the very sport where he excelled. There are an awful lot of NOs on his list that major football coaches still heartily say YES to, because they’re control freaks, and because there’s money at stake, and because it’s too risky to deviate from the norm, even when the norm is a proven failure. In 2018, it still counts as a mighty leap in progress when a small number of NFL coaches begin to
routinely go for it on fourth down more often as a matter of strategic principle. Doug Pederson went for two when he was down by eight last week and the Fox crew nearly fainted in response to his decision, even though the stats prove that unequivocally that going for two is the correct move there.
And those are just small strategic changes. In the grand scheme of things, coaches like John Gagliardi and Kevin Kelley remain
needlessexceptions, treated as small school novelties by a football culture that is, in every conceivable way, incredibly SLOW. Just so fucking slow, I’m amazed the forward pass ever got legalized. For all of the late night film sessions and all of the tape eating and all of the whizzbang play diagramming that football coaches and administrators do, they remain woefully slow and conservative when it comes to foundational principles of how they deal with people and how they run a football team, which is strange because a lot of football teams suck.
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When I was in high school, I went to football camp, and one of the coaches there was this old dude named Coach Lake. And Coach Lake was nice. He was just the nicest coach you’ve ever met. I don’t think I ever saw him get mad. Every day during stretches, he would call out to everyone “How YOU doin?!” And you had to reply back “OH VERY WELL.” He would crack up an entire camp of aggro teen boys just by repeating “How YOU doin?!” over and over again. And I remember it being odd because it was one of the few times a coach ever made me feel good. Think about it. How often has a football coach made you feel good? I’m not talking about the time they gave you a starting job, or the time they celebrated some sweet-ass victory with you. I’m talking about a football coach making you feel good as a matter of routine. I’m talking about a coach making you feel good every day, and not just because you were talented. How many coaches like that have you known?
This is a nation that is endlessly horny for tough love, and one that sees newer methods as unmanly and stupid even when they’re proven to succeed. John Gagliardi was a huge exception to all of that, and it remains a deep and lasting tragedy that he ever had to be one in the first place. Sometimes coaches are the ones who need the most coaching.
