It didn’t take long for Glanville to embrace the Canadian game
In his half-century in the football business, last Friday night was the first time Jerry Glanville had ever been to a CFL game.
And he was running one of the defences in it.
“I love the 20-second rule, I don’t need 40 seconds like they do in America,” the Hamilton TigerCats’ new defensive co-ordinator says of the brief gap between plays here. “The way we do it, I just need 10 seconds to get ready.”
Glanville has been getting ready since he blew his first coaching whistle in 1967, at Western Kentucky. That led to an unbroken four-plus-decade string of big-time coaching jobs, mostly in the NFL, with nine combined years as the Main Guy in Houston and Atlanta.
Although he’s done a lot of guest and volunteer coaching stints (including a brief one at training camp here last year) and was immersed in the game as a TV analyst, he hasn’t held a formal coaching position since he ran the defence at Portland State in 2009.
You’d never guess that from his knowledgeable ease, and aggressiveness, on the Mac practice
field and from what those around him are saying.
“I love his style,” offers starting safety Courtney Stephen, who’s entering his sixth Ticat season, with his fourth defensive co-ordinator in the last three years.
“He’s a tough coach and that’s what you want. He knows his stuff inside and out. He does a good job of putting us in positions to make plays.”
The 76-year-old Glanville is a legendary coach, a long time stock-car driver/owner and, frankly, a character.
“Who here isn’t, though,” Stephen laughs. “Have you looked around this team? It’s why we get along so well.”
Glanville knows he still has things to learn about the Canadian game, and a cynic might point to the 36-18 loss to the Argos as Exhibit A. But that was a preseason game with lots of extra players in the mix and the defence was often compromised by the offence making more turnovers than a baker on adrenalin.
The real exam will be come in Calgary and Edmonton when the season opens in just over a week.
But Glanville says he had no issues with the different configurations of the Canadian game during his first exposure to live action. Secondary coach, William Fields, and assistant head coach, Orlondo Steinauer, Kent Austin’s defensive co-ordinator for four years, quickly arm him with down-and-distance and offensive-set prompts at the start of each play. Then Glanville calls the defence.
“On the sidelines, the game slows down to me, it’s like it’s in slow motion,” Glanville says.
“I could do that even when I was a player. I think I shocked my college coach that I could see everything on just about every play. It’s God-given. I don’t think that I ever did anything to make it better.”
His defences are notoriously aggressive, so much so that June Jones had to reel them in after the second day of training camp. Glanville promises he’ll find a way to maintain and stoke that aggression despite the no-pads rule the CFL has instituted for the season.
Wednesday was the Ticats’ last 2018 day wearing pads.
And while he’ll make adjustments to the Canadian game, don’t expect Glanville not to continue his career-long embrace of the blitz and man-toman defence. Of the 16 defensive highlights he isolated from Friday’s game — “where we played so well the pictures should be in the Louvre” — 14 were in man-toman coverage.
“I think the biggest difference here is the yard off the ball,” he says. “The second biggest difference is that you can’t run your U.S. defence because the motion toward the line of scrimmage dictates who can cover who. In America, I’d have a defence where a linebacker takes a slot (receiver) but a linebacker can’t cover a slot who’s already running.”
Steinauer says that Glanville’s passion for the game and for life — “whether it’s head coaching, being an assistant coach or NASCAR race driving” — is infectious.
“It’s something you have to feel from being around him,” Steinauer explains. “You ask ‘Is this consistent or is this a one-day thing?’ But it’s consistent. He is about football and about being the best.
“He has no desire to be average, I’ll tell you that.”