Whoo-whoo. As a St. John's grad, and a former member of Gagliardi's Theory of Football class, I feel compelled to weigh in. First, he probably is overexposed, as overexposed as a Division III coach can be. It's humorous when other St. John's people sometimes complain about the media perhaps not giving them enough coverage. The coverage they receive locally and in national publications is greater than every other D3 program combined, and that's with Mount Union in the mix.
But again, overexposed in this case means a story in the Times or washington Post every four or five years. The last time the Times wrote about him, I think, was when he broke the record for wins. That was 2003. Now he's coaching his 600th game. It's a decent hook to revisit the story.
As for whether it would work, I actually think it would work better at a higher level. Yes, better. The more talented the players, the better the system would work. St. john's gets great D3 players from high school. That allows them to not spend time tackling or doing stupid drills. They run plays in practice. That's it. Defensively, they teach the players where to be. They don't worry about tacking in practice or playing crunch or doing ridiculous bear crawl drills because those have nothing to do with getting first downs, or preventing them. They assume people can tackle.
So at a higher level - D1 or the pros - the players would obviously be even better. They know how to tackle. So what good does it to do pound each other all week? Why not just run plays and work on the other team's plays and teach players where to be?
If being physical in practice is so important - and crossthreading with overdone stories, how about the ones where a new coach puts the guys in pads and they beat each other up, proving their toughness! Yeah! - then why do D1 or NFL coaches ever go in just shoulder pads? Shouldn't they be pounding each other all week? For 16 weeks, and the playoffs? Why do they let up toward the end of the season?
Or do they just feel the need to be physical one day or two days of the week, because every one else does it and it's always been done that way? That's Gagliardi's thing. Why do you have to do what's always been done?
and every year, St. John's has one of the best D3 defenses in the country - they're the only team to hold Mount to 10 or less points in about 20 years. And they've done it twice - and one of the best tackling teams. Offensively, St. John's has a small playbook. Actually they don't even have a playbook, just cards. Ok that might not work. But the small playbook, running few plays? They do that because they practice the ones they are good at over and over and over. Why have 150 plays and run 40 of them pretty well, when you can work on 50 and run all of them really well?
Who else does that? Oh, Peyton Manning and the Colts. From his interview with Dan Patrick:
When it comes down to it, [the Colts are] trying to be good at a certain number of plays, and we're not afraid to run the same play over and over and over again. You've got to be careful trying to run 60 different plays in a game and being pretty good at most of them, as opposed to being great at this core group of plays.
Manning might have plagiarized that quote from Gagliardi, who's been saying the same thing for literally 50 years.
Why can other "systems" work, but Gagliardi's wouldn't, when Gagliardi's makes more sense than just about any of them? Discipline issues? Maybe. I don't know. But Gagliardi's teams are plenty disciplined and they do it without running ridiculous wind sprints as punishment after practice.
Again, at a lower level, the system would be harder to operate, because you would have to spend time on things like teaching guys how to tackle. But the better the player, the better it would work.
For what it's worth, at the highest class of Minnesota state football, Eden Prairie is the dominant program, winning five or six state titles in the last decade (they usually beat Cretin-Derham Hall, including when Joe Mauer was there and two years ago with Michael Floyd. But Eden Prairie is so much better coached). The coach is Mike Grant. Bud's kid. And a former player under Gagliardi and assistant under him. he uses the same methods, with a bit more contact early in the season. He says Gagliardi has more of an influence on his coaching style than his own dad.
Again, why wouldn't the style work at a higher level? Boom, you prove the point. Gagliardi always says they don't want converts, they don't need other people to think their way works. But why do you insist that it has to be taught in a brutal way, even if it is a brutal game? It's not about proving manhood, it's about scoring points and preventing the other team from doing that. Would Auburn fans care if their team was winning 10 games every year, but wasn't doing hitting drills in practice? Really? They'd fell less manly?
The funniest part, though, is that you think the stories are for the Upper West Side liberals, which sort of implies Gagliardi himself must be some hippy-dippy liberal tree-hugger. The same guy who spoke in support of W at a rally before the 2004 election.
It's amusing when people from bigger schools watch a St. John's game and at first are usually convinced, "These wacky ways are cute but they'd never work where real men play!" Chris Spielman did the color for the 2003 title game and kept talking about how he couldn't have played with not tackling in practice. he "needed that" to be a great player. No you didn't, Chris. You were taught that you did, but you didn't. And he kept expressing skepticism. Until the fourth quarter, when St. John's had held Mount to 6 points - they were averaging 50 - and didn't miss a tackle all game.
More St. John's trivia: Tom Burnett of United 93 fame played at St. John's, though didn't do much there, and current security advisor to Obama, Denis McDonough, was a really good safety in the 1990s.
St. John's fanboy rant over.
