Laying the Foundation

The game of football is about defeating the man in front of you. Everything else plays out from there.

— Former De La Salle head coach Bob Ladouceur

I believe football is in my DNA. I understood the game from the get-go, even as a small child. I can remember back to my days growing up in suburban Detroit, Michigan, wearing a plastic Lions helmet and shoulder pads and running around the front lawn playing football. I loved it. I never lost that passion for it. In a lot of ways, I felt I was meant to do this.

I have tried to figure out why that was true for me. There were two subjects in high school that I really excelled at. One was physics, and one was geometry. The game is about physics and geometry, and I truly believe that helped and aided me throughout all those years. The only math class I ever excelled in in high school was geometry. It was easy for me. In every other mass class, I struggled. Geometry was the only science class I excelled in was physics. I just understood leverage, how to move mass, and things like that. I really think there's a strong connection between those two subjects and the game of football.

I have always been able to see where defenses are vulnerable and how you can layer a defense. I've always understood the angles and steps required to properly execute a trap block, when a quarterback should throw and at what angle, and the physics and body position involved to move a guy bigger than you.

Know the Game

I was fortunate to have great high school coaches in Fred Houston and Pete Villa. I had great college coaches in Daryll Rogers and Dick Mannini. These guys taught the game well. I understood the game. I understood how the pieces fit together. I wasn't a great player in college. I was a good player in high school and in college I was a role guy. I played special teams. I played offense until I had two knee surgeries, and then they switched me to defense. I was willing to make the transition. I backed up guys and I learned. So at 24 when they put me in charge of this program, I thought, I know this game. I can teach these kids something.

That's what carried me when I started. I had a good working knowledge of the game and I could tell what was working, what wasn't, why our defensive line was playing poorly, why our offensive line was blocking so well, why our receivers could or could not run a good route. I understood it all. I had no experience, but that first year in 1979, those kids looked at me and said, "This guy knows something about this game." They felt like I could teach them something and they liked that. They trusted me and gave me the benefit of the doubt as I fumbled through my early years.

Because I was a running back before being a defensive back at San Jose State, I knew the running back and quarterback positions. I knew all the defensive back positions and I knew some stuff about linebackers. I was less sure about the offensive and defensive lines, the receivers, and special teams, but as I went on, I schooled myself until I felt like I could coach every position on the field.

We had a great offensive line coach in Steve Alexakos, and the technique we currently use was his idea. He left in 1992 to coach at San Jose State. I loved what he was doing, so before I took over his spot as offensive line coach, I worked with him for two weeks. I knew a lot about what he was doing after working with him for three years and calling the offense and watching his guys work, but I wanted to know the minutiae and the methodology of what he was teaching. He was a good teacher. He taught me everything, and for the next 10 years, I personally coached the offensive line. I felt really shaky going into it that first year, but I got used to it, and that stretch of coaching was the most rewarding and most fun I ever had. A head coach should be able to step in for any position coach, and that group should not miss a beat.

There's an adage that Alexakos used: you have to inspect what you expect. You have to know when things are breaking down and why they're breaking down if you're a head coach. You have to know it all down to the minute details. A good coach has to know exactly what he's looking for and what his expectations are. There's a lot kids don't know, but they do know whether you know the game. You can't fake it. You can't fool them. They will respect you and listen to you if you know what you're talking about and they appreciate it most when you work with them to correct their bad habits and reinforce their positive ones. They think, This guy wants me to be a better player and he's working with me to do it. I'll give him the effort.

The Game Remains the Same

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the game is always the same. It will never change. No matter what offense you're running, it's always going to boil down to old-school building blocks. Can you block? Can you tackle? Can you run? Can you get off blocks? Can you get your guys in the right spots?

That's exactly what we work on. We pour all our energy into technique and developing our players. We teach our kids how to get off blocks every day in practice. I tell my linebackers, "I never want to hear you say you got blocked. They are going to send guys to block you. The key is to defeat that block and make the hit. You're an inside linebacker. That's your job. Defeat the block and make the tackle."

We teach them how to do that. There's a technique to it. We drill it every day. Strike, get off your block, fill your gap. If the ball goes the other way, cross his face, gap exchange back the other way. Whatever you do, don't run around the block. Then we watch film on Saturday and say, "Your head was on the wrong side when that guy was blocking you. Now you're cut off. You just wrecked the integrity of the defense. Now that tackle has a free release into our linebacker" or "This is why you got cut off, you knucklehead, you stepped with the wrong foot." Those are the things we concentrate on. Those are the things we're constantly correcting. The stuff we do is simple. Nothing we do is complex. We're high school football coaches, but our emphasis is on technique.

Everybody wants to be a success. I've never heard anyone say he or she wants to be a failure. No matter what their definition of success might be — and it's different for everybody — everybody wants to be successful. People often ask me the secret to my success. I'm always baffled by that because there is no secret. I tell that to our players: "We're going to go out and play this big game tomorrow night. We can't sprinkle you with fairy dust. This is going to be your gig. You have to earn it and work for it."

For us, for me, our foundation for success is grueling, nose-to-the-grindstone, monotonous, tedious work and trying to get the fundamentals and the foundation right. It...