North Carolina State University Athletics
Learning While Teaching
11/29/2004 12:00:00 AM | Football
Nov. 17, 2004
By Bruce Winkworth - In more than two decades of college coaching, NC State offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone has rubbed elbows with some of college football's biggest names, worked the sidelines at some of its grandest venues, and seen just about every region of the country.
He was an assistant to Dennis Erickson at Oregon State for a year before coming to Raleigh in 2003. He spent three seasons under Tommy Tuberville at Auburn, and was with Tuberville at Ole Miss for five years prior to that. He spent three years in the frozen Northlands of Minnesota with the Golden Gophers. He was an assistant to Jim Wacker for six years at Texas Christian. Mazzone got his coaching start with Sonny Lubick at Colorado State, and during those years he often found himself watching from the other sidelines as Norm Chow performed his offensive magic as coordinator of CSU conference opponent Brigham Young. And he was a college quarterback himself at the University of New Mexico.
Talk about a long and winding road, but that's often the life when you choose coaching for your profession.
"Sometimes you have to move," Mazzone says. "My wife keeps saying that all we are is migrant workers, that as football coaches we just follow the crops around. It's been all right, though. I've worked with some great guys and at some great places. I worked Jim Wacker when I moved from Colorado to Texas. He was a great guy. I went from Minnesota to Ole Miss because it was a chance to be a coordinator. Then I went to Auburn, and when they fired me at Auburn, Dennis Erickson takes care of me and I go out and have one of the most fun years I've ever had coaching with him at Oregon State. Then Chuck gives me this opportunity at NC State, which I couldn't pass up."
Mazzone has worked with some great coaches in his career, but the one who had the greatest influence on him was never on the same coaching staff. Way back at the beginning of Mazzone's career, when he was still an assistant coach at Colorado State in the early 1980s, he and Lubick, then the Rams' offensive coordinator, fell under the spell of a young NFL head coach who was just beginning what turned into a Hall of Fame career.
"Probably the guy who had the biggest influence on me -- and he probably wouldn't know me today if I walked in the door -- was Joe Gibbs," Mazzone says. "When I first started coaching, Sonny Lubick and I used to jump on a plane and fly to Carlisle, Pa., where the Redskins trained, and spend a week every chance we could. This was when the Redskins had John Riggins and Joe Theismann and all those guys. They were kind of the first guys to run the one-back and two-tight-end formations, the H-back, all that stuff. That was my first exposure to football, so his philosophy was the one that influenced me the most."
That first year Mazzone was at Colorado State was the same year that Gibbs guided Washington to its first Super Bowl championship. The following season, the Redskins dazzled the league by scoring a then-NFL-record 541 points, an eye-opening 33.8 points per game, and advanced to their second consecutive Super Bowl. While known for his love of the running game, Gibbs has been one of professional football's most innovative offensive coaches. He enjoys running the occasional trick play, and he has never been afraid to ask his quarterbacks to throw the ball down the field.
Much of Mazzone's offensive style reflects his days in Carlisle watching Gibbs and the Redskins. Mazzone likes his offense spicy. He likes to spread the field, move the ball around to different playmakers, and put the pressure on the defense. When he got to NC State he inherited an offense that looked a lot like what he had coached at Oregon State, Auburn and Ole Miss.
"Chuck's no dummy," Mazzone says. "I don't think I'd have been hired if my philosophy wasn't along the same lines as what he was thinking, kind of wide open, a little goofy at times, throw the ball around the park. The terminology was different, which was the hard part for me. I think I really hindered Philip [Rivers] a little earlier last year because of that, not being familiar enough to speak his language yet. I think as the season went on, I felt so much more comfortable and Philip felt so much more comfortable with me once we started speaking the same language. The first couple of games, we weren't on the same page.
"Hey, plays are plays. Anything they'd done were things that I had done in the past, and things that I had done were things that they had done here in the past. So it wasn't that big an adjustment. The biggest thing was the terminology. But I had a chance to coach a guy who, in 23 years of coaching quarterbacks, I think was something special."
The fact that Mazzone and Rivers wound up together in 2003 at NC State has to be one of the great ironic twists in college football annals. Mazzone's recruiting area at Auburn included Athens, Ala., where Rivers grew up and played high school football. Mazzone recruited Rivers at Auburn, but the Tigers already had a commitment from Jason Campbell, a Parade All-American and one of the top-rated high school quarterbacks in the country that year.
The best Mazzone could offer Rivers was a chance to play quarterback, but most likely he would have to move to another position. Rivers chose NC State instead, where, four years later, he became both the best player Mazzone ever coached and the best player he ever lost on the recruiting trail.
"He's the best quarterback I've ever coached, no question" Mazzone says. "Is he the most talented? No. But the best quarterback? Yes. Without a doubt. I've had guys who were as smart as he was, or who threw as accurately as he did, but the total package? His love and passion for the game were so infectious. You'd just get infected with it. You want to coach harder because he's out there playing so hard. To me that was the fun part about coaching him."
