Reclaiming a deferred dream requires sacrifice. Which explains what Joe Moglia was doing with his life two years before he found himself hired on as head coach for the UFL’s Nighthawks.…
At 6:30 on an early winter morning in 2009, Joe exited the revolving doors of the Embassy Suites hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, hugging a University of Nebraska football playbook to his chest. Outside, the biting prairie wind cuffed him, ruddying his cheeks and watering his eyes. Through the blear he saw the sun breasting the flat horizon. It didn’t make him feel any warmer. That winter would go down as one of the coldest ever recorded in the state. Joe pulled the collar of his jacket up to his throat, leaned into the wind, and hurried the three hundred yards from his hotel to the Osborne Athletic Complex, home to the school’s football facility.
Joe looks like a football coach. His body is big in the shoulders and chest, tapers a bit through his torso and upper legs, then swells again into cantaloupe-sized calves. It’s a body made for wearing gray sweats. His hair is the color of rust. His brow furrows easily over his clear, alert, blue eyes that never miss a thing. His nose can quickly turn pugnacious—like a bulldog’s—when he gets worked up. He even shouts well, in short, declarative barks spiced with traces of an inner-city New York accent that’s easily discernible above nearly any din. He has a presence that commands attention.
However, Joe was not a football coach. Not then, in 2009. He was one once, long ago. But in 2009 he was a sixty-year-old grandfather trying to somehow retrace the steps back to that place where the road forked, to find that other path, the one that leads to a dream unfulfilled. Since there didn’t seem to be any shortcuts to that path, Joe was in Lincoln now serving as an unpaid intern—officially, the “executive advisor to the head coach”—for the University of Nebraska football team. That frigid winter day would be just one of the hundreds he spent with the team over the next two years. Fourteen hours a day catching up on half a lifetime away from the game. Film study. Practices. Meetings with coaches and players. Legal pads filled with his scribbled notes. Two years living in a hotel room. Four thousand hours of work.
Typically Joe wouldn’t return through those revolving doors at the Embassy Suites until midnight, when he would go to his room, make a brief call to Amy back in Omaha, then plunk down in a chair with a Bible-thick book of the plays that he had decided he needed to understand completely if he were to return to coaching. Later, a few hours of sleep would end with a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call, starting the whole cycle over again. For his efforts, he would be paid exactly $0.00.
He did it all with a huge smile on his face. Joe wanted to be a football coach again, and this, he thought, was the first step he needed to take to get there.
Joe had done something extremely rare in the world of American business: he left at the absolute pinnacle of his career. There was no Securities & Exchange Commission investigation, no personal scandal, no precipitous drop in stock price, no shareholder revolt. Very simply, he took over a company, led it through one of the stormiest periods in the financial world’s history, then left it a much stronger and more profitable place than it was when he started.
In the summer of 2008, Joe voluntarily walked away from the CEO post at TD Ameritrade. In just eight years, Joe had transformed the company, first by saving it from the disastrous pop of the dotcom bubble, then by building it into one of the most complete financial services firms in the world. Under his watch, TD Ameritrade not only completely skirted the 2008 financial crisis, it actually posted big profits.
Joe left because there was really nothing else to prove. He was presented with a huge challenge when he took over the company in the spring of 2001. By 2008, he’d exceeded the goals he set out to reach. He’d been in the business world for twenty-five years, and before that in an intense sixteen-year coaching career. Joe had worked since he was ten, when he started doing shifts in his father’s New York City fruit store. Since boyhood, he’d never had any extended time off from work. Now, he had certainly earned it.
And that was what he thought he’d be getting, some serious time off. When Joe stepped down from his position as CEO in the summer of 2008, he became TD Ameritrade’s chairman, which came with some responsibilities—mainly board meetings—but was a cakewalk, time-wise, compared to his previous job. So Joe played golf and read books. He went to the gym and kept detailed logs of his workouts and weight loss. (“He was starting to get chubby,” says his wife, Amy. “I told him, ‘You can be old or fat, but not both.’ And, well, he wasn’t getting any younger.”)
