The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘No risk it, no biscuit’
Wisecracking Frank Giufre will be anything but timid as UConn’s new offensive coordinator
STORRS — Every spectator sport invites secondguessing. Major league baseball managers know this whenever they walk to the mound and wave to the bullpen. Football offensive coordinators know this whenever they turn on a sports talk station on the ride home from a game.
It is human nature, the insatiable hunger for your team to win or to be the smartest guy in the room …
“And people in hell want ice water,” said Frank Giufre, UConn’s firstyear offensive coordinator. “I’ll put it this way. I don’t read blogs. I don’t look at the newspaper. I don’t read anything you guys write. No offense. I have skin like an armadillo. Of the guys I have been around, one of the best quotes is ‘No risk it, no biscuit’ from Bruce Arians. If you look, that’s at the top of the call sheet.
“I’m not going to change. We’re not going to change who we are and what we believe in. Somebody thinks they can do a better job, I don’t critique guys on their jobs. They’re more than welcome in here to come grind the 16 and 18hour days we do. See if they can last. When we walk into the building, when we practice, our blinders are on, it’s laser focus.”
Hold on a second, Frank. Rewind a paragraph. “No risk it, no biscuit,” is on your call sheet above all the plays, down and distance, field position, scripted and endofgame plays?
“Yeah,” Giufre said. “There are a couple other sayings, too. I’m not going to share the other ones.”
Let’s hope none of them are “David Corley is going to be an icon in our profession,” like Bob Diaco said early in November 2016 when he replaced Frank Verducci as offensive coordinator. After scoring 16 points in the final four games all three were gone.
You can get dizzier than a guy with vertigo riding a carousel going through the UConn offensive coordinators in recent years. George DeLeone, T.J. Weist, Mike Cummings, Verducci, Corley, Rhett Lashlee, John Dunn and now, Giufre. One was interim head coach for three games, one the brother of a renowned baseball writer/announcer, one the wunderkind sup
posed to remain until he got a head coaching job and yet another who was going to get a $150,000 raise out of head coach Randy Edsall’s pocket to stick around.
All gone. Giufre means eight OCs in seven years, not counting Jerry Kill who was supposed to come in after 2016 to work with Diaco and never did.
The good news is the offense under the defense-consumed Diaco is long gone. So are those national rankings among the bottom five in the nation. The 276 yards a game in 2014? The 19 total touchdowns in 2016? Diaco didn’t want to risk it and he didn’t want his Huskies to have biscuits. He wanted fishcakes and zeroes on the scoreboard.
Before leaving after one season to become OC at SMU — not as head coach — Lashlee did push UConn to 50th in the nation at 415 yards a game. Last year, Dunn was 88th at 378 yards before bolting to the Jets as tight ends coach two months after the season. The bad news, the horrible news, was the Huskies needed to be one of the most explosive offenses in the nation to offset arguably the worst defense in the history of college football. We’ll have to see how that goes in 2019.
Enter Giufre, a big bear of a man, although not nearly as big as the 400 pounds when he arrived in Storrs early in 2018 to become the offensive line coach.
Arians’ biscuit motto, as defined by the Tampa Bay Bucs’ coach himself, essentially means, “If you don’t reach for greatness, you’ll be average the rest of your life.” Good words to live by and good ones for potentially timid offensive coordinators to heed. Giufre, who grew up in the world of martial arts and coached with Arians with the Colts, is anything but timid. He has no shortage of wisecracks, which fans will love if they arrive after UConn Ws. While Giufre has nearly two decades of coaching experience, he also has not called plays before.
So with less than two weeks before Game 1 against Wagner, how’s his first foray into OC going?
“How much gray hair do I have now?” said Giufre, who maintains a dual title as offensive line coach. “It’s been good. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s trying to get these guys get to a place where they can’t get to on their own. To me, that’s what coaching is. That’s why you get up in the morning. That’s why you come to work. We’ve got really good guys in that offensive room. Really, really good coaches, better men. They’re fired up.”
Giufrew, who grew up in Canastota, N.Y., was an offensive lineman at Syracuse. He was a graduate assistant at Miami before moving to Sacred Heart, Maine and the Indianapolis Colts. The preponderance of his work has involved the line and tight ends. The most challenging part of being offensive coordinator?
“Learning the receivers’ names,” Giufre said. “Before, it was, ‘Hey, 82 or 84.’ Now, it’s, ‘OK, Mason (Donaldson). OK, Elijah (Jeffreys).’ I can’t give them nicknames or bust their chops anymore. On a serious note, it has been 19 years of at the snap of the ball your eyes go right to offense line on the run game and when you’re throwing your eyes is go right to where the protection is going.
“Now it’s expand your vision. It’s something I’ve got to work on a daily basis. I’m so keen right to the offensive line. It’s a hard habit to break. It’s like brushing your teeth with your right hand. Something happens and you’ve got to everything left handed. We’re getting better.”
Giufre has developed an experienced offensive line that should be a strength and one that stresses communication. (“And anyone that’s married knows the root of all issues in life comes from poor communication.”) With a massive turnover at the position, he has seen some young receivers surprise in camp. (“Not surprised in, ‘My God I can’t believe he’s playing this way,’ but surprised they’re coming in, working hard, doing everything you ask, no issues.”) Running back has depth and a budding star in Kevin Mensah. (“You can tell he put the time in during the offseason in terms of his flexibility, speed and strength improvement. He’s a little more rocked up muscle wise. I’m excited about Kevin.”)
And? “We’re not going to line up and run the WingT, but we’ve got to run the ball,” Giufre said.
The Huskies had a scrimmage Saturday at Rentschler Field: “I think we were hot and cold,” Giufre said of the offense. “We did some good things. We did some bad things. We just need to be more consistent in every phase of the game.”
Which brings us to the unnamed starting quarterback. With transfer Micah Leon nursing injury and Jack Zergiotis an incoming freshman, the starter against Wagner will be transfer Mike Beaudry or redshirt freshman Steven Krajewski. The bet is Beaudry.
“Everybody asks about the quarterback,” Giufre said. “It’s still an ongoing battle … Whenever we figure it out, you guys will know.
“You want to see how a guy commands the offense. You want to see a guy take charge. You want to see a guy show control. Each one of these guys has positives and things in their game they need to work on.”
What does that mean to Beaudry?
“Do all the little things right,” he said. “Everyone here can throw the football. It’s about leading other people and handling all the details.”
And “No risk it, no biscuit?”
“Oh, yeah,” Beaudry said. “I love Bruce Arians. I read his book. So did my dad. I know coach Giufre is a big Arians fan.”