GLENDALE, Ariz. — High up in the stadium’s stands, far from the sophomoric exercise known as Super Bowl media day, sat New York Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo.
Late into the 26th season of his football career, an adult lifetime of dissecting offenses and drawing up schemes had manifested itself in the gray hair that speckled his goatee. As Spagnuolo talked five days before the biggest game of his football life, a line of faces from all the places in his past kept appearing.
Cape Cod. Worcester. Connecticut. Maine. Philadelphia.
He greeted each with that glimmer of memory that comes when the context isn’t exactly right. Such is the world of a coaching lifer when he gets to the Super Bowl — so many people suddenly come back from the deep recesses of the memory.
This year, as Spagnuolo nears 50, everything is different. The anonymity of a life on the climb has worn away. This year Spagnuolo has been tapped, told gently through whispers he is a coach of the moment, chosen by whatever entity makes such determinations.
If all indications are correct, come next Monday he may well get a phone call from the Washington Redskins inquiring about his interest in becoming their head coach.
Predictably, when asked about this possibility, Spagnuolo said he is thinking only of the Super Bowl.
“I am not smart enough to think about two different things like that,” he said. “I make myself ignore (head coaching talk). Right now my focus is on the Giants.”
Of course, he made sure to suggest that if the Redskins were to call, he would consider the possibility.
Two hours earlier, in a different section of the same stands, the New England Patriots’ youthful, enthusiastic offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels, talked about the only professional organization he has known and the only mentor he has had as a professional: Bill Belichick.
For as circuitous a path as Spagnuolo has taken to becoming the hot name at this Super Bowl, McDaniels’ has been straight and swift. This is how it is for the young and fortunate in the NFL. Get to the right team, the right coach, the right system, gain some power, and soon enough they’ll be talking about you as the big new thing, trained by the best, ready to lead.
Like Spagnuolo, McDaniels may too get a phone call from the Redskins next week.
And like Spagnuolo, McDaniels said he is worried only about the game this weekend.
“I’m not going to comment,” he said. “I’m happy with what I’m doing now.”
Of course, he too made sure to suggest that if the Redskins were to call, he would consider the possibility.
McDaniels also was careful to say the chance to be a head coach had to be the right opportunity. Whatever the right opportunity is, he did not elaborate. At 31, on a franchise that goes to the Super Bowl regularly and seems to mint new coaching stars every fall, he can afford to be picky.
Such is the life of a coach on the rise — the chances keep coming.
It’s strange how this business of being the hot new coaching candidate works. Here were two men, on the same level of their organization’s flow charts, giving almost identical answers to the same questions about the same Redskins job, a position that would be the first big chance of their careers, and yet their words had completely different meaning.
McDaniels, handed the keys to one of the most powerful offenses in history, can explore a position in Washington, where the coordinators will have been chosen for him, with the required amount of skepticism. Someone else will call again someday.
Spagnuolo has no such fortune. His quarter of a century of football anonymity has told him this could be his only opportunity. Should the Redskins call, the answer likely has to be yes.
Not that either men would discuss such hypothetical possibilities. So instead they talked about their lives.
As Giants defensive end Michael Strahan rambled below about whatever frivolity was going on in front of him, Spagnuolo remembered the litany of coaches in his life, each delivering his own lesson.
Men like Tom Jackson, the coach at the University of Connecticut who gave him his first defensive coordinator’s job and taught him the value of not working players too hard in August in order to have them ready for November. Or Jim Johnson, the defensive coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles who instilled in him the importance of an aggressive, always attacking defense.
When asked about a favorite place, a cherished memory, he talked about the season he was the defensive coordinator for the Frankfurt Galaxy in NFL Europe, the year it played for the championship in its home stadium. He grew close to his players that spring; they all lived in the same hotel, ate meals together, lived as a group.
“To me, it’s the relationships with the players — that I think I take away from it most,” he said. He smiled wistfully as he recalled all the Eagles players who texted him messages of congratulations when the Giants beat Green Bay in the NFC championship game to make it to the Super Bowl.
McDaniels said he wanted to be a football coach since the age of 5. But he never imagined it would be at this level, at somewhere big. His aspirations were to own the Friday nights in Ohio like his father, Thom.
Of course, that was before he went to John Carroll University in Cleveland, was a teammate of Redskins linebacker London Fletcher and eventually wound up as an assistant to Patriots Coach Bill Belichick.
After Belichick gave McDaniels his first real responsibility — breaking down film for the defensive players — the team’s star cornerback, Lawyer Milloy, pulled him aside and gave him the best advice of his life: As long as he was teaching the players, making them better, they would listen.
The moment it appeared he was talking just to hear himself speak, they would tune him out.
“I have never forgotten that,” McDaniels said.
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