The professional world didn’t leave him alone, though. Within weeks of his resignation, he’d had a half-dozen inquiries from folks in the financial and media worlds. (Joe had spent some time guest-hosting CNBC shows during his TD Ameritrade stint.) He responded to all the calls with polite but firm no thank yous. Amy really believed that after what amounted to half a century of hard work, her husband was finally ready to take a breather. “I was really excited,” she says. “Look, I don’t want a guy who’s following me around all the time and asking me what we’re going to do today. But I wouldn’t mind a little of that. I was ready for at least a year of relaxing a bit. He’d worked so hard. We’ve been really lucky. I wanted to enjoy it for a little while.”
Joe’s daughter Kim also thought that a break would be good for him and the entire family. “He was always driving himself so hard,” she says. “Now he was financially set. I wanted him to exhale. I wanted him to spend more time with us.” Even Joe signed on. “I was in no hurry to do anything. I was ready to try to relax.”
At least that was the plan. Two months after he left his job, Joe and Amy went to Vermont to visit Joe’s oldest child, Kelly. One night Joe and Amy were in their hotel room getting ready to go to a party at Kelly’s when Joe’s phone rang. It was Charles Johnson, chairman of the mutual fund company Franklin Resources. Joe thought this was just another guy calling to try to woo him back to finance. But Johnson also happened to be a major donor to the athletic program of his alma mater, Yale. He told Joe that the school’s football head-coaching job might be available at the end of the year. He wondered if Joe was interested…in coaching.
Joe was stunned almost to the point of incoherence. He eventually mumbled something about being flattered that Johnson would even think about him as a potential candidate, especially since he’d been out of the game for so long. He told Johnson he’d think about it.
“Who was that?” Amy asked after Joe had hung up. They were late for the party.
“Uh, Charlie Johnson. He wanted to know about a coaching job,” Joe replied. He was still dazed.
Amy thought little of it. They went off to the party. Joe didn’t tell anyone else about the call.
But as days went by, Joe began to think about it more and more. The nights were the worst. “I literally could not sleep,” he says. The call had stirred something within him that he thought he had repressed and walked away from forever.
Joe spent the next few months sitting alone in the office in his Omaha home for hours at a time, thinking about coaching and writing down thoughts and notes on legal pads. He wanted to be completely honest with himself in answering two questions: Was he qualified to coach again? And did he really want to? “The answer to the first one was an overwhelming yes,” says Joe. After all, he’d been a coach before. And he was a leader. He’d managed teams in business that numbered in the hundreds, even thousands. His football-coaching career had been a huge asset to his business career. And now he had twenty-five years of managing, of decision making, of leading in business. How could that not be an asset on the field?
Answering the second question, however, was a bit more complicated. Joe knew that during the football season, he would end up working even harder than he did at Merrill and TD Ameritrade. Coaches routinely put in ninety to one hundred hours a week. What would Amy think of that? And there would be serious personal and reputational risks involved. Coaches are judged by wins and losses. No extra credit is given for all of the hard work put in. He could fail. He could certainly get fired.
As he sat in his home office and furiously scribbled notes (he would eventually fill five legal pads), a feeling began to overwhelm him: “It became clear that I couldn’t really live with myself if I didn’t give this a try.”
Joe reached out to friends to get their opinions, just to make sure he wasn’t totally crazy. One of those friends was fellow Omahan Warren Buffett. Joe asked him to dinner one night. It turned out that he was hugely supportive. “I always tell college students how lucky I was to find my passion very early in life and that they shouldn’t give up until they find theirs,” says Buffett. “Joe’s dream obviously was to coach a top-notch football team and there is no question he would be terrific at it. So I encouraged him to do it.”
By December 2008, Joe had made up his mind. He was going to attempt to land a head job at a Division I school, at either the FBS or FCS level. (Simply put, the FBS—Football Bowl Subdivision—is populated by the big-time football schools and conferences. The smaller schools and conferences make up the FCS—Football Championship Subdivision. The biggest difference: FBS schools have more scholarships and more money for those scholarships.)
He broke the news to Amy and the rest of the family. “He just looks at me one morning and goes, ‘You know, I don’t think I can let this go,’” says Amy. “I’ll admit I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t going to take some time off. But he told me that this was his passion now, that he was really feeling it. I wanted him to be happy. So I was like, ‘Okay, here we go.’”
