George DeLeone coached football and ‘how to love the game’

On3 imageby:Ivan Maisel03/04/22

Ivan_Maisel

When George DeLeone died Tuesday of cancer at age 73, 50 years of teams reached out to console one another. Syracuse players from the 1980s told their stories, and the 2022 Baylor Bears told theirs. They told stories of a cross between a football savant, talk show host and unmade bed.

Former Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson recalled his sophomore season in 1985, when DeLeone arrived from Rutgers. DeLeone went into the Syracuse equipment room to ask for gear.

“What size?”

“Just give me whatever you got. I don’t care,” DeLeone said.

DeLeone walked out with size smalls, put them on, and went to the team meeting.

“He looked like Jerry Lewis in ‘The Nutty Professor,’ ” McPherson said. “He walked into the meeting room goofy, unkempt. One of our receivers, Mike Siano, drew a picture of him.”

Then DeLeone opened his mouth.

“He was magic,” McPherson said.

DeLeone coached at eight schools and three NFL teams, on both sides of the ball and most every position, all over the country. He came up as part of the cadre of football coaches from Connecticut – his best friend Paul Pasqualoni, Tony Sparano, Kevin Gilbride, Steve Addazio, Rich Bisaccia – who made an outsized dent in the game.

But DeLeone is best remembered as the architect of the freeze option that made Syracuse a perennial power from the late 1980s under Dick MacPherson into the 2000s under Pasqualoni. McPherson led the Orange to an undefeated season in 1987, when he finished as the Heisman runner-up to Notre Dame’s Tim Brown. You know how the best quarterbacks today are dangerous runners as well as passers? A generation ago, few schools wanted those guys. Coaches waged recruiting battles waged over pocket passers.

Meanwhile, with DeLeone’s freeze option, Syracuse put one quarterback after another in the top five in the nation in passing efficiency. Names you may remember, like McPherson and Donovan McNabb, and names you may not, like Marvin Graves and Todd Philcox.

DeLeone held his players to an exacting standard. You did it right or you didn’t get to do it.

And when you did it right, nobody threw a party.

“He was brutal when it came to grading people,” said John Garrett, the center on the 1987 team. “He had a crazy scoring system. You got a zero if you did your job. You got a minus if you didn’t do your job. The rare plus if you really overdid your job.

“One time, I throw a nice block, put the guy on his back. I graded myself a zero. The next day, we’re looking at the film, he said, ‘I’m giving you a minus.’

“ ‘Coach, a minus? I put the guy on his back!’

“ ‘You stepped with the wrong foot.’ ”

Garrett, 35 years later, burst into laughter. “That’s how detailed that man was.”

McPherson used to sit in on offensive line meetings.

“He would say things that were just brilliant,” McPherson said. “It wasn’t just Xs and Os or technique. It was how to love the game. I remember he told them once, ‘Here we have all these smart people on campus. They don’t have to make decisions as quickly as you do while somebody is smacking you in the head.’ ”

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George DeLeone had eight college jobs (Southern Connecticut, Rutgers, Holy Cross, Syracuse, Ole Miss, Temple, UConn and Baylor) and three in the NFL (San Diego, Miami and Cleveland). (Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images)

In the fourth game of the ’87 season, Syracuse went into the locker room at halftime at Virginia Tech trailing 21-7. The Hokies had scored a touchdown on a blocked punt, and McPherson had thrown an interception in Syracuse territory.

Fullback Daryl Johnston, who went on to a long career with the Dallas Cowboys and Fox Sports, now is the executive vice president for football operations for the USFL. He remembered the team sitting down in front of the chalkboard and waiting to see how DeLeone would respond.

“George just walked up, wrote the word ‘character,’ underlined it, turned around and looked at us, and said, ‘We’re going to find out if this team has any of this,’ and just walked away,” Johnston said. “He let us go through what needed to be done. He kind of turned it over to the players. I always felt that was one of those unique coaching moments where you knew what the team needed. It wasn’t anything to do with what you could provide as a staff. Let the guys become accountable and own everything that went wrong.”

That was the halftime adjustment. In the second half, the offense gained 283 yards and scored 28 points to win 35-21. They won every other game until Auburn tied them, 16-16, in the Sugar Bowl.

DeLeone coached so intently that he got right up in the line play, barking all the time. At one practice, two linemen rolled into him and DeLeone came out of the collision with a torn knee ligament. The linemen thought, “Hey, maybe he’ll back off.” The next day, DeLeone drove circles around his blockers in his golf cart, yelling just as loud.

He ran practices so fast, trying to cram 24, 28 plays into a 20-minute period that he would scream at players to get lined up for the next play before the whistle sounded on the current one. His players rose to meet his standard.

“All of our offensive linemen raved about how much they learned from George, even the guys who went to the NFL,” Johnston said. “They carried the fundamentals that George brought to them.”

In 2005, DeLeone served as the run game coordinator and offensive line coach on Ed Orgeron’s first staff at Ole Miss. Among his linemen was a mass of raw talent named Michael Oher. As Michael Lewis recounted in his 2006 book “The Blind Side,” Orgeron wanted Oher to play left tackle and DeLeone wanted Oher redshirted so he could learn offense.

Instead, DeLeone moved Oher to right guard, where his older teammates could bracket him and tell him what to do. And whenever he could, DeLeone yanked Oher out of the game and put him back on the bench until Orgeron spotted him and put him back in. The Rebels went 3-8. DeLeone didn’t stay for a second year at Ole Miss.

Matt Rhule hired DeLeone to coach Temple’s offensive line in 2016, and the next season took DeLeone with him to try to breathe life into a Baylor program that scandal had left for dead.

You might think that a Connecticut guy who had spent a 45-year career elsewhere would have difficulty in the famously insular world of Texas football. Turns out they spoke a common language.

“Nobody loved football more than George DeLeone,” Baylor quarterback coach Shawn Bell said. “Not just football itself, but what it meant to be part of a team, how to prepare, how to work. Toward the end of his career, to be in Texas, for him it was a match made in heaven.”

Doctors diagnosed DeLeone with prostate cancer in 2018. Rhule made him a consultant and promoted Bell, a former Bears quarterback who had never coached offensive line in his life.

“I really leaned on George,” Bell said. “He would have to leave weeks, months at a time. Go down to Houston for treatment. I’d call him and check on him. We’d be in the middle of the season. I wanted to talk about his health. All he wanted to talk about his pass protection: ‘And how is so-and-so? How is he vertical-setting?’ ”

Baylor had a team meeting Wednesday. The players and coaches stood and talked about what DeLeone had meant to them.

“He taught me to be demanding and loving at the same time,” Bell said. “…He had a way. He’d walk into a room and bring happiness and joy.”