Leftwich rising star on diverse Bucs staff
The kid stood at one end of the H.D. Woodson High practice field with the rest of the JV football players. A stray football rolled toward him from the other end, where the varsity had gathered, so he picked it up and threw it back.
“Who threw that ball?” asked Bob Headen, the head coach at Washington, D.C., school.
“Byron,” Headen remembers someone telling him.
“Tell him to do the same thing,” Headen said.
Byron Leftwich, a freshman wide receiver hopeful, rifled another laser beam. Headen waved him over and told Leftwich he liked how he threw the ball.
Leftwich wanted to play wideout, but Headen insisted he would become Woodson’s backup quarterback. In a blowout later in the season against Spingarn, Leftwich got to play and
threw a touchdown pass.
“The next morning, he said, ‘Coach, I think I like that position, quarterback,’ ” Headen said this week, laughing. “And that was it.”
The football journey Leftwich began in Washington has taken him to a position of prominence at the Super Bowl, the third of his career but his first as a coach.
A cerebral quarterback for 10 years in the NFL, Leftwich began his rapid coaching ascent five years ago, when he again agreed to take on a role he at first didn’t know he wanted. On Sunday, Leftwich will call plays for Tom Brady as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator.
Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians, Leftwich’s offensive coordinator late in his playing career when he was a backup with the Pittsburgh Steelers, tried to lure Leftwich into coaching for three years, until Leftwich decided he was ready.
Arians views him as so essential that he said he would not have come out of retirement to coach Tampa Bay had the organization not let him hire Leftwich as offensive coordinator.
When Arians hired Leftwich, he made him part of the NFL’s most diverse coaching staff. The Bucs have 12 Black assistant coaches, including an unprecedented four coordinators in Leftwich, special teams coordinator Keith Armstrong, defensive coordinator Todd Bowles and run game coordinator/assistant head coach Harold Goodwin.
The staff also includes two women, assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar and assistant defensive line coach Lori Locust.
“For us, it’s the best coaches we know,” Arians said. “They just happen to be some women, some African American. I would hope that other owners would look and see that this works, to have that many different voices giving input so that the output is greater, and make an example of it.”
Arians assembled his staff amid a persistent, ongoing NFL crisis.
A league consisting of roughly 70 percent Black players has only three Black head coaches and an acute dearth of Black offensive coordinators and quarterback coaches — the two positions most likely to produce head coaching candidates.
Despite appearing in his second straight Super Bowl, Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy was passed over for the third consecutive hiring cycle in which he received multiple interviews. Leftwich didn’t even get an interview.
If NFL owners are to improve their dismal record of hiring Black coaches, Leftwich might be a pivotal figure.
Despite the league overlooking him this year, his supporters and players believe he’s a future head coach.
“He’s just got an amazing sense of poise under duress,” Brady said. “He’s got a lot of great years ahead of him. I’m sure he’ll be a head coach very soon.”
Leftwich, 41, would be the first Black quarterback to play in the NFL and become a head coach in the league since Fritz Pollard in 1921.
“Hopefully one day it’s not such a big thing that two AfricanAmerican coordinators are in the Super Bowl,” Leftwich said. “But it is still right now. So it’s something we have to talk about.”
From the start, Leftwich exuded the qualities of a future coach. Headen gave him free rein in Woodson’s pass-happy offense, allowing him to audible to different plays at the line of scrimmage because his calls almost always worked.
“The guys, they listened to him,” Headen said.
Leftwich went on to have a successful collegiate career at Marshall, where he became a Heisman Trophy contender and created the iconic image of his offensive linemen carrying him down the field after he returned from a leg injury serious enough that he had been driven to a hospital for X-rays.
“It’s the same way that he coaches,” Brady said. “He gives it everything he’s got.”
Leftwich’s position stands out because of how few Black coaches have been granted the opportunity to run an offense.
When the Houston Texans hired David Culley, he became only the sixth Black head coach in the modern era who came from the offensive side of the ball. This season, Leftwich and Bieniemy were the only two Black offensive coordinators in the NFL, a fact not lost on them.
“First of all, we’re all in the Super Bowl together, so that says a lot about what we’ve accomplished together,” Bieniemy said. “That just goes to show you, there are great coaches in this league, and plenty more need to be given those same opportunities and given those same windows to go through.”