His kids had mixed reactions. “I just asked him, ‘When will it all be enough?’” says daughter Kim. “But he explained it to me and he said, ‘I feel like this was something I never really finished.’”
His youngest daughter, Kara, says with a knowing sigh: “He is who he is.”
His youngest child and only son, Kevin, who bears a striking resemblance to him, says: “I was too young to remember his earlier coaching career, so I was pumped. I wanted to see him out there.”
No one in the family should have been surprised that Joe was unable to remain idle for long. It was in his genes. His father had worked until he was eighty-two years old and stopped only when his Alzheimer’s disease had become completely debilitating.
When he told his old colleagues about his decision, they were flabbergasted. John Bunch, who had worked closely with Joe since 2005 as TD Ameritrade’s president of retail distribution, remembers thinking: “Are you crazy, man? Go do something fun with your money!” Ed Sheridan, Joe’s old Merrill teammate, was skiing in Telluride, Colorado, when he got the call while riding a chairlift. “I initially thought, This dude has lost it. But he explained it to me. By the end of the lift ride, I was sold.”
Joe called Yale about the job. They never called him back. It didn’t matter. The fire was lit.
Joe went after a coaching job the same way he’d gone after a Wall Street job as a thirty-four-year-old, divorced father of four—with everything he had. He first hired an agent. He then put together a detailed spreadsheet of college football teams, focusing in particular on losing programs with coaches who had expiring contracts. He started sketching out his plans for recruiting and researching the potential names of his coaching staff. He networked, making four to five calls a day—many of them cold—to conference commissioners, athletic directors, and coaches. Whenever anyone agreed to a face-to-face meeting, Joe jumped on a plane. He met, in person, with the commissioners of the Big Ten Conference, the Missouri Valley Conference, and the Colonial Athletic Association, and the athletic directors at West Point, Fordham (his alma mater), Northwestern, Duke, and East Carolina. He figured he was not a candidate for a big-time FBS program like Notre Dame or Tennessee. Not yet, anyway. But he decided that he did not want to coach anything lower than a Division I team and that he was going to be a head coach or nothing. He didn’t want to take the more traditional route and start as a coordinator and work his way up again. “There was no time for that,” says Joe. And anyway, he was a manager, a leader. That was where his skill sets lay. Joe believed that with his background, he was a perfect candidate for a job at an Ivy or Patriot League school, someplace where a kid desired an education to go along with his football.
He had his doubters. “A reasonable amount of people told me I had no shot at a job,” Joe says. “But people also told me that when I applied to Merrill. Most of my life people have told me that. I’ve never used that as a motivating factor. I just never agreed with it.”
But he also had legions of admirers. His quest—the seeming impossibility of it all, the determination to not go gently into that good night—struck a chord with some people, particularly those for whom middle age was in the rearview mirror. They might not be able to throw caution to the wind at age sixty and chase a dream. But it was extremely important—vital, really—to know it could be done. “It’s just such an example,” says Rik Bonness, an Omaha lawyer and former linebacker for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s who had become friends with Joe. “I mean, he didn’t have to do this. He could have retired. But he did do it. It’s a reminder that if you want to stay energized, you have to commit to something and do it full speed and not be afraid of failure.”
For Bill Campbell, the former CEO of Intuit (and now the chairman) and a member of Apple’s board, Joe’s quest resonated deeply. Campbell had been the head football coach at Columbia before he embarked on his own starry business career. “People ask me why I left football for a career in business,” says Campbell. “And my answer is always the same: ‘Did you see my won-loss record?’”
In six years as the head coach at Columbia (1974–1979), Campbell never had a winning season, finishing with a 12-41-1 overall record. He says once he left football, he never seriously considered going back. “But if I’d had more success, I probably would have stayed in the profession,” he says. “It was a hard thing to give up, and I still have pangs.”
