And so this is “Big Time Football!”

In major college football coaching is basically broken down into two groups as per the NCAA.  First you have the “fulltime” coaches of which you are allowed nine plus the head coach.  You then have two “on-field” Graduate Assistant Coaches (GA’s) and two non-coaching Graduate Assistants who have various duties including developing scouting reports and analyzing opponents.

There are all kinds of other guys running around the office as well.  You have senior coaches – who do no on the field coaching but work with scouting, recruiting and so on.  There are academic counselors, strength coaches, administrative assistants and so on and so forth.  But, you get the picture.

When I first started coaching a Division 1 staff was limited to eight fulltime coaches, but the number of GA’s you had was only limited by your football budget.  So, whatever you wanted to spend was up to the head football coach and athletic director.

In essence, the graduate assistant coach is in a learning position and the fulltime assistants are there to guide them, teach them football etc.  In return the GA gets a small stipend to live on and his graduate studies are paid for by the athletic department.

When you are a graduate assistant coach and you get all the low-level football jobs.  As we used to say you are lower than “whale shit on the bottom of the ocean.”  Well, that’s the way it is – but it is a rite of passage.

You are the least relevant guys on the staff.  The fulltime coaches are doing all the important stuff like game planning, coaching the individual groups, meeting about what needs to be done.

They are more experienced coaches who are paid a salary by the school – have medical insurance (mental and dental as we like to say), have a retirement fund and often have a car sponsored by a dealership in town – and a bunch of other perks.

So basically compared to the full-time coaches you were pretty much just cheap help.  But, to move up the coaching chain you had to put in your time and pay your dues.

Now, as a GA you might get blamed for something you really had no control over.  But, don’t worry you aren’t going to get any credit for anything that goes right.

The GA’s are doing all of the runaround things that the eight or nine fulltime guys feel are below their stature – or sometimes is just too lazy to do for themselves.

If someone needs something run off on the printer or some extra film watched – you get to do it.  If they need someone to track down a player or take attendance at a study hall – well that is your job whether it was assigned to you or not.

Let me back track here to explain a few things to the non-football people who are crazy enough to read about these episodes.  Full-time coaches are just that.  It is their job to coach the football team.

Graduate assistant coaches are generally guys who have recently finished college.  They are trading off their beginning coaching experiences (to learn from the full-time guys how to coach – theoretically – anyway.) for a chance to work on a master’s degree.

As a GA at New Mexico State I received $300 a month and the school paid for my grad courses.  Well, I never went to the classes because the Head Coach discouraged it.  He said if you earned a master’s degree you were spending too much time on school and not enough time working in the football office. (The other three GA’s with me all earned their Master’s degrees while I obviously did not.)

But, being a GA is essential to your career path in football.  Almost all guys who get a fulltime job in football have been a GA at one time or another.  It was how you broke in and met people who could pull you ahead. It’s just the way it is done in athletics.

Hell, I always thought I was lucky to find a job as a grad ass (often we went by the name of grad ass) because they are hard to get.   I literally spent two years trying to break into Division I football as a GA.  Those are coveted spots and with only four per major college staff now days very had to work your way in unless you were a player at a big school.

So, when you are lucky (did I say lucky?) enough to get one – put your head down, shut your mouth and get to work.

This is the way you will learn to be a coach!  You might also say that sometimes you learn what not to do to be a coach.  Later you learn that some of the stuff you see is just a bunch of bullshit.

That’s just the way it is.  You aid the fulltime position coaches with their own workday.  Yet, you have your assignments to get done as well.  Trust me if you keep a good attitude it isn’t that terrible.  But, it can be hard on your ego!

As you can imagine sometimes you are taken advantage of – think of an intern in the office at JP Morgan.  Interns in business are like GA’s in football.  You are there to be mentored and to learn the job.

A lot of the time you end up cleaning up meeting rooms.  Making sure everyone has pens and paper.  Running down trivial jobs that are too far beneath the full timers to do.

I have seen a graduate assistant (GA) called into a coaches’ office and told to run down the street to buy donuts for a staff meeting – (by the way) using his own dwindling money, another had to drive the head coach’s car to his home so his wife could have it (without giving the GA a ride back by the way).  And, a thousand other BS jobs that the fulltime coach is sometimes just too busy (or like I said earlier too lazy) to do himself.

