Hall of Famers Cowher, LeBeau cherish time with Spanos
While shaping the Pittsburgh Steelers game plans of the 1990s and 2000s, head coach Bill Cowher and defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau had many questions and a trusted man in place for many answers.
Beside them for years was Lou Spanos, now UConn’s fiery interim head coach, then a young NFL assistant who spent countless hours elbow-to-elbow in meeting rooms with his Hall of Fame mentors.
Spanos was on the Steelers staff in 1994-2009, working specifically with linebackers and in areas of quality control, but generally leaving a thumb print on much of the Steelers’ identity.
“He’s got the memory of an elephant,” Cowher said.
“He was my right-hand man,” LeBeau said.
Spanos was the details guy, the human history book so important to a Sunday playbook. Where the Steelers were going always had a lot to do with where they’d been, what they’d seen, what Spanos could recall and how the entire staff could meld it all together — usually in the late hours of Tuesday nights in the team’s defensive meeting room.
“I used to always sit there and say, ‘Lou, how did we get here,’ initially, with this concept?” said Cowher, who coached the Steelers for 15 seasons in 1992-2006. “And he would be able to walk through the evolution of something. Which I think is fascinating because a lot of people today just do what they’re told and don’t try to understand why you’re doing it. He was the kind of guy who understood what we were doing and why we were doing it and, more importantly, how we got there.”
Who could argue with the Pittsburgh road map Cowher and LeBeau drew up with Spanos’ help?
The Steelers, with some of the dominant defenses of the era, went to three Super Bowls during Spanos’ time
with the team — winning Super Bowl XL after the 2005 season under Cowher and Super Bowl XLIII after the 2008 season under Mike Tomlin.
Cowher was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2020.
LeBeau, who still holds the Detroit Lions franchise record for career interceptions, had been inducted in 2017, honored for his work as both a dominant defensive back and the main architect of defenses during long stretches as a coordinator with the Steelers and Bengals. He is considered one of the greatest defensive coaches of all time.
These men are, in short, legendary football figures who shaped Spanos’ coaching career — and found their own jobs to be more manageable through Spanos’ photographic memory and versatility.
“He was like my personal filing system,” LeBeau said. “He knew the defense as well as I did. If I saw something that I knew I had dealt with previously, but maybe I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I would say, ‘Now Lou, do you remember three years ago when Baltimore was doing this?’ … ‘Yeah, Yeah.’ Always. He was a tremendous resource. He didn’t forget anything.”
Spanos is now the face of UConn football, at least for a while. The Huskies defensive coordinator since 2019, he was named interim head coach Monday to coincide with Randy Edsall’s departure.
UConn needs reconstruction on the field and off, having gone 6-32 under Edsall. The fan base has essentially eroded. An embarrassing loss to Holy Cross, of the Football Championship Subdivision, in the home opener took place Saturday before an announced crowd of 18.782 — but just 6,166 tickets were actually scanned at the gates. UConn hasn’t been mildly competitive since 2015, and hasn’t had a winning record since 2010.
Spanos’ job isn’t necessarily to fix all that. It is to inspire a team at the outset of yet another transition, to inject positive energy, confidence, competence and purpose. And to win a few games, of course. Spanos has made a point to say it is important for UConn players to have fun, and for fans to see them having fun.
“That’s a culture we tried to build in Pittsburgh,” Cowher said. “There’s a time to work and a time to play but you certainly always wanted to have passion. It’s a game we’ve all been playing since we were very little. You need to enjoy it. You need to play with a degree of passion, a degree of purpose, but that’s also the way you attack life. You need to make sure you’re having fun, but fun also comes with winning. You can do both.”
“Lou’s a very serious guy. He’s a guy that also has a sense of humor. But he’s all business when he needs to be business. He’s going to hold people accountable. He’s going to push you, but he’s also going to pat you on the back when you do it right. He’ll bring structure, discipline and accountability to a program because that’s what he grew up in and understood with all the coaches he’s been around.”
UConn football needs personality. Perhaps Spanos, 50, can make the Huskies interesting, for starters. Maybe a good vibe, absent for so long, can be seen and heard and felt through the remaining 10 games. If social media posts are any indication, players feel more energized by the immediate future than demoralized by the past.
“He’s always been a player-orientated coach,” LeBeau said. “I always believed the best way to coach was to teach.”
