Herm Edwards pleased to return to coaching
As February draws to a close, so will spring practice at Arizona State.
The Sun Devils kicked off practice during the first Tuesday of this month, one day before national signing day, and they’ll wrap up workouts Feb. 28 with a spring game.
This is Year 2 for Arizona State coach Herm Edwards, whose hiring in 2017 prompted many to question why the school hired a 63-year-old with no previous college coaching experience and nearly a decade removed from his last coaching job in the NFL.
“I did the right thing by coming back,” Edwards said of the decision to leave an analyst job at ESPN to return to the coaching ranks for the first time since 2008. “I had a chance to come back before and I chose not to, and I think once I got immersed in it again, I really realized how much I really missed it. I knew I missed it, but I really didn’t know how much I missed it.”
During Edwards’ first season, Arizona State finished with a 7-6 overall record, including a 5-4 mark in the Pac-12. The team placed second in the South Division behind Utah. Nine of the Sun Devils’ 13 games were decided by seven or fewer points, including four of the team’s six losses.
“We played nine games of one score. We didn’t win all of them, but we were very competitive and that’s what we’re trying to build. We’re trying to build a competitive profile where we’re going to have an opportunity to win games. I thought we were a team that kept our poise,” Edwards said while reflecting on last season.
Edwards said the biggest challenge for him early on was getting to know his players as well as working with an entirely new coaching staff.
“I haven’t coached with any of these guys and they hadn’t coached with me. Now some of these guys are veteran college football coaches, and I haven’t coached in college football in quite some time,” he said. “I’ve been around football. I’ve been involved in football, but not at the college level, since I retired from pro football and I was at San Jose State.”
The learning curve was big for Edwards, who took made the most of his time during the offseason, but he didn’t really get a thumb on the pulse of his team and his staff until the 2018 season started.
“You really truly don’t find out about people until you play. You know when there is something at stake and wins and losses are important and how you deal with those things are important as well,” Edwards said. “And that’s when you really start figuring out who you are.”
Even then, things were fluid as Edwards grew to understand his team better. He made adjustments including changing the offensive mindset to a much more run-focused attack.
“I said if we’re going to do anything and improve, (we’ve) got to be able to run the football and they took hold of it and ran with it and we did a pretty good job of running the ball and being a balanced football team,” he said.
ASU finished with the second-best rushing offense in the Pac-12, averaging close to 185 yards per game. Sophomore running back Eno Benjamin led the league in rushing with a single-season school record of 1,642 yards and 16 touchdowns.
Another unique challenge for Edwards was recruiting.
What used to last only a few months now spans the entire year for college coaches.
“Probably 70 percent of your workload is recruiting,” Edwards said.
To help with that workload, Edwards adopted an NFL-style approach to recruiting, including setting up a scouting department that helps coaches evaluate high school recruits.
“The time that is spent on really reviewing players and trying to figure out what your DNA is, that was time consuming and it still is,” he said. “But now we’re on a schedule and we’ve been together as a staff and we’ve kind of hit our stride.”
He insists critics who believe Edwards is nothing more than a glorified CEO, deferring decisions to his assistant coaches, are mistaken.
“No, no, no, I’m no CEO,” said Edwards. “I’m the coach. I’m here every day at 4 o’clock in the morning. I’m the first guy in the building now. I actually coach. I go on the field and coach. When I took this job, it wasn’t like I was just going to delegate everything. No, no, no, no.”
Edwards said he become player’s lives.
Benjamin, it’s important part of his
the
tailback who flourished during Edwards’ first season, said the team was surprised by their new coach.
“When he was first hired, I felt like, ‘Oh man, he’s got this Army background. He’s gonna come in NFL-coach strict.’ And so the first day he came in, he set the rules and he just told us that it was up to us, it was up to us as a team not to cross those boundaries. He literally laid everything out on the line,” Benjamin said.
“He’s a very open guy. He knows how to relate to the young cats even though he’s an older guy.”
Edwards believes in an open-door policy, hoping his players will take advantage of the wealth of experience he can provide.
“I told my team and I told my coaches this, I said, ‘Look, everything we’ve ever learned somebody told us this. We were taught by somebody else. We didn’t just wake up and have all this. We learned it from somebody else,’ ” Edwards said. “I said if you don’t walk through this door and ask me questions, shame on you because I want to help you.
“I want to give you that knowledge and, whether you use it or not, walk in here and ask me that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to serve you. That’s what I took the job for. This is a service job. I’m here to serve you guys, OK.”
The lessons Edwards is teaching extend to the program’s interaction with the media and the use of social media.
While some programs limit social-media use or media interviews, Edwards wants his players to embrace it all with one caveat.
“You can make sure they understand the importance of when you press the button, send, that it becomes your résumé, guys, for the rest of your life,” he said.
“The more I could put them in position to understand how to say things, how to speak to them, how to deal with the media, whether it be right, wrong or indifferent, how to deal with it, that’s important to me because that’s a part of the development that we say we were supposed to do as coaches.”
It’s all coming together for Edwards, who believes he made the right choice returning to coaching.
“I’m like those teachers or professors at those schools. They take those sabbaticals,” he said. “I took a sabbatical for nine years and then decided to come back. … I decided that last year was the year I was going to come back and I enjoyed every bit of it, every single bit of it and I’m just so fortunate that I was given the opportunity to be the head coach here.”