But, that’s the way it works.  No one said it was easy, and no one said it was going to be fair.

Some GA’s move on to become fulltime coaches … others don’t and some decide the job is not for them and they get into a more normal business.  Of the  three other guys I spent my GA year – I was the only one to stay in college football..

One went back home to PA and became a coach and athletic director, one coached a few years in college then got out and the third returned to Montana and became a principal and later a superintendent of schools.

We had a fifth guy who came in later.  I am not sure what he ended up doing, but he didn’t stay in college coaching though.

To be honest with you I never understood why any fulltime coach would take advantage – or abuse – a grad assistant.  It never made any sense to me.  When I was fortunate to land my first fulltime job (Arizona State) I went out of my way to make sure the rookie coaches were taken care of.

Well, there was one of the reasons I got the nickname “Big Daddy.”  Mostly because I bought the guys beer, or got them fed.  But quite honestly Coach Rogers at Arizona State and his staff were really great to the young coaches – they appreciated the help they gave..

But, I can guarantee you one thing – every coach has a “GA” story.  Coaches are generally great story-tellers (alright “bullshitters” might be more closer to the mark.)  I can’t tell you the several million (hyperbole – OK) times I sat around a table stacked with beer cans with a group of coaches telling and listening to football stories.

Well, here is my graduate assistant coach story from New Mexico State.

The head coach Gil Krueger who was a prickly guy with a pretty healthy ego. He would hand out jobs to the GA’s to make sure the full-time coaches could spend time with their serious work and not have to worry about minor things around the office.

For instance – one of the four of us grad assistants was responsible for making sure the practices were filmed (notice I said filmed – there was no video equipment in those days, there were 16 millimeter cameras).

Another had to make sure the student managers had all of the practice gear on the field – things like dummies, sleds, step over bags…and most importantly footballs!

To this day I think my job might have been the most unique GA “shit” job ever in the history of football.

I was in charge of the laundry.  Yes, the laundry.  On the surface it could …  no, should have been a very simple job.  But, not so fast Batman!

At NMSU we had no washing machines and dryers in the football stadium.  So, every day all of the sweaty jerseys, pants, jocks, socks and towels had to be packed up in duffel bags and brought downtown (about two miles) to a laundromat – put into washing machines to get cleaned and then into the dryers to get dried.

I was to oversee that process.

Well, Gil gave me a player who was ineligible – Dee Taylor – to be the guy to actually do the job.  I was just to supervise him and make sure everything went properly.  I wouldn’t actually have to do the work.  That was Dee’s job.

Like I said, he would pack up the laundry load it into an athletic department truck and take it downtown.  Then he would physically load the washers and then the dryers – wait around, repack the duffel bags and drive the now clean laundry back to the stadium.

Now, the reason Dee was ineligible was because basically he was a lazy dumbass who didn’t go to class and was cruising through.  But, since he was on scholarship Coach Krueger wanted him to at least earn his way.

Things went well for about a week or so in summer football camp.  The laundry was getting done.  Gear was being handed out nice and clean.  But, all good things must come to an end.

Dee went AWOL on me during week two and the gear wasn’t cleaned one morning.

Now, no one wants to go to practice in shorts and t shirts that are  damp with old sweat let alone  wet jock straps  that smelled bad.  Oh yeah remember our school is in the southwestern desert … hmmm could get a little toasty out there on the practice field.

Naturally – and rightly so – players complained about the unwashed gear.

Gil called me in and ripped me up one side and down the other.  Called me some nice words and so on.  I tried to defend myself (wrong, wrong, wrong idea … no excuses please1) by explaining the missing Dee Taylor.

As I recall the Head Coach just had this incredulous look on his face and in no uncertain terms told me that (pardon my French here) I was a stupid fucking son of a bitch with even more nice words worked in!

He said he didn’t want to hear any bullshit excuses and if I couldn’t figure out what to do about the laundry I could pack up my pickup truck and go back home to Pennsylvania.  He said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if Dee ever showed up again, it was my responsibility to get the gear cleaned.

So, I learned pretty quickly that I had a new job – the actual task of doing the laundry myself.

Dee Taylor was never seen again!

For an entire eleven-game season I did the laundry for the New Mexico State Aggies’ football team.  Every morning from late August to the weekend before Thanksgiving I was on call to do this job.

