The benefits of quality control

NY Times:

The modern N.F.L. quality-control coach was born in 1990 in San Francisco, where an offensive guru named Mike Holmgren solved two problems with one hire.

Holmgren wanted to transfer the 49ers’ playbook, a series of sketches copied and stapled together, onto a computer. To do this, he hired Jon Gruden, a young coach he wanted on the staff. But before Gruden could celebrate, he called his father.

“What the heck is a quality-control coach?” Gruden said his father asked.

He found out soon enough. Gruden made $500 a month, slept most nights at the office and drew plays on the computer using the program Super Paint 1.0. He fetched coffee, played gofer during practice and studied old tapes of Coach Bill Walsh installing his famous West Coast offense.

Learning an N.F.L. system from the ground level prepared Gruden for his own rise to head coach with Oakland and Tampa Bay. Same as it did for nine head coaches hired in the past four years, including five this season.

These coaches received no recognition for long hours and little pay. But each understood the importance of the position. Because for all the pageantry and complexity of an N.F.L. game, head coaches make decisions based on information provided by their quality-control coaches.

“We worked quadruple everybody else, but we got to feel like a coach,” said Todd Haley, now the coach in Kansas City, who worked in quality control with the Jets. “We had responsibility. It’s the greatest job in football as far as learning.”

Ben Kotwica wanted to coach in the N.F.L. but wondered where his experience would fit. Kotwica served as a captain and played linebacker at Army before beginning a military career in which he guided Apache attack helicopters in Iraq, earned a Bronze Star and flew convoy-security operations escorts for President George W. Bush.

In quality control, where Kotwica worked with the Jets the past two seasons, he found duties tailored to his military training. The job required multitasking, breaking down film up to five weeks in advance, coaching and analyzing data. It required following orders, and producing reports that ran 50 to 200 pages for coaches.

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There is much more.

One of the hardest workers I have ever been associated with was Larry Cutuzzi who had been an assistant coach at Ohio State and later head coach at Delaware. He came to work early and attended utility district board meeting late at night and made pitches for new business during the day. He was very successful in the public finance business but also was involved in civic activities such as bowl games and working with the sports authority in Houston.

I think it is just apart of the business of coaching. He told me of one of the new coaches who was assigned to set up plays for the kick off returns. The guy came back with 20 different plays and the whole staff just looked at him for a minute. Finally someone told him if we need more than five different kickoff return plans, the game is going to be out of hand to begin with.

The work ethic of the quality control coach is on that anyone starting a new job should consider. It works for lawyers as well as coaches.