Ticats’ Glanville ‘loving everything’ in CFL
Former NFL head coach embraces the challenges and culture of the Canadian game
HAMILTON — More than 50 years after taking his first football coaching gig, Jerry Glanville sees the light at the end of the tunnel like only he can.
The colourful Glanville is completing his first season as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ defensive co-ordinator after serving as a guest coach with the club in 2017. The Ticats face the Ottawa Redblacks in the East Division final Sunday after dominating the B.C. Lions 48-8 on Sunday.
“When I took this job my wife (Brenda) asked, ‘How long do you think you’ll stay there,’ ” Glanville said straight-faced before delivering the punch line with a broad smile. “I said, ‘No longer than 15 years.’
“I love it (in the CFL), I love everything about it. It’s great fun, great players, the players play hard. It’s just been totally great experience.”
He’s appeared in movies, driven race cars and served as a television football analyst. But make no mistake, Glanville — a former linebacker at Northern Michigan University — is a football coach and always will be.
“Coaches coach and preachers preach, they take that to the box,” Glanville said. “I’ll be coaching when they put me in the box.
“When I was doing TV, Waylon Jennings told me, ‘Quit TV tomorrow. You know more football than anybody. Don’t you dare die without teaching it, don’t you dare die with the music inside you.’ Watching coaches grow and players play is why you never say, ’I’m done.’”
Glanville, a Detroit native who calls Knoxville, Tenn., home, took his first coaching job in 1967 as Western Kentucky’s defensive co-ordinator. He spent 20 seasons in the NFL, including nine as a head coach with Houston (198589) and Atlanta (1990-93).
“A cat is supposed to have nine lives and I think I’m down to about four, Glanville said. “I’ve been very blessed.”
Taking the Hamilton job reunited Glanville with Ticats head coach June Jones. Glanville was on the Falcons coaching staff when Jones was a quarterback with the club (1977-81) and the two have worked together in both the NFL (Houston and Atlanta) and NCAA (Hawaii).
But the CFL presented challenges for Glanville, none bigger than its unlimited motion.
“You have to be smart enough to throw out a lot of your American coverages,” he said. “In the U.S. I’m a full bump-and-run teacher but I don’t full press bump and run anybody that’s off the line.
“I treat the motion guy like he’s a slotback off the line, then I add four yards in my depth to cover them. You know what? There’s a lot of bump-and-run people playing in the NFL that couldn’t cover anybody up here. It’s different.”
Linebacker Larry Dean, who had 106 tackles this season and is a finalist for the CFL’s top defensive player award, calls Glanville a “football historian,” who delivers sometimes very colourful messages.
“I can’t repeat some of them,” Dean said with a chuckle. “We’re just trying to get as much knowledge from him as we can.
“He has different philosophies, different ways to look at things and I just find it interesting to pick his brain and get the skin and bones of it.”
However football isn’t what defines Glanville, who’s rubbed elbows with such big-name entertainers as Jennings, Johnny
Cash and Burt Reynolds.
But Glanville took Reynolds’ death in September at the age of 82 especially hard. The two worked together in the 2017 film “The Last Movie Star.”
“He taught you humility,” Glanville said. “People would line up three blocks for autographs and he never turned anyone down, he never treated anyone badly, he signed every autograph and spoke to every single person.
“He was bent over and had a hard time walking but he’d never take a double. He was just that type of guy.”