Dec. 20, 2009
by Lee Pace
Jimmy Johnson's 1992 Dallas Cowboys staff included Davis (back left with sunglasses) and Wannstedt (top right with mustache).
The tradition began back in the 1970s at a venerable eating and drinking establishment in Stillwater, Okla., known as The Ancestor. There Jimmy Johnson, head coach of the Oklahoma State Cowboys, took his coaching staff on Thursday nights during the football season to kick back after a full week of practice, quaff some beverages and chow down on nachos and burgers. Johnson was in his mid-thirties and the coaches around him--Butch Davis, Dave Wannstedt, Pat Jones and Tony Wise, among them--were mostly in their late-twenties, so there was much to learn about the business of coaching, but Johnson knew the sense of camaraderie among his assistants was paramount to success.
The coaches would fine tune the game plan for Saturday and strategize about recruiting, but mostly they relaxed, enjoyed one another's company and shared an occasional laugh at one another's expense. There was the time, for example, that Wise, the offensive line coach and a native of upstate New York, was given directions to a recruit's home in East Texas and was told to "look for the cattle guard" as he approached the road to the youngster's home. Any toddler in the Rust Belt knows a cattle guard is a type of obstacle built into roads to allow vehicles through but prevent livestock passage. But Wise got lost in the dusty terrain when he "never did see a guy on a horse guarding the cattle."
"At all my coaching jobs, I really tried to build a tight-knit staff," Johnson says. "I always made a conscious effort to make sure the guys did things together. We did things at my house on a regular basis. In Dallas I would take them out for beers and Mexican food on Friday nights. I thought it was really important to have a close staff that enjoyed being together."
Through five more years leading the University of Miami Hurricanes and five seasons in the pressure cooker of the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL, Johnson always sought to build and maintain a collegial staff. That tenet was underlined in 1984 when, in his first year in Coral Cables, Johnson inherited a handful of coaches from the previous regime of Howard Schnellenberger and took only Davis with him from his Oklahoma State staff. The result was an office full of whispers, daggers and divided loyalty.
"I think I can speak for Jimmy in saying that '84 experience really shaped his philosophy in building a coaching staff," Davis says. "He learned a lot about the chemistry in your building. That was a miserable year. It was horrendous. People were trying to stab Jimmy in the back. Over time he put together a cohesive and loyal staff, and five years later, he took pretty much the entire group to Dallas. He didn't want to have to figure out two, three, four years later who was loyal and who was not. He knew we were all on the same page."
This photograph was taken in the summer of 1992, three seasons into Johnson building a juggernaut team at Dallas for new Cowboys owner and former Arkansas Razorback teammate Jerry Jones. Johnson took his Cowboys staff on a deep-sea fishing trip off the Florida coast, and the image--framed and matted in the Cowboys' blue and silver--is hung today among assorted memorabilia on Davis's office wall in Chapel Hill.
The group includes five current or former NFL head coaches--Johnson (pink shorts in the center, Dallas 1989-93, Miami 1996-2000); Davis (back left in sunglasses, Cleveland 2001-04); Dave Campo (white shirt front-left, Dallas 2000-02); Wannstedt (back row right with mustache, Chicago 1993-98, Miami 2000-04); and Norv Turner (dark shirt to Johnson's left, Washington 1994-2000, Oakland 2004-05, San Diego 2007-current). Also in the photo is Wise (white shirt to Davis's left, also a groomsman in Davis's wedding), and Joe Avezanno (between Davis and Johnson, one of the1990s' most noted special teams gurus in the NFL).
The Johnson coaching tree extends further as well. During his 1980s Miami days his graduate and part-time assistants included Tommy Tuberville (later head coach at Ole Miss and Auburn), Ed Orgeron (head coach at Ole Miss) and Ron Meeks (current Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator). Legendary Dolphins coach Don Shula wanted son David to get out from under dad's shadow in the late 1980s, so he asked Johnson to hire David when Johnson was putting his first Cowboys staff together. David was the Cowboys' offensive coordinator before moving to Cincinnati as an assistant (where later he became head coach for five years). Jack Del Rio was a Cowboys linebacker in the early 1990s and now is the Jacksonville Jaguars' head coach, and Randy Shannon was a Hurricanes linebacker in the mid-1980s and now is head at UM.