I would get up each morning around five o’clock (at times with a hangover – no, make that many times with a hangover) walk over to the stadium load the laundry into a 1956 white Chevy Apache panel truck and drive down to the laundromat.

I had to get to the laundromat before it was opened to the public because I was going to use most of the machines in the place for the team’s laundry.

The owner of the laundromat was a real nice guy and I think he realized the bad job I got put into.  He would hand me a sack of quarters and I would load the machines, set the dials put the quarters in the slots and then sit on my butt for an hour while everything got soaped and rinsed.

Then I would load everything into driers and finish up my job.  Luckily, I am an avid reader, because I spent several hours a day for an entire season sitting on some hard and uncomfortable orange plastic chairs reading and doing crossword puzzles in a downtown Las Cruces, New Mexico laundromat.

There was a benefit however.

I missed every single eight o’clock staff meeting.  It was awesome! …. Here’s why it was so great.

At the eight o’clock staff meetings all the coaches would gather in a big meeting room and discus the previous day of practice, the game plan and so on.  Then they would plan out the work and practice for that day.

But, Gil would take part of that meeting time and go around the room and basically call out each coach one by one and actually tell them they were doing shitty jobs in preparing “his” team.

Now we had a bad team – granted.  We only won two or three games that year.  But, to blame everyone around the captain of a sinking ship was ridiculous.  So, in a lot of these meetings you had to sit through stories of Gil’s great career  – winning a national championship at Northern Michigan and his other great achievements and then you had to accept what amounted to an ass chewing.

Well, I got to miss pretty much every single one of those meetings.  Perhaps laundry duty was worth the price on not getting bitched at every day.

Now, back home in PA a lot of my buddies thought I was on my way – big time coach in a major college.  Some were actually envious.  Boy, if they only knew some of the bullshit involved.  (Think about it, a lower than whale shit grad assistant coach at a losing low level major college with a jackass for a head coach!  … how great will that look on my resume?)

I still recall the last day I did my laundry job.

I call this part “The Last Ride”.

The Friday before the eleventh and final game (I think we were going to play at Southern Illinois) I did my last batch of laundry.  I loaded the many duffel bags of dirty gear into the rear of the truck.

Let me tell you a little about the 1956 Chevy Apache.  Also known as the “Laundry Wagon”.  First of all, it was 20 some years old already.  It was painted primer white.  The truck had no seats at all.  So, I took an empty five-gallon paint bucket and put a piece of carpet on top of it to make it at least somewhat comfortable for me to sit and drive.

This beauty had a three-speed manual transmission that was on the steering column.  (“Three-on-the-tree” as we called it in those days).  Luckily, I was acquainted with driving a standard shift since my own truck had one.  Of course, the clutch would slip and it was a herky-jerky effort to get the Apache moving from a stop.

The windows obviously were crank jobs and the passenger side window did not roll down at all.  But, it was only a two-mile trip from the stadium to the laundromat – so not an issue.  Someone had taped a big feather on the Chevy hood ornament (probably would piss of the PC people now days – too bad!).  Well – think … Apache.

Oh yeah – only one headlight would work and neither of the taillights had worked for years.

But, the best for last, the windshield wipers did not operate at all.  Well, living in the southwestern desert it usually only rained in the “Monsoon Season in New Mexico” (OK- look it up – there is a “Monsoon Season”) and you really didn’t need wipers.

I shit you not – that was my beautiful 1956 Apache laundry truck.  You may think I am making this up but I swear it is the truth.

So, the Friday morning – a week before Thanksgiving – Right around dawn I haul the dirty gear from the stadium locker room and load it into the back of the Apache.

The sky was just starting to brighten up and yet you could tell it was going to be overcast and rainy.  Now remember the condition of my transportation.

It’s still pretty dark, it’s raining and I was probably hung-over.

I jump into the primer white panel truck for my last ride to the laundromat.  I still remember my thoughts to this day.  I truly said this out loud that day.  “Here I am in New Mexico – big time football coach driving a panel truck full of dirty laundry with no front seat, no headlights or windshield wipers.  It’s dark and it is raining.  If my friends could see me now.”

The big time isn’t always the big time and working in Division I football isn’t always as it is portrayed.  Over the years I learned from someone else’s wisdom — never take yourself to seriously.

By the way I never saw Dee Taylor again and I would bet money he is still skating by somewhere.  But, he adds to the context and humor of this story!

Hah … what a life!