Al Groh isn’t much for math.
“To this day, anything that’s got numbers in it is a challenge for me,” Georgia Tech's defensive coordinator said.
Here are two numbers that should impress even the math-challenged. Groh is preparing for his 46th year of coaching in his 15th stop. A Super Bowl champion and a former head coach at Wake Forest, Virginia and the New York Jets, Groh is entering his third season at Tech.
He recently sat for an interview, the first in a series with Tech’s assistant coaches. As for how his mathematical shortcomings changed the course of his life, read further.
Sports-filled childhood
Grew grew up on Long Island, enjoying the quintessential 1950s childhood: “Kids on the ball field or kids on the basketball court every day. Choose up sides, play until it gets dark.”
Groh sees a tradeoff in the greater structure in which children play sports today.
“Now, young kids are getting a lot of instruction, but everybody’s doing everything for them – drive them to practice, provide the bats, provide the balls, put the bases out, bring the sodas,” he said. There is “an aspect of self-reliance, accountability, communication, leadership that perhaps is traded off for the more advanced instruction.”
Early influences
On his office bulletin board, Groh has photos of his father (also Al) and his high school football coach at Chaminade High School in Mineola, N .Y. (There’s also a signed photo from Tech coaching legend Bobby Dodd, whom Groh once met at a banquet.) Groh’s father, briefly a high school football and baseball coach, was a manufacturer’s representative who sometimes packed a bag early Sunday morning, attended Mass and didn’t return home until Friday evening.
“Probably the example to us was, sometimes, you’ve just got to grind,” said Groh, who puts in 100-hour weeks during the season. “There’s something you’re responsible to do, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
F for future
Groh calls a failed statistics class in his senior year at Virginia in 1967 as the biggest break of his career. He had been accepted to graduate business school, but instead had to stay to re-take the class the following semester. He got a work-study job coaching football at a local high school, where the team went 10-0 and Groh enjoyed himself thoroughly.
In a roundabout way, that led to an ROTC assignment in 1968 to coach the plebe (freshman) football team at West Point. His first night there, he was taken to the officers’ club, where he met Anne Stahle, whom he later married. The next day, he met another Army coach, Bill Parcells, with whom Groh coached several years in college and the NFL.
Said Groh, “Obviously, I didn’t go on to graduate business school.”
Among others at West Point at the time: Bobby Knight, Ken Hatfield (later head football coach at Clemson and Arkansas), John Mackovic (head coach with the Kansas City Chiefs, Wake Forest, Illinois, Texas and Arizona) and tennis legend Arthur Ashe.
“A lot of us would meet for noontime basketball,” Groh said. “You should have seen Parcells guarding Knight and vice versa.”
Joined at the hip
Groh worked with Parcells at Army, Air Force, the New York Giants, New England Patriots and New York Jets, winning the Super Bowl with the 1990 Giants. He also worked with Patriots coach Bill Belichick at all three NFL teams and also with the Cleveland Browns. He remains close with both.
Parcells once likened the coaching fraternity that includes those three, Giants coach Tom Coughlin, Kansas coach Charlie Weis, Chiefs coach Romeo Crennel and others to a tribe, a description that resonates with Groh.
When players he's coached have gone off to play for his colleagues in the NFL, they’ve come back to tell him how the coaching style, team meetings and practice format are all the same.
“There’s a type of player, there’s a type of organization, there’s a mentality to how to play the game that everybody from this tribe [shares],” Groh said.
Open ears
Groh has a CD case in his office packed with dozens of discs. The artists include the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Adele, Jay-Z, Kenny Chesney, Maroon 5, Diana Krall, Weezer and the Doobie Brothers.
“I guess the term that people would put on that is fairly eclectic,” he said.
He’s learned about newer performers from his children, players and society. “You’ve got to know what’s going on,” he said.
If he had to pick just five? Billy Joel, Toby Keith, Lady Gaga, Van Halen and Springsteen.
Coaching LT
Groh was a position coach for Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor both at North Carolina and later with the Giants. Among Taylor’s greatest attributes, Groh said, was his ability to see and understand the game.
“If Lawrence was sitting there and he tried to tell you why he did something, you’d say, ‘This guy doesn’t have a clue,’” Groh said. “But in terms of seeing it and knowing it, the game made perfect sense to Lawrence.”
St. Louis Rams defensive end Chris Long, who played for Groh at Virginia, has the same gift.
“It goes from there to here so fast,” Groh said, pointing at his eyes and then his head. “It’s not even a cognitive process, but they know.”
Summer school
Groh has been meeting with outside linebacker Jeremiah Attaochu to watch video and help him learn his assignments. Groh said there have been plays where he wasn’t sure what Attaochu was doing. The goal of the sessions is “eradicating those from his game and doing the things that he knows how to do and do well with greater consistency.”
They watch video of Tech and also NFL defenses with schemes similar to Tech’s. Groh questions Attaochu on what he sees and what he would do on the field.
Said Groh, “There’s plenty of space in there for improvement.”
Next steps
To Groh, the challenge of defending up-tempo offenses isn’t conditioning. Rather, the difficulty is signaling plays from the sideline and communicating player to player in the condensed time between snaps. Groh has streamlined his play signals to communicate more information in less time.
“That is, you can’t let the limited interval in between the plays limit what you’re doing,” he said.
Groh said he considered borrowing from Oregon’s system of holding up large cards on the sideline to signal in offensive plays, but determined it wouldn’t work.
“We’ve always operated with the idea that the communication aspect of playing defense is at least as important as the schemes and techniques, and certainly as challenging,” he said.
On the line
Groh holds high hopes for the defensive line, even though it lost end Jason Peters and nose tackle Logan Walls, who had a combined 65 career starts between them. Groh liked the progress that tackles T.J. Barnes and Shawn Green and ends Izaan Cross, Euclid Cummings and Emmanuel Dieke made in spring practice.
“I think that the three spots [on the line] show signs of maybe being the most effective that we’ve had in three years,” he said.
One other factor is that Groh has been teaching his scheme for the third year.
“This is about when the paint should dry, if it’s ever going to,” he said.
Family business
Both of Groh’s sons have followed him into football. Mike is the wide receivers coach and recruiting coordinator at Alabama. Matthew is a scouting assistant with the New England Patriots. Mike was a stockbroker before getting into coaching. Matthew was an attorney. Groh said he had some reservations about the life they were choosing, but acknowledged that, “It’s been a very good life for our family.”
Both grew up on sidelines and in locker rooms, Groh said, hearing their father tell his players the exact same things he told them at home.
“The game and the nature of it has allowed me to be who I am,” Groh said, “as opposed to accommodating what I am, who I am, to some other line of work.”
