Gannon got ‘whole picture’ early on
Prep coach saw great things in Cardinals coach
Chuck Kyle offered some insight last week on new Arizona Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon, who played for Kyle at Cleveland’s St. Ignatius High School.
Kyle, an Ohio prep football coaching legend whose teams won 11 state titles, didn’t typically use a player on both offense and defense. Gannon was an exception, and excelled in three sports.
In the only state basketball championship St. Ignatius has ever won, it was Gannon on the free throw line to hit a pair and ice the final game. One year, six weeks after joining the track team, Gannon was competing at the state championship meet in the high hurdles.
When it came to football, Gannon had not only the talent to play but the intelligence to understand the Xs and Os of the game. As Kyle told the Republic, Gannon always understood “the whole concept.”
“I would say coverage, well, if you’re a corner(back), they just know what the corner does. Or a wide receiver, you just know I’m running a post pattern. But Jon was really very, very good about understanding the whole concept of the pattern. He would know what the other patterns would be,” Kyle said.
“And defensively, he played corner because he was that kind of athlete. But he certainly understood the concept, you know, when you had Cover Two or Man Free, or where your safety is going to be and what am I trying to do to make sure the safety has a chance to make a play?” Kyle continued. “The whole concept, he was very, very good at for being a high school kid. That’s what leads you into coaching, you know, that you really enjoyed that whole idea, that whole concept of the defense or the offense. So it doesn’t shock me that he’s had success in coaching.”
Gannon made sure to thank Kyle on the day he was introduced as head coach of the Cardinals. It was Kyle who helped Gannon earn a football scholarship to Louisville. And when starting out in coaching, Gannon reached out to Kyle for advice.
“I’ve had some really good mentors. Too many to list right now. Some in the NFL, some in college, some in high school. My head football coach at St. Ignatius just retired, Coach Kyle,” Gannon said on Feb. 16. “He wrote a book called ‘The Object of the Game,” and I think it’s a manual that you can take anywhere and get a team running the right way.”
Gannon might have dreamed of playing in the NFL. But he was injured in college, dislocating a hip. He tried to come back and play the next season but couldn’t get back to where he was, so he turned to coaching while still in school. At age 21, he realized he wanted to be a head coach.
“Preparing to be a head coach is not hard if you have a growth mindset and you listen to people.” Gannon said.
In 2021 he was named Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator. There, head coach Nick Sirianni prepared him to be an NFL head coach, Gannon said.
“I truly believe that. I told him before I walked out of the building. We’re obviously friends because we worked together in Indy (Indianapolis), but he was my boss in Philly for two years,” Gannon said. “He was extremely hard on me and extremely detailed. He’s detail oriented but he always had my back and he let me in on a lot of things of how he was running the team and the why behind it. He gave me a very easy blueprint, which I will put my spin on, but he gave me the blueprint to how to be a head coach. For these last two years, especially this last year, I was fully confident that I could do this job, so I appreciate him for that.”
Whatever that blueprint is, it got Sirianni to the Super Bowl this past season, and the Eagles were one better-played second half away from the Lombardi Trophy.
“This guy is incredible,” Sirianni said last month in an article published by SI.com. “(Gannon’s) going to be a head football coach in the National Football League because of what he does. This guy is a stud.”
Gannon apologized for being a few minutes late for the scheduled start of the introduction of new Cardinals offensive coordinator Drew Petzing last Thursday. Kyle said being punctual is part of how Gannon operates as a coach.
“You’ll see he’s a guy that’s really very organized. That’s one of the things that’s really important to him. I mean, the schedule says we’re ending at 3:20, it’s going to end at 3:20 He’s very meticulous about that,” Kyle said.
Kyle said the Cardinals and the greater Phoenix community are, in Gannon, getting a good family man who will give an honest postgame presentation on what he thought would happen and what his team needs to work on. And in the event of a loss, it’s 24 hours to deal with it and then leave it in the past and move on.
“That’s the way we always approached it in high school. And I see that’s how he does it,” Kyle said. “But he’ll be resilient. He’ll bounce back and look at that next opponent and focus in. So that’s the way he is. That’s what you’re going to get. And I think coaches will love working with him.”
Being around veteran NFL assistant coaches at the time he broke into the NFL, and as he moved from job to job and team to team, inspired Gannon to believe he could be an NFL head coach.
“There’s a lot of short-term things that you have to do to get to long-term goals,” Gannon said. “That was always a goal of mine, but it was in the back of my mind because I do believe you’ve got to be where your feet are. To get to be a head coach I better learn how to do this job (assistant coach) first, and that’s what I did with every job as I moved up through the ranks. If you have a growth mindset, you’re curious about learning, and (if) you’re around the right people, you can get better real fast.”