Interesting MMQB read on Greg Schiano prepping for his next job

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Schiano’s main job, however, has been preparing for his next interview. He has traveled everywhere from Columbus to Tuscaloosa to Foxboro, refining how he’d run a college program or NFL franchise. He says only about 15 percent of what he has looked at is related to X’s and O’s, which includes weekly pre-dawn film sessions with Jon Gruden. Instead, he is focused on organizational and macro topics such as, “Can I be just as demanding of people, but make their quality of life better?”

Schiano hopes to return to football in 2015, as a collegiate or NFL head coach. In the next two months, an athletic director or NFL owner is going to have to make a decision about him. Is he the hard-nosed disciplinarian who resuscitated Rutgers from a century of wretched football, enjoying so much success that he turned down head coaching jobs at Miami and Michigan? (He also declined the chance to talk to Tennessee when Derek Dooley took the Vols job in 2010.) Or is he the NFL coach who earned raves for instilling discipline during his debut 7-9 season before free-falling to 4-12 and finding himself unemployed?

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Schiano also spent a week behind the scenes with Bill Belichick, a mentor and close friend. Schiano’s takeaway from New England was the culture Belichick created, one in which everyone sees football from the “Patriot viewpoint.” Schiano spends time refining such elements as red zone defensive philosophy and teaching. His notes don’t contain specific plays like “Y24 Zebra” but rather ideas and ideals that he calls a “football curriculum.”

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Schiano visited Alabama, where his friend and former assistant Mario Cristobal is the offensive line coach and assistant head coach. He came away impressed with the synchronization of Nick Saban’s program, not to mention the facilities in Tuscaloosa. Schiano found himself sneaking cell phone pictures of lockers, noting their size as fodder for his next stop. When Alabama players left the practice field, they all had customized smoothies waiting for them, high-calorie for guys trying to gain weight and low-calorie for those needing to drop pounds. “Everything is systematized,” he says, “from nutrition to academic support.”

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There are smaller things Schiano picked up along the way. He loved how Princeton’s defensive meeting rooms all had footballs attached to springs and nailed to the walls. When defensive players walk into the room, they whack the ball as a way to establish a culture of forcing turnovers. “Definitely stealing that,” Schiano says, proudly showing a picture of the set-up on his phone. Schiano liked some of the corporate approaches Al Golden used at Miami, specifically using staff e-mails for things like distributing cut-ups.

Schiano visited Arkansas, where a former assistant, Robb Smith, is defensive coordinator. He admired the way Bret Bielema’s energy rippled through the program and left Fayetteville with a macro takeaway. “I’ve known Bret for a lot of years, and just the way he approaches everything, he enjoys himself,” Schiano says. “That’s harder for me to do. I’m not that freewheeling, but I can appreciate that in a guy. I need to do that more.”

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