Do You Love Football?! by Jon Gruden, Vic Carucci Page B

that called for full protection and a short high-percentage throw to our tight end, Rick Aeilts. Phil called the play, Jim made the throw, Rick caught the ball and, after a chip-shot field goal, we had a stunning 16-13 victory.
    It was a terrific sense of accomplishment. You hate to compare anything to winning the Super Bowl, but given the joy that all of us involved with that team felt at that moment it might as well have been. The thrill of victory is all relative.
    As a coach I felt I was on schedule, but I also realized that there had to be more things I could bring to Jim Eustice's game. I still didn't know enough. I knew what we had done at Tennessee the previous year, but I kept hearing that Tennessee was doing more things that season and I was missing out on them. That pissed me off.
    I would see the Volunteers play on TV and I wouldn't recognize a particular motion or formation. I was still teaching 64 Stay Meyer and 64 Stubs and 64 Oscar and 256 Z Shack and Waggle Right Z Wheel. Yet I didn't see Tennessee running those plays anymore. I saw them growing into a new arena and I wasn't a part of it.
    After our season ended Tennessee was playing at Vanderbilt, which was close enough for me to take a drive to see Walt Harris. Once again Walt had me sitting in the press box, helping him just as I had the previous two years. It felt comfortable. It felt right. It felt like I had been reconnected with my past while also plugging into the future. When Walt became head coach at the University of the Pacific in 1989, he saw to it that we could resume working together by offering me a job on his staff.
    "You're going to be my tight ends coach, Jon," Walt said.
    "Tight ends coach?"
    "Yep. It's time for you to learn offensive line play. And the best way for you to do that is to become a tight ends coach." I was crushed.
    "But I want to be the quarterbacks coach, Walt," I said.
    "I'm going to coach the quarterbacks, Jon. I need you to coach the tight ends and learn offensive line play."
    I knew I had to take the job, because it was a chance to once again work with and learn from one of the greatest coaches around. You just don't pass up an opportunity like that. I also was getting a pay increase from $15,000 to $28,000 per year, and the chance to move from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Stockton, California. But all I kept thinking was, This will not look good on my résumé. All my training was to be a quarterbacks coach. My dad told me to be a quarterbacks coach. The quarterback I had just coached at Southwest Missouri State played well. And what do I have to show for it? A job coaching tight ends.
    Things would only get worse from there. We got our asses kicked that year. We were everybody's homecoming game. We opened up at Pittsburgh, at Arizona, at Auburn, and got crushed in all three games. We were bad. We finished 2-10, making it the worst team I was ever on, record-wise. Pacific, which has since dropped football, was a smaller Division I school, usually playing out of its league competitively. Opponents like Fresno State and San Jose State always had much better players.
    The following spring Walt decided to switch from an offense that did a little bit of everything to the run-and-shoot, which was in its heyday at that time. He also switched me to receivers coach, which was fortunate because the tight end is nonexistent in the run-and-shoot. It's wide-open passing, with four or five receivers running routes every play.
    Mouse Davis, who was the offensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions, was the leading run-and-shoot expert at the time, and Walt brought him in-along with some assistant coaches at the University of Houston-to speak to us about the finer points of the scheme. It was unlike anything I had ever learned about offensive football, but I understood why we had to do that at Pacific. We couldn't recruit the big-time, feature-horse tailback.
    We couldn't recruit the big, classic offensive linemen who could come off the