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Home > Terence Moore > Archives > 2008 > September > 16
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Johnson’s fire misunderstood
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maybe it’s my old-school background, filled with screamers from my high school days as a football player through my years as a sports journalist.
Anyway, give me a fiery coach or manager in most situations. Give me Paul Johnson, the consummate perfectionist, who is often yelling and frowning at his Georgia Tech players when he isn’t stomping or snarling.
To say this veteran college football coach, who is in his first season with the rapidly improving Yellow Jackets at 2-1, is an inferno on the sidelines is to say veteran college basketball coach Bobby Knight got excited at times. “Well, you know, I don’t think I’m Bobby Knight,” Johnson said softly on Tuesday at the Edge Center before his weekly news conference. With apologies to Johnson, he is Bobby Knight in so many ways, and that’s a compliment. Consider, for instance, that Knight was Woody Hayes, Billy Martin, Frank Robinson, George O’Leary and Lou Holtz.
I know, because I dealt with those rather animated coaches and managers up close and personal through the decades. Give or take a Hayes swinging at the head of an opposing player or a Knight wrapping both hands around somebody’s neck, there usually was a hidden, and in their mind, logical reason for their explosions.
The same goes for Johnson, who has spent his first games with the Jackets greeting mistakes by players with one-on-one conferences on the spot.
And loudly.
“I talk to our guys all the time that we’re going to coach you aggressively, and we’re going to coach you hard, but don’t take it personally,” said Johnson, sounding like Knight, Hayes and the rest, while also producing some of their success. Georgia Southern and Navy won a combined 73 percent of their games during Johnson’s 11 seasons as a head coach. That included an unprecedented five consecutive trips to bowl games for Navy and two consecutive Division I-AA titles for Georgia Southern.
Added Johnson, “I mean, there are some guys that if you yell at, they go in the tank. Other guys, if you yell at them, they play better. It’s whatever it takes to motivate them to do their best. If I can make them mad at me and that motivates them, that’s all right. Four hours later, we can sit and laugh about it, and then it’ll be over.”
Before such levity, there is a lot of Johnson standing centimeters from somebody’s face. The conversation isn’t pleasant. AJC cameras have captured several of those moments. There was Saturday, when Johnson (ahem) chatted with lineman Cord Howard after he jumped offside during a two-point conversion attempt.
More famously, there was that Embry Peeples thing in the season-opener against Jacksonville State. “He had missed a blocking assignment, and, actually, when I grabbed him, we had scored a touchdown,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t a big deal. He knew it wasn’t personal. It was my way of conveying to him, ‘That’s your guy.’ We even joked about it later. I told him that he’s going to have to do something to get me in the paper next week, because I got him in the paper with that one.”
Knight often joked with his players, too, and so did Hayes and the rest. They also were obsessed with trying to keep their players from becoming punch lines during games. So they refused to let them become less than they could be. Even if those coaches and managers had to scream discipline into them.
“I tell my guys, ‘If I don’t feel like you can do it, I won’t waste my time yelling at you,’ ” said Johnson, who currently has a persistent roar in games, which means he believes these Jackets can do it.
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