Joe reached out to Campbell for advice when he decided to go back to coaching. Campbell is a big fan of Joe’s, but even he had his doubts about Joe ever finding a college job. “The problem is that as good a manager as he is, an athletic director still has accountability, to his trustees, his alumni, the players, the students. All these groups will say to the AD, ‘You took a guy who hasn’t coached a game in twenty-plus years?’ Joe is fighting long odds. Someone will have to see how energetic, bright, and enthusiastic he is. Someone will have to overcome fear and take a chance on him.”
Joe knew all of this. He realized he could fail. “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith,” wrote the theologian Paul Tillich.
When Joe met with the coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners, he told each of them his personal story, starting with his inner-city childhood, then his coaching career, then his painful decision to leave the football field, then his business career. (Rare is the occasion when a conversation takes place with Joe when he doesn’t tell a story. He is a natural storyteller. But as they say, stories happen only to those who can tell them.) Joe made it very clear to everyone he talked to that he was dead serious about this. He was well aware that his money, instead of being an asset in his search, could instead make it harder for people to take him seriously.
Most important, though, Joe sold himself, trying to turn his quarter century away from the game from a potential negative into a positive. He gave all of these football people his pitch: A head coach is the CEO of his program. He’s the leader. He’s a recruiter of talent. He’s organized. He’s an ambassador for the program and the school. Joe had run teams at Merrill for seventeen years. He’d run an entire company for eight years. Ameritrade, when he got there, was no different from the type of foundering football program that needed a coach like him. And look what he’d done there! He knew how to lead, how to delegate, when to coddle and when to castigate. And imagine the sway he would bring to recruiting, especially with Ivy League kids. He could appeal to the kids’ own sense of their future, and to the parents’ hopes and dreams for their children, too.
With the kid—and his parents—sitting right there, Joe said, this is what he would tell them. “I will help you stand on your own two feet and accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. I will help you be a man. At some point in time—next year, after college, after ten brilliant years in the NFL—your football career will come to an end. What will you want to do? Become a doctor? A lawyer? A businessman? Chances are that I can provide greater insight on that, on your future career, than any other coach in the country.”
Then Joe would end his sales pitch with what he believed to be his clincher. His voice would inevitably rise a notch or two in volume. “And the bottom line is that I know my football! I was a coach!”
Someone out there had to give him a chance.
As it turned out, only one school did. The University of Massachusetts, in need of a new coach, called in late 2008. Joe flew in for an interview with the athletic director, John McCutcheon. But right away he could tell that the interview was really more informational than serious. UMass ended up hiring someone with more recent coaching experience.
By the following February, the college football hiring window had closed. Joe was jobless. He’d heard the same thing from nearly everyone he’d talked to: Great story, Joe. Really inspiring. But after so long out of the game, no one is going to hire you as a coach. No one.
The problem was with the athletic directors, who, as Bill Campbell had anticipated, were naturally risk-averse. After meeting Joe, Terry Holland, the AD at East Carolina, said: “He is an impressive leader and would have all the skills necessary to be a head football coach at the college level, except for his lack of recent experience actually coaching a team. But I could not hire him here as our football coach. The number one rule for athletic directors is to ‘at least win the press conference.’ It would be difficult for any AD to make a hire that would be likely to generate more questions than it answers.”
Kevin White, the AD at Duke University, a college not known for its football excellence, also met with Joe in early 2009. “He would be a non-traditional hire. A university would have to see him as a risk that makes sense to take.”
And none of them did.
Clearly, as Terry Holland noted, the lack of recent experience was crippling Joe’s job search. He would have to find a way of getting that experience in order to buff up his résumé.
Tom Osborne is a demigod in the state of Nebraska. He’d coached the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers for twenty-five years—during the football program’s glory days—and won three national championships. He later served for six years as a U.S. congressman for the state. Then, in 2007, with the football program in disarray, Osborne was called back to the university, this time as the athletic director, where his sage-like, grandfatherly presence eventually righted the ship.
Osborne and Joe were casual acquaintances. Nebraska is a small state, population-wise, and most of its movers and shakers have run into each other at one time or another. Osborne had been one of the people Joe had talked to right after he made his decision to try football again. “At first I thought he wasn’t thinking very clearly,” says Osborne. “It was a very unusual move. But he gradually convinced me that he was dead serious. And he sure did have a lot of passion for it.”