Spanos is known for passionate rants and outbursts. He’s a “really wacky guy,” junior cornerback Jeremy Lucien said, who “had us rolling” in laughter during the first team meeting Tuesday. Later in the day, Spanos was, at least on one occasion, dancing while instructing during practice.
“Life has its serious moments and we all have to deal with them,” LeBeau said. “But your life profession should be something you truly enjoy doing. It’s going to have some sticky moments, no question. The quote goes, ‘Every job’s got a little dirt to it.’ And you have periods of time where you’re dealing with the dirt. But he’s seen me dancing with the players before, let’s put it that way.”
Spanos grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and was an offensive lineman (center) at Tulsa before graduating in 1994. He was hired by Cowher, also a native of the Pittsburgh area, in 1995 and spent 15 consecutive years on the Steelers’ staff, 12 under Cowher, three under Tomlin. LeBeau was defensive coordinator for eight of Spanos’ seasons.
“I feel close to Lou because he was an offensive player in college,” said LeBeau, who played offense and defense under Woody Hayes at Ohio State and spent 59 years in the NFL as a player and coach before retiring in 2017. “Centers have a lot of mental responsibility, making calls, and that’s right up Lou’s alley. The first thing that struck me about him was you only had to tell him anything one time. Once. That’s the kind of acumen he has in mental capability. The rest of it was, he was just going to get things right. I thought it was tremendously interesting, so much to the extent that I held on to him as long as I could.”
In Pittsburgh, LeBeau made a point to have each defensive assistant to present his portion of the game plan to a larger group, grooming them for opportunities as coordinators or head coaches. Cowher was also heavily involved on the defensive side every week.
“He was a guy I relied on,” Cowher said of Spanos. “If I needed something from a game of four years ago, he’d pull it right up and we’d talk through it. Some of the things that you evolve to, it’s important to have someone who understands where it came from. And he was one of those guys I could always (ask), ‘How did we get to this point?’ In terms of building something, he understands that where you start isn’t necessarily where you’re going to finish, that an evolution is something that you have to go through and work through. He was a tireless worker, detail oriented, organized.”
The three have remained close over the years.
Cowher, 64, is still one of the sport’s most visible and charismatic figures as a studio analyst for “The NFL Today” on CBS. LeBeau, who turned 84 on Thursday, is retired and living in Cincinnati. Many members of all three families have been in regular contact since their Pittsburgh days.
“He’s a great family man, a great friend and he was a tremendous teammate in all the years we were together,” LeBeau said.
Spanos left the Steelers to become Redskins linebackers coach, a position he held under Mike Shanahan in 2010-11. He became a defensive coordinator for the first time at UCLA under Jim Mora in 2012-13, before joining the Tennessee Titans as linebackers coach in 2013. The next year, he was reunited with LeBeau, who spent the final three seasons of his career as Titans defensive coordinator.
“And it was like old times,” LeBeau said.
Spanos returned to college football for the 2018 season, as an analyst at Alabama, working for Nick Saban. He was hired to run the UConn defense in Jan. 2019.
Now he’s a head coach for the first time.
“You’re not just overlooking a defense, you’re overlooking a football team and you have the public relations part of it, sending the right messages to studentathletes,” Cowher said. “Being a head coach, you’re encompassing it all, working with all facets of an organization or a college, as you’re talking about, working with the AD, working with the president. Now you’re overseeing the whole thing, but it won’t be too big for him.”
Said LeBeau, who was head coach of the Bengals in 2000-02: “No doubt it’s a different job, but it’s football and there isn’t a whole lot of difference between talking to the whole defense and talking to the whole team.”
Cowher and LeBeau have both spoken to Spanos this week, wishing him well.
“I didn’t want to take much of his time because, trust me, this is going to be a hectic couple of weeks for him,” LeBeau said. “But I wanted him to know that I was in his corner, rooting for him. I watched him become an excellent position coach. I watched him become an excellent coordinator. And I hope I get to see him become an excellent head coach. He checks all the boxes in terms of preparation for the job. I’m sure he’s looking at this as an opportunity.”
UConn’s search process will play out over the coming months as Spanos tries to fix the 2021 Huskies and, perhaps, coach himself into consideration for the fulltime job.
“I would highly recommend that guy as being a part of any organization,” Cowher said. “Give him a little time. He’ll leave an imprint.”