Making a Change for Better : After 20 Years in the NFL, Henning Happily Returns to College Coaching

From his second-floor window at Boston College, he is the master of all he surveys, even if that is mainly construction workers racing to put up grandstands by September.

It’s what he has always wanted, but he didn’t know it until he had it.

In February, Dan Henning was 51 and out of work, in the middle of his life wondering what he was going to do with the rest of it. In March, he found out.

Or hopes he has.

It all started when Bill Parcells, coach of the New England Patriots, called.

“Bill asked me if the Boston College coaching job came up, would I be interested,” Henning said. “I thought it might be interesting. I hadn’t thought about college.”

After 20 years in the league, Henning had become disillusioned with pro football. “They might have become disillusioned with me, too,” he says.

Boston College needed a coach because Tom Coughlin had left to coach the NFL expansion Jacksonville Jaguars, and Chet Gladchuk, the school’s athletic director, was seeking advice from Parcells, who became Father Football in New England the day he became the Patriots’ coach.

The school needed a particular kind of coach because it would have more seats to fill next fall, about 46,000, in a sports-saturated city and Gladchuk likes offense. Doug Flutie had won the Heisman Trophy at Boston College in 1984, and his legacy was passing, points and fans in the seats. More recently there was Glenn Foley, who passed Boston College past Notre Dame last season.

The idea was to find another Coughlin, get him to develop another Flutie or Foley and beat Notre Dame again.

“With the success that Tom Coughlin had here after being in pro football and then going back to pro football, I felt that we had to have a coach with a professional attitude,” Gladchuk said. “When he left, my mind immediately went to pro football. I wanted somebody with professional experience, who had been an offensive coordinator, who had worked with quarterbacks.”

Several NFL general managers, some of whom had sent children to Boston College, got calls.

“A couple that I respected brought Dan’s name up,” Gladchuk said. “But they said, ‘You’ll never get him.’ ”

As it turns out, Gladchuk was selling exactly what Henning was buying, a place where he could be correct without having to be political.

And Henning was eminently hireable. He had been fired as offensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions midway through the 1993 season, with more than two years remaining on a contract that he says “pays me more than I make here.”

He was playing golf in South Carolina and Florida, calling friends for ideas and being told by his children to get another football job.

“I think they thought I was going to drive them crazy,” he said.

Parcells had talked about the Patriots, but Henning told him not to invent a job for friendship’s sake. After being fired from head coaching jobs in Atlanta and San Diego and from the Detroit assistant’s position, pro football held little allure. Still, college football was a swamp from which he had escaped to the NFL after assistant jobs at Florida State and Virginia Tech.

“The reason I became disillusioned with college football 20 years ago was because of a couple of situations in which we actually had discussions in staff meetings about how to lie, after a fashion,” Henning said. “Even that wasn’t as distasteful to me as, after we had a student-athlete for a year or so and we had evaluated him and recruited him and now we didn’t feel he was very good, we weren’t going to give him any help and keep him around. If he flunked out, he flunked out.

“On the other hand, we might have one who might be worse off academically and might be even worse as a citizen, but who was a better football player, then we would go overboard to try to keep him around.

“That’s the way it is in the pros. You trade for a guy or draft him, and you live with all those personal problems as long as a guy’s assets are higher than his liabilities. When the assets or liabilities change, you get rid of him.”

But pro football made no pretense to be anything other than what it was. He didn’t have to go into a living room and tell a mother or father that their athletically gifted son would be cared for and nurtured, not saying he would be dumped when others more gifted were found.

It’s not like that any more, Gladchuk told him. In fact, it had better not be. A system of academic support was in place at Boston Collee. So was one of NCAA compliance.

There were four candidates, one of them the incumbent defensive coordinator, Steve Szabo, who taught preventing touchdowns, not scoring them. Gladchuk won’t identify the others.

“There was a consistency by the general managers I talked to in their respect for Dan in that he had fallen short in Atlanta, and in San Diego and even in Detroit,” Gladchuk said. “But it seemed from what they were saying that maybe it wasn’t all his fault.”

Henning’s forte is coaching quarterbacks. He had been one, at William and Mary, in minor league pro football and for a time with the Chargers. He had coached Don Strock at Virginia Tech, Joe Namath with the Jets, Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, Steve Bartkowski and Bob Griese.

The Super Bowl ring he wears at Boston College is testimony to his ability to coach them.