When Joe didn’t find a job in 2008, Osborne came up with a suggestion: why didn’t Joe do an internship as a “shadow coach” with the Nebraska football team? Osborne said he’d have to clear it with the fiery, young head coach, Bo Pelini. Joe was game. So, it turned out, was Pelini: “I was like, ‘Why the hell not?’ The guy obviously had organizational skills and knew how to run a team.”
Joe joined the Cornhuskers as an unpaid intern in July 2009. By NCAA rules, he couldn’t actually coach (thus his official position: “executive advisor to the head coach”). “I will always be grateful to Tom and Bo,” says Joe. “They gave me a chance.” As part of the deal, Joe agreed to be a “life coach” to the entire athletic program. Joe ran seminars for student athletes, counseling them on personal finance and job seeking, similar to what he would later do with the Nighthawks players. But what he really did at Nebraska was concentrate on reacquainting himself with a game he had left two and a half decades before.
Joe spent the first few months with the team acting like the proverbial “good child.” He was seen—at every practice, meeting, and film study session—but he was not heard. “I didn’t make a peep there for a little while,” he says. Instead, he soaked up every detail he could. He noted where the different coaches arrayed themselves at staff meetings; the order in which the playbook was put together; how the team lined up for the national anthem on the sidelines; even how Nebraska fed its players.
At Pelini’s suggestion Joe concentrated on the defense, which made sense given Joe’s history with that side of the ball. In doing so, though, he would also gain insight into the multiple offenses Nebraska would face during the year, which ran the gamut, from the pass-happy pro style of Oklahoma to the run-first philosophy at Colorado. Nebraska that year had a dominating defense, led by future NFL star tackle Ndamukong Suh. The only offenses that really gave Nebraska trouble were the spread option ones, which is one of the reasons Joe grew so fond of the style, and later decided to use it with the Nighthawks.
Joe started off studying with the linebackers, the position from which the Nebraska defense flowed. “He was just there all the time,” says Blake Lawrence, a linebacker on the team in 2009. From there Joe moved to the defensive backs. Soon he was shadowing Carl Pelini, the defensive coordinator (and brother of Bo). During games Joe sat in the coaches’ box above the field with the defensive staff. He listened in on the play calls and the back-and-forth between Bo Pelini and his coaches.
As the season progressed, Joe started to feel more comfortable. But the coaches remained a bit wary. Coaching staffs are like close-knit families. They work grueling hours in an intense atmosphere and in very tight quarters. Outsiders are usually iced out. “There was sort of a sense of Who is this dude? when Joe first got here,” says Doug Colman, then the quality control coach for the Cornhuskers.
Joe kept his head down, but was present for everything. If the coaches were dealing with a problem at 1:00 a.m., Joe was right there with them. Gradually, they began to realize that he wasn’t some weird old wealthy guy just getting his kicks from hanging out with a football team. He was a guy who was there to learn.
By October Joe had been accepted as part of the team. Because of the NCAA rules, he couldn’t actually run players through drills during practice. He was just supposed to observe. But, gingerly at first, he started to become more vocal, on the field and in the meeting rooms. “He just eventually became ‘Coach Joe’ to us,” says Blake Lawrence.
In late October of that year, Nebraska, then 4-2, hosted Iowa State, one of the weaker programs in the Big 12, and a team that Nebraska had not lost to at home in thirty-two years. But Nebraska had eight turnovers in that game, including four within Iowa State’s 5-yard line. The Cornhuskers lost, 9–7. “That was the first time that season that I felt incredible pain from a loss,” says Joe. “That night I had flashbacks to the horrible games I’d had as a coach. Then I said, ‘Hold it. I don’t want to feel like this.’ So I challenged myself and asked myself, had I not learned anything in the past forty years that would help me handle this?” Joe says he stayed up most of the night thinking it through, and eventually felt at peace.
The next day he went to the team’s football offices. Pelini walked in, looking like he hadn’t slept at all. “Bo just looked at me and said, ‘I can’t believe that you want to do this,’” says Joe. “I told him I had a thought for him.”
