A State of Affairs From a Rather Open Coach Diaco
By, Matt Schonvisky
Head coach Bob Diaco joined Jason Horowitz and Rick Neuheisel on SiriusXM’s College Sports Nation on June 3rd, for an eye opening interview. Topics ranged from how his transition has gone since taking over the UCONN football program, what the current state of the program is and where he thinks the American Athletic Conference is headed in the landscape of college athletics.
The former Notre Dame defensive coordinator is still getting settled and couldn’t predict just how much goes into starting a program over from scratch.
“No I couldn’t, I really couldn’t, no,” he said convincingly. “It’s unbelievable and you know, you have your mentors and the guys you trust, the guys from your tree and the guys from your past. You’re talking to all these guys and they are guys you worked for, guys you played for. They’re trying to give you some insight, but most of them just chuckle and say, ‘hey, you know every day’s a new day. Call me if you need something on that particular day.’ Each situation’s unique, so I just go from there.”
Being a former successful head coach in college football, Neuheisel told him the most important thing at the start, is to resist making decisions too quickly in a new environment.
“That’s great advice and I appreciate that coach,” Diaco responded. “You know, the stacks don’t seem to leave my desk, I’m kind of just shuffling them around and they’re just all over the place right now. But it’s a great challenge, it’s a lot of fun and the best part is working with the guys, it’s working with the team. I mean that’s the best part of the day.”
Coach D seemed surprised by what was left behind in the program. Guiding a large group of players who have struggled on the field the last three seasons has been difficult at times, certainly a change from what he was accustomed to at Notre Dame.
“One of the many layers here is the guys collectively are sick of losing. I know it sounds cliché, but the fact of the matter is, you can really see it. It’s a visceral, guttural, collective ‘we are sick of losing.’ They’re looking at you, they want to know, ‘tell us what to do!’”
“Now with that said, there is a culture of losing, for whatever reason,” he continued. “I’m not trying to be disparaging about what happened. The recipe that was here has worked at other places and has been great, but it didn’t work here. So where we are right now is you’ve got physically a bunch of guys that all kind of look the same. You look at the freshmen and they don’t look much different than the seniors look. You talk to the seniors and they really don’t act much different than the freshmen act. So there’s a development piece that has been missing.”
“That’s been really in our face, which we are eradicating and they are eradicating themselves through the information we give and really controlling everything on how to train, what to eat and how to think. That whole piece is really, really on us. Even in the moments where we’ve tried to then take the next step, it’s been evident that we’re going too fast. Even this morning, we met as a staff, and I said ‘clearly guys, again, we’re trying to coach winning, but the reality of it is we’ve got to stay focused on not losing. We’ve got to coach losing out of this group before we can move to that next level.’”
One of the main reasons the first-time head coach felt comfortable leaving an established program of the ilk of Notre Dame to come lead a program whose future was portrayed to be in limbo, was athletic director Warde Manuel.
“Oh [Warde being here was] very, very important, the most important,” Diaco stressed. “It’s kind of rare right now, in fact, in college football to have an athletic director who played at a high level. He didn’t just work and he didn’t just administer at a great football school, this guy has played at a high level. So he knows what it feels like, he knows what it looks like and he knows what the infrastructure needs to be like. And really, those pieces are in place, these guys, in terms of the people across the street, from the President on down, they want to have a real good football team.”
When asked about the difficulties of not trying to bring everything that worked so well at Notre Dame to a new place, a new school and a completely new set of players, Diaco brushed it off with the experiences he has had throughout his coaching and playing career.
“It’s a great perspective to have [that you will want to bring it all here] and it’s totally not true for me. I think it’s easy to look back at my experience at ND with Brian Kelly and feel like that was the beginning and the end,” he said. “The fact of the matter is I worked at Western Illinois and won a championship there in the Gateway, in 1-AA football. I had a cup of coffee at Delaware St. I bounced around the MAC at all the directional Michigan schools, Central, Western, and Eastern. I was at the University of Virginia. I was at Cincinnati in the Big East. So I’ve been at a lot of different levels, I’ve been in a lot of different places and I’ve worked for some great guys. I worked for Hayden Fry and I played for Hayden Fry. So I’ve got a lot of different perspectives in terms of how things can be done. ‘Ok, well so what we don’t have the special mat with all the dots on it.’ Just put some tape on the ground and we’ll do it like that. You know there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat.”
Looking back at the end of last season, some positives can be drawn from recovering from an 0-9 start to win the final three games, but the team is focusing on moving as far away from the past as possible.
“Yea, it definitely shows a perseverance from the group and there was some momentum going into the winter that we had from that,” Diaco noted. “But just like we aren’t focused on the bad from the past, we really aren’t focused on the good, either. We are just kind of where we are at today, what this team looks like today and what we need today. So we really aren’t spending a lot of time on the past. It did show some perseverance and grit and stick-to-a-tiveness from the team, so that’s pleasing, but we’re just moving forward right now.”
For those that were concerned about the cupboard being left bare during the last coaching change from Randy Edsall to Paul Pasqualoni, the same does not hold true this time around.
“I’m pleased with the wide receiver group, I believe there’s some real talent there. I think there’s some real talent in the defensive front. There’s about six or seven defensive lineman and a pretty good amount of linebackers that are going to be able to roll in. I believe, frankly, we’ve got a couple of safeties and a senior corner [Byron Jones], who I think is going to be one of the best players in the country. He’s just a very, very talented, very bright, very hard working guy. So there’s a couple of pieces on defense and the wide receivers on offense. And I believe we’ve got a lot of talent at quarterback, I mean there’s four very highly skilled players at that position.”
The UCONN coach recently returned from sunny south Florida to attend the league meetings that were held in late May. Diaco had nothing but adoration for his new conference.
“To me, what I took from it, was that we’re doing big things and we are going to continue to do big things. We had a big two-day convention down there, it was professional and it was first-class all the way. We have championship teams, we’ve got players on our teams and in this league that are the best in the country, some of the best in the world. Our teams are competing and beating the very best. So we are working to position ourselves from a national marketing standpoint to be sure that people are understanding how good our teams are.”
Future out-of-conference scheduling was a big topic of conversation, something UCONN does not need to worry about this season as they host BYU and Boise State right off the bat.
“It was talked about, it was really anyone, anywhere, anytime,” he said. “You know, play in the parking lot. It was let’s do some outside the box things with when we play, where we play, what time of day and what day of the week. We need to make sure we are getting the type of exposure that we’re looking to get.”
With Coach D firmly at the helm, positive exposure should be the last thing anyone should be worried about.
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