RICE CHASING HIS DREAM
Mike Bloomgren took a meandering path to his first head-coaching job, but he never lost his focus
Bobby Bowden. Rex Ryan. David Shaw. Dennis Franchione. • Among the list of football minds to hire, shape, and develop Mike Bloomgren, it’s his high school coach Mike Hickman who might be most responsible for his job at Rice. • “I grew up in a single-parent home at that time and my mom was working full-time in grad school so I was the old-school latchkey kid,” Bloomgren said. “Coach Hickman is somebody who got me into football and really made it something I was passionate about … But he also wasn’t afraid to step in there and tell me when I was out of line and be that father figure.” • Bloomgren’s path to Rice, where he will debut as its head coach Saturday against Prairie View A&M, has not been a straight line, but he has developed a singular focus on being a winning coach.
Born in central Florida, Bloomgren relocated to Toronto until he was 5, after which his mother moved them to Houston in search of a new teaching job. He attended Spring Shadows Elementary and played Spring Branch American Little League. To pursue her doctorate, they returned to Florida, where his high school practice field was a short distance from Florida State.
Bloomgren, 41, played tight end for two seasons at Culver-Stockton College, a private institution of almost 1,100 students in northeast Missouri.
Hickman helped him launch his coaching career as a defensive undergraduate assistant for Bowden at Florida State, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sports management in 1999. From there he worked as a graduate assistant at the University of Alabama, earning his master’s in higher education in 2001.
NFL experience paid off
After a two-year stint as co-offensive coordinator at Catawba College, Bloomgren ran the offense at Delta State, where he met Joe Ashfield and Jerry Mack, his current offensive line coach and offensive coordinator, respectively.
The Statesmen ran a passheavy, spread attack; a far departure from Stanford’s grinding ground game. But it was at his next two stops — starting with the New York Jets in 2007 — that Bloomgren began morphing into the head coach he’s become.
“His experience in the NFL is very formative to what he’s become from an X’s and O’s standpoint,” said Ashfield, who left Delta State for his first stint at Stanford in 2005 and 2006. “When I got back to Stanford with him (in 2013) his knowledge just exploded — and he was a very good offensive coordinator at Delta State. We went from good to a really high level quickly. He was the same guy but his level of knowledge had just gone through the roof.”
At this point, Bloomgren had won a pair of conference titles as a member of Florida State’s staff and another with Alabama in 1999. In each of his final two seasons in New York, the Jets lost in the AFC Championship Game. At Stanford, he would go on to win three Pac-12 titles.
“My first impression is that he was a really smart guy,” said Brian Smith, Owls defensive coordinator. “I knew one day that he’d be a head coach. He just had that feeling.”
Smith would know. Not only did he share an office with Bloomgren, but the two began working as quality control coaches for the Jets on the same day.
“Coach Bloomgren and I come from that Bill Belichick-Eric Mangini (style) of situational football,” he said. “We spent a lot of time studying other teams around the league and your knowledge of the game expands so much. You look at all the possibilities, preparing for situations that you never even thought about. We were having late-night discussions about that, it’s like getting a Ph.D. in football.”
For all of his growth and success with the Jets, Bloomgren’s NFL aspirations shifted into college football dreams once he left to start coaching Stanford’s offensive line in 2011.
“I remember maybe a year or two after he had left the Jets and he just told me, ‘You’ve got to try it.’ He loved it so much. He was so happy at Stanford,” Smith said. “I could just feel it, he equated it to Disney World. It piqued my interest.”
At Stanford, Bloomgren’s offenses rewrote record books.
His running backs set school rushing records and helped dominate time of possession, his linemen were some of the most decorated in program history, and a pair of former players (Christian McCaffrey then Bryce Love) finished as Heisman Trophy runners-up in 2015 and 2017.
“He’s a great, great coach,” Love said of Bloomgren. “I had an opportunity to learn so much from him out here, but he was also one of the main recruiters I had. Being around him and his family, it was obvious that he loves ball and is passionate about what he does. He’s a great coach, and I’m excited to see what he’s going to be able to accomplish at Rice.”
It’s at Stanford that he met current Rice quarterbacks coach Robbie Picazo, as well as the Owls’ new strength and conditioning coach, Hans Straub. He also reunited with Ashfield, who returned as an offensive assistant.
Building a culture
But most formidably, Bloomgren gleaned the framework for how he’s developed a cultural brand at Rice from Shaw, the Cardinal coach. He even borrowed the team’s motto, ‘Intellectual Brutality.’
“The biggest thing David does is culture and how people legitimately enjoy showing up to work,” Bloomgren said. “There’s so many pieces of what he did that I want to incorporate here at Rice.”
So far that’s been reflected through the team’s players, staff, and facilities.
Although Bloomgren has yet to coach his first game at Rice, he’s grateful to be in August, months removed from the most rudimentary aspects of foundation-building. Coaches made strides crafting their offensive identity through the summer; students in his first recruiting class are on campus and a few have even cracked the two-deep depth chart; and with visible additions to the Brian Patterson Center, the school has embraced the program’s upward momentum. Many players describe longer, tougher and more exhausting practices; but in the same breath they say Bloomgren has made football fun again. They praise their collective gains and their new coach’s optimism and attention to detail.
“In the past there may have been a few guys on the fence here and there; there may have been some guys who weren’t living how they should be as a Division I athlete,” captain Zach Abercrumbia said. “But I feel like now all the guys have bought in and that’s the very first step. It’s not something that we just wake up, come here and do. It’s something that we actually live so I’m proud to be a part of that.” Bloomgren’s proud too. Saturday, he hopes his players take a big step toward maintaining that attitude: winning.
“I worked a long time to be a head coach at a place where I believe you can win games. So that’s the most exciting part, is checking the box of attaining that role,” Bloomgren said in March. “The reality is I never wanted to be a head coach, I always wanted to be a winning head coach.”