They went to Pelini’s office. Joe explained what he had wrestled with the night before. And he reminded Pelini that 300 colleges had played football that Saturday, 150 of whom had lost. “We’re not trying to cure cancer here, we’re not protecting democracy and capitalism. We’re playing a football game. And, yes, we love the game and we want to win, but it’s just a football game, and once in a while we are going to lose and we’ve got to keep it in perspective. It’s not the end of the world.”
Says Pelini: “Joe just always had great perspective after a tough loss or a big win, and those conversations were really beneficial for me.”
Joe also started to help with recruiting. Although the NCAA didn’t allow him to visit recruits off campus, when potential recruits came to the university, they all met with Joe, who talked to them about his life and told them why he had chosen the program to help reboot his career. “He really helped with these kids,” says Megan Rogers, Nebraska’s director of on-campus recruiting. “A lot of these kids came from rough backgrounds like he did.”
Joe did all of this while living in a room at the Embassy Suites hotel in Lincoln six days a week, away from Amy and their home in Omaha. He drove the fifty miles back to Omaha on Thursdays to have dinner with Amy. On Friday mornings, he went into the TD Ameritrade offices, then drove back to Lincoln in the afternoon, either to catch the charter flight for games that were played away, or to spend the night in the hotel where the entire team stayed for those that were played at home. He was a sixty-year-old man busting his ass. “I was a bit surprised at how hard he went at it,” says Osborne. But Joe knew he had to prove how serious he was.
Nebraska, behind its defense, rebounded from the loss to Iowa State to qualify for the Big 12 Championship game, where they lost by a point to then-number-one-ranked Texas. In the Holiday Bowl, the Cornhuskers crushed Arizona, 33–0.
Joe learned a lot that season. Yes, the game had changed since he last coached: it was faster, especially with increased use of the no-huddle offense; it was more specialized, with each side of the ball having essentially fifteen “starters”; and there was more emphasis on schemes and less on the fundamentals of tackling and blocking.
But he felt the game had not passed him by. “I mainly had to adapt to the faster pace,” says Joe. The specialization wasn’t that hard to master: it was just different players in the same old roles. And the emphasis on schemes? Joe believed that there was an overreliance on them. The fundamentals still mattered. “Out of old fields comes all the new corn,” Chaucer once wrote.
Joe went back out on the job hunt. This time, he came equipped with some heavy-hitting references—Osborne and Pelini. By now, having watched what Joe brought to the game, both on and off the field, Osborne had become a big fan. “I thought he’d make a great college coach,” he says. When he called fellow athletic directors on Joe’s behalf, Osborne broke down Joe’s candidacy to its bare essentials. “I told them that coaching is not rocket science, it’s not some mystical endeavor. If you work hard, are a good communicator, are well organized, and hire a good staff, you can do it. I told them that Joe had all of those ingredients in spades,” he says. “But I didn’t get anywhere with a lot of them.”
As an athletic director himself, albeit one with a little more job security than most, Osborne says he somewhat understood their reticence. “If you go out on a limb and it doesn’t work out, you are really out on a limb,” he says. “Still, someone should have given him a shot.”
Joe did get a little more traction this go-around. He landed an interview at Cornell, exactly the kind of place he believed would be a perfect fit for him. But they ended up hiring a coach who’d been an assistant at Ole Miss. He had interviews with Princeton and Richmond. The former hired an assistant with the Cincinnati Bengals, the latter an assistant from the University of Virginia.
Like Osborne, Joe understood the predicament he put athletic directors in—to a point. “I knew that the typical AD wasn’t going to hire me. I needed to find one who could make a true risk-reward decision and figure out that the risk in hiring me wasn’t that huge and the reward would be great.”
But folks weren’t buying it. Most of them told Joe that his mission was nearly impossible to accomplish. Mike Bohn, the Colorado athletic director, loved Joe and his story, and had a coaching vacancy. But he couldn’t pull the trigger on hiring Joe. Instead he hired an NFL assistant, and floated the idea of Joe’s taking a “head of football operations” position at the school, where he would have responsibilities for both on- and off-the-field sides of the program (akin to what Bill Parcells had done with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins). Joe wasn’t interested. He wanted to be the one on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, he was attracting a fair amount of national press for his quest to get back into coaching. It was a great story: Man at pinnacle of his career steps down from powerful CEO position to seek college football job a quarter of a century after coaching his last game. ESPN did a few segments on him. Spots aired on CBS, ABC, and CNBC. Sports Illustrated ran a long story on its website. Forbes ran a feature piece (written by this author). “I would get my hopes up every time one of these stories would hit,” says Joe. “I was hoping some athletic director or some college president somewhere would see it and realize how serious and how qualified I was.”
