Coach wants founder Ford around more often
Gattuso had program legend speak to players about team’s history
Bob Ford, the father of the University at Albany football program, spoke to the entire team on Saturday for the first time since he retired as head coach eight years ago.
He stood outside in front of the former University Field — now the school’s track and field complex — where he coached 43 of his 44 seasons with the Great Danes. The players sat on the old wooden bleachers that overlook the field.
Ford, 83, gave them a 20-minute history lesson on Great Danes football at the invitation of Greg Gattuso, the man who succeeded Ford as head coach.
“I want the kids to know who he is,” Gattuso said. “A lot of these guys haven’t met him. … We talked about him coming down more. I want him to come down. He’s a great guy ... Sometimes people lose that sight of what (Ford) did here and what an amazing job he did. So I think it’s important that he comes back.”
Ford, who still lives with his wife in Ballston Lake, didn’t give his speech a rave review when asked about it on Monday
“You know, I hadn’t spoken to a group in eight years, so it’s obvi
ously a skill I guess you develop, or hopefully you do, but if you don’t use it, you lose it,” he said. “So I don’t think it was as good as I thought I used to be.”
Ualbany redshirt junior linebacker Danny Damico was impressed enough. Before Saturday, he had only said hello to Ford in passing.
“I like what he’s all about,” Damico said. “He’s a lot about tradition, setting the bar high. When you set goals you’ve just got to keep stacking them so you can get better. You can’t just settle for mediocrity. I really like that.”
Ford revived Ualbany football as a club program in 1970 and guided the Great Danes to varsity status in 1973 as a Division III program. He led them into Division II in 1995 and the Football Championship Subdivision four years later. His final season was Ualbany’s first in the Colonial Athletic Association and the debut of Casey Stadium, which has a turf field named for Ford.
He went 256-170 at the varsity level, including a perfect season in 1974 that he mentioned to the current team on Saturday.
Then Ford told them about three landmark upset victories for the program: 42-39 at Maine in 1977, 28-27 at Central Florida in 1980 and 17-10 at Delaware (led by quarterback and future Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco) in 2006.
He related those games to Ualbany’s season opener on Sept. 4 at eight-time FCS champion North Dakota State.
“If you go out to North Dakota State and beat them,” Ford said, “(Alabama) coach (Nick) Saban will start his coaching meeting on Sunday morning and he’ll say to the staff, ‘Did you see what the hell happened up at North Dakota State this past week?”
Since retiring, Ford has watched Ualbany home games from the alumni suite at Casey Stadium. He did some fundraising for the school, but that was curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Ford has been hesitant to get too close to the team out of respect to Gattuso. He did attend a team barbecue several years ago.
“I’m a ham at heart, so I always love the opportunity to talk, especially about football,” Ford said. “But I told (Gattuso) I don’t want to ever appear as if I were looking over his shoulder, so I will go by invitation, but I’m not going to just walk in on a staff meeting, so that’s where we are.”
Gattuso said he felt the same emotions when he left Duquesne, which he guided for a dozen seasons, to become a Pitt assistant in 2005.
“It’s really hard when you leave somewhere that you built and love,” he said. “I know how it feels to go back sometimes. You start analyzing everything. One of my first times back at Duquesne was an off week when I was at Pitt. I was yelling plays at a (Duquesne) coach: ‘Run this.’”
Ford acknowledged that he “tremendously” misses coaching. He won six Northeast Conference titles at Ualbany and guided the Great Danes to NCAA Tournament appearances in 1977 and 2011.
He spends time at home doing yard work in the morning, reading in the afternoon, and then enjoying a cocktail and dinner with his wife.
“The definition of a good job for me was, get up in the morning and you couldn’t wait to go to work and then when you walked across the threshold, you had some fun people to work with and good people to work with,” he said. “The third thing was, you had enough resources to do your definition of a good job, which in our case was graduating kids and winning football games.”