In Atlanta, he had David Archer; at San Diego, a disgruntled Jim McMahon and Billy Joe Tolliver. Henning had a 38-73-1 record as an NFL coach, in large part because of the Archers, McMahons and Tollivers.

At Detroit, he had a threesome--Erik Kramer, Rodney Peete and Andre Ware, none of whom could hold the starting job.

“When I was fired twice as an assistant (in Detroit and at Florida State), those two situations weren’t scars, they were blessings,” Henning said. “I had tried to leave and they wouldn’t let me out of contracts. After I was let go, I went to church and said a prayer of thanks.

“At Atlanta, I wanted to win, especially for the (owner Rankin) Smith family, but I didn’t. My situation as a head coach at San Diego--Bobby Beathard (the Chargers’ general manager) was a good friend of mine for many years. When he came in, I had two years left on my contract. That was brought up and I asked, ‘What’s going to happen to me? You make these kinds of turnovers in personnel, it’s going to be difficult to win, especially with turnover at the key positions.’ I was told not to worry about it, or maybe it was this way, I was told I would be all right. I should have asked what all right was.”

It was one more season and then out, acrimoniously so, to the cheers of the San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium crowd.

But Beathard weighed in with a good reference two years after he had fired Henning, saying that the player talent wasn’t there to win and that the city had turned on the coach.

And Joe Schmidt, Detroit’s general manager, gave his support, calling Henning tough, but not very good politically.

When he called Henning, Gladchuk got a warm but tentative reception. Henning was assured that college football had changed in the 20 years he had been away.

For one thing, the scholarship limit was down to 85 and that meant more players were available to be spread among the Division I schools.

And the recruiting class was in place. It was one of the nation’s best, 19 players from 12 states, and it included Scott Mutryn of Cleveland St. Ignatius High, called by some the country’s best high school quarterback last year.

“A lot of the quarterbacks I had worked with, I had near the end of their careers,” Henning said. “It would be nice to have one at the beginning.”

Henning’s first call went to Vince O’Connor, his high school coach at St. Francis Prep in New York. O’Connor is still coaching there. Henning had come full circle.

“I had been recruited by Boston College out of high school in 1960,” he said. “I wasn’t accepted. I wasn’t offered a scholarship.”

He didn’t fit the Eagles’ standards. Now he sets them.

They will be high, he said.

“I had never come close to cheating in the six years I was a college recruiter,” he said. “I used to get kidded that I didn’t bring in as many kids as the others. I tried to go after quality--and I didn’t bend the rules. Recruiting was a shady business.

“Maybe it sounds hokey, or it sounds naive. And maybe it is. But if I can get it done here, it will establish all of the beliefs I’ve ever had.”

It’s all so different. Different, and better.

“In the pros, a player might be gone the next day,” Henning said. “Here, there are no side deals and there is no salary cap. . . . The commitment you have from (college players) seems a great deal higher to the team goals than to individual goals.

“The level of play is different, but I feel the level isn’t as important as much having a chance to implement your ideas without those ideas being crossed over so much by other people. Professional coaches always want to have control of personnel. I have that here.”

It’s what any coach wants. It’s what no NFL coach has anymore.

“Dan’s a good coach,” said John Robinson, the USC coach who, as did Henning, Bill Walsh and Holtz, came back to college football from the NFL. “He’s going to be successful as a college coach because he understands the difference in the games.

“Recruiting is different. Evaluating kids at 17, 16, 18 years old when you are used to seeing players 24 to 30 years old is different. It’s still teaching a game, though. It’s just that you have to teach in less time. Where in the pros, you might say, ‘I want to teach 15 things,’ in college you find that you need to scale that down to 12 things and really have time for only seven or eight things.”

Henning got a quick lesson in time management from spring football. The NCAA mandates no more than 20 hours a week during the season or spring can be spent on football.

“I didn’t know the college system had changed so much,” Henning said. “It’s so far afield of the way it was 20 years ago, when you could coach every day of the year. I know it’s done to protect the student-athlete, but they should let the coach do his job. Still, the process had gotten out of hand.”

A quarterback has been settled upon, sophomore Mark Hartsell winning out over Jeff Ryan.

Ahead lies a Sept. 3 date at Michigan and the home opener on Sept. 17 against Virginia Tech in the new stadium. Notre Dame comes to call on Oct. 8.