But every time, those hopes were dashed. Nobody wanted to take the chance.
Then in late 2009 Walter O’Hara, a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Co., called Joe to talk to him about the Williams College coaching job, which was vacant. (Though O’Hara didn’t go to Williams, he had fallen in love with the school and was well connected to its influential alumni.) Williams was a Division III school, which Joe had decided early on he didn’t want any part of. Football just wasn’t taken seriously enough at those small schools. Plus the recruiting was brutal: there were no scholarships, and chances were that if you ever did find a really good player, he’d be snapped up by a Division I school before he enrolled.
But O’Hara worked on Joe, selling him on what a special place Williams was. Chuck Johnson, the coach at Ridgewood High School, a perennial New Jersey prep powerhouse, also called Joe to talk up Williams. Johnson sent a lot of his players there and loved the school, which he said actually did take its football seriously. The two men eventually persuaded Joe to pursue it. “I didn’t want to act like I was too good for this,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t have anything.” O’Hara and Johnson made calls to the school on Joe’s behalf. So did Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball and a Williams alum. Joe followed up with a note and a packet of his credentials.
But he never heard from Williams. He followed up again. He never got a response. The message couldn’t have been clearer: not even a Division III school wanted him.
That year, Joe sent his résumé to sixteen different colleges that had head coach job vacancies. Only three of them had the courtesy to respond with a “no, thank you.”
Joe was left completely stymied.
Faced with no job, Joe went back to Osborne and Pelini. He was not quite ready to give up. One more year at Nebraska, he thought, would do the trick. It had to. He had no idea what to do if it didn’t. Amy wasn’t surprised. “Once he puts his mind to something, he doesn’t give up easily,” she says. He went through the entire process of shadow coaching again: the playbook, the note taking, the meetings, the film study, the practices, the games, and the cookie-cutter hotel room. Nebraska had another good year, buoyed again by their stellar defense. Joe ingratiated himself with the team even more that season. After it ended, the players voted to give him the Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp trophy for leadership and service, an annual award usually given to a player or coach who has demonstrated unselfish commitment to the team. It was an unusual gesture to give it to someone who was not even an official coach.
As the season neared its end, Joe started his job search once more, still hopeful, if a bit unnerved by his previous two unsuccessful attempts. Kent State called. So did the University of Buffalo. But they ended up going with younger guys who had more up-to-date credentials. It was all happening again.
Joe grew frustrated. He was accustomed to working hard toward a goal, then actually achieving it. He called friends and vented. “I have exactly what it takes to be a head coach,” he told them in the fall of 2010. “I have the skill sets. I’ve demonstrated myself on the field and in the business world. At this point in my life, I could do whatever the hell I want. But I’ve chosen to become a football coach. I’ve spent four thousand hours at Nebraska. I don’t understand why these folks don’t see that.”
But he never let his frustration show publicly. “What is stunning about him is that he always 100 percent checked his ego at the door,” says Charlie Besser, a TV producer who had followed Joe’s story. “He pitched these guys like his life depended on it and took their ‘I would never hire a guy like you’ in stride. Most CEOs would have had three advance people fly in before the interview and would have made a huge deal about it all. Joe didn’t. He called them himself. He went to them himself. He had this unusual combination of drive and humility, never letting his ego get in the way of his desire to accomplish the goal.”
Despite this ego check, despite the determination and the four thousand hours at Nebraska, Joe still had nothing to show for it. Zero.
He had no idea what to do now. He couldn’t go back to Nebraska again. What was a third year as a volunteer going to do, anyway? He thought he had failed. He thought his dream was now officially dead.
Then in November, he finally got a job offer. It wasn’t from a college. It was from a man named Michael Huyghue (pronounced “hewge”), the commissioner of something called the United Football League.