But no doubt this group relaxing with Johnson in 1992 was the "dream team" of the era. It's germane today for Tar Heel fans because Davis and Wannstedt are the respective head coaches of the Tar Heels and the Pitt Panthers, opponents in the Meinke Car Care Bowl scheduled Dec. 26 in Charlotte, and Wise is the O-line coach of the Panthers. Wannstedt returned in 2005 to his native Western Pennsylvania, where he grew up the grandson of a coal miner and son of a mill worker before matriculating to the University of Pittsburgh. There he was an offensive tackle for coach Johnny Majors and one of the trenchmen who opened running lanes for Tony Dorsett. After one injury plagued season with the Green Bay Packers, Wannstedt returned to Pitt where he became a graduate assistant on the 1976 Panther national title team. He was retained the following year by new head coach Jackie Sherrill and was introduced to Johnson, who came from Arkansas as the defensive coordinator.
"Dave initially had mixed feelings about going into coaching," Johnson says. "I talked to him some and tried to steer him into the idea of making a career of it. I thought he had a lot of passion for the game and he really enjoyed working with players. I thought he'd be an outstanding recruiter, which ended up being true."
After two years, Johnson was hired as the head coach at Oklahoma State and took a number of coaches with him, among them Wannstedt, Wise, Jones (who would later be the Cowboys' head coach), and offensive coordinator Bob Leahy. The latter was recruiting in Tulsa in 1979 when he met Davis, then 28 years old and the head coach at Will Rogers High. Leahy began quizzing Davis on Tulsa area prospects and learned that Davis, whose father had coached in Oklahoma high school circles years earlier, was a font of knowledge about the ins-and-outs of the area football culture.
"Those guys who had come in from Pitt and New York, they didn't know how to get to the schools, much less find the players," Davis says. "I even warned him which coaches were die-hard Oklahoma fans and wouldn't help anyone from Oklahoma State."
Three weeks later, Davis got a phone call from Leahy asking if he wanted to come to Stillwater and interview for a job with Johnson--one of Davis's heroes when Davis and his grade school buddies in Springdale, Ark., would jump trains on Saturdays to ride to Fayetteville and watch coach Frank Broyles' mid-1960s crackerjack teams.
"Jimmy was full of enthusiasm, bouncing off every wall and going a million miles an hour," Davis says. "I took a huge pay cut to go to Oklahoma State as a part-time coach, but it was a great decision."
One year later, Davis was promoted to receivers and tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator. His life with Jimmy was off-and-running. Johnson, Davis, Wannstedt, Wise, Campo, Hubbard Alexander and Joe Brodsky would collect multiple national championship rings together--with Miami in 1987 on the collegiate level and with Dallas at the Super Bowl in 1992 and 1993.
"Butch was highly organized and was an outstanding recruiter, which is paramount in college football," Johnson says. "He is really an intelligent guy, and he was able to learn from a lot of people. We always had a lot of quality people around us, and I think Butch learned something from every one of them. He handles people really well and has a passion for the game."
Norv Turner was a West Coast guy and grew up learning from John Robinson, Ted Tollner and Ernie Zampese. Wannstedt ventured west for three years in the mid-1980s, working for Tollner at USC, where he met Turner, the Trojans' offensive coordinator. Johnson was looking to replace Shula after the 1990 season, and he lured Turner from L.A. to Big D. It was an excellent move, as Turner molded Troy Aikman's throwing, Emmitt Smith's running, Michael Irvin's catching and Jay Novacek's powerful body and excellent hands into a steam-rolling offense.
Everett Withers was an assistant coach at Southern Mississippi in 1992 and had a chance to attend a Cowboys training camp in Austin that July.
"It was an unbelievable experience for a young coach," says Withers, today Carolina's defensive coordinator. "You watched them practice and you knew why they were going to be good. They practiced like a college team--hard. It was impressive. We watched the inside drill with Emmitt Smith and (fullback) Daryl Johnston. It was a bloodbath. You can see the things Tony Wise was doing with the offensive line then show up in tape of Pitt this year. He's got to be one of the best O-line coaches in football at any level. And I've been able to spend some time around Dave Campo over the years. He's by far best secondary coach I've ever been around."
The staff in this photo would produce a 13-3 regular season record en route to flattening Buffalo 52-17 in the Super Bowl in Pasadena. Wannstedt became head coach of the Chicago Bears the following year, and Davis was elevated to defensive coordinator and hired John Blake, today the Tar Heels' defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator. The 1993 team went 12-4 and battered Buffalo again in the Super Bowl, this time winning 30-13 in Atlanta. But the chemistry in the Cowboys' Valley Ranch headquarters had begun to deteriorate, primarily because the egos of the owner and head coach had become incompatible. Davis spent one year as defensive coordinator under new head coach Barry Switzer, then moved on to Miami to launch his own successful head coaching career.
What goes around eventually comes back around, leaving the history between Davis and Wannstedt to provide an interesting storyline to this year's bowl season.
Lee Pace writes "Extra Points" twice weekly during football season and can be heard from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network's broadcasts. Send your questions for the pre-game show to asktheheels@gmail.com.
