Knowles brings spark to Buckeyes
OSU’S new defensive coordinator is a ‘genius’
STILLWATER, Okla. — The piles of large yellow notepads cover the desk and nearly overtake the laptop in the center.
Notes and drawings fill each notepad, much like the whiteboard on a wall next to a dark TV.
Jim Knowles, the next Ohio State defensive coordinator, finds solace in his Oklahoma State office’s messiness.
“It’s kind of stupid, to be honest with you,” Knowles said. “There’s (expletive) everywhere. But it is a comfort thing.”
Any idea or piece of advice becomes a note on something somewhere. Front and back of each yellow paper. Sometimes the cardboard backing. An envelope becomes a notepad. Even sticky notes are used, though not often. Those are “a pain in the (expletive).”
“It’s really a lot like that movie, ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ ” Knowles said.
Beautiful mind or beautiful chaos, the concept is essentially the same, and a peek into Knowles’ mind is quite revealing.
The creative process is what makes him great and why Ohio State hired him to revamp its defense beginning Jan. 2.
The 56-year-old Knowles is the mad
scientist formulating one of the nation's top defenses. He is a quirky Ivy League graduate raised in the inner city of Philadelphia who was up for the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant coach this season.
He won the hearts of the Oklahoma State faithful with a unique balance of brawn and brains.
In the land known for high-flying offenses, Knowles got his Cowboys believing in defense.
“Even the great teams we had before, they were giving up a lot of yards and forcing a lot of turnovers and just surviving,” Cowboys safety Kolby Harvellpeel said. “Whereas Coach Knowles kind of has more of an approach — you see it in his play-calling and his aggressiveness — he wants to win games defensively."
Knowles brings a tough persona that carries over to his players. He does things differently but also with an oldschool approach. He's regarded as a mad scientist for a reason.
“I'll go into his office on a weekday and he's damn near in a sweat from the scheme he's got,” Oklahoma State defensive lineman Brendon Evers said. “He looks like a doctoral student with papers everywhere. But he sells out for this team and this program.”
Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy often goes nearly 48 hours without seeing Knowles.
What Knowles does between Sunday night's practice and Tuesday's staff meeting in his closed-off office, Gundy isn't sure.
“He could be watching cartoons, for all I know,” Gundy said.
There is no Bugs Bunny, unless he knows how to get to the quarterback.
But Knowles is watching film, dissecting the upcoming opponent on his laptop. He scrawls note after note, meticulously forming a plan of attack.
“This is all the process within myself because when I bring something to the guys or to the team, it's gotta be tested,” Knowles said. “I have to put it all through the test myself, so it's just really a creative process.”
A standout defensive end for Cornell in the 1980s, Knowles had a knack for details. He was the player who made correct adjustments before defensive coordinator Pete Noyes could.
“You don't expect a guy like Jim Knowles or guys that were younger to have a grasp that Jimmy had, let's just put it that way,” Noyes said. “He was right from the get-go, and he's had that intelligence.
“It doesn't happen by accident. It happened because of hard work and actually in his case an extremely terrific personality, his persona. And he's a genius.”
Noyes hired Knowles as a defensive line coach in 1988 despite little experience. That's when Knowles began filling reams of papers with his ideas and drawings of formations and plays.
Each notebook became about trial and error.
“It's that 10,000-hour rule,” Knowles said. “It's like becoming a great musician or whatever.”
Throughout his coaching path that led to Western Kentucky, Ole Miss, Cornell — as the head coach — and Duke before Oklahoma State, Knowles wanted to have answers not only in the highest times but also the lowest.
He believes there is nothing worse than being a coach without answers.
“That happens a bunch in our profession,” Knowles said. “It's happened to me before. That's what drives that, I guess you would call it, fear of ever getting to that position. It happened to me early on here.”
So, he continued to fine-tune his process. Nowadays, the process is tedious.
He closes the door to his office, which becomes his personal laboratory. He keeps things old school. But he keeps young blood around, tapping into grad assistants and quality control coaches who often bring analytics that Knowles welcomes.
Knowles encourages other ideas, but they need to be prepared, fleshed out and detailed. There is little time for errors, especially in practice.
“You can have some mistakes in practice and be like, ‘OK, that doesn't work. Throw it out,' ” Knowles said. “But you don't want to waste a lot of your time doing that."
At one point this year, Knowles was determined not to yell at a practice. So, he brought a coffee mug to do his talking.
After each Cowboys defensive mistake, Knowles got the attention of the player and pointed to the white cup with black letters. “That ain't it, bro,” the mug read. “He's like a cartoon character,” safety Tanner Mccalister said.
Knowles often doesn't wear his shoes entirely on his feet, opting to put his heels on the back. That draws questions and jokes from his players.
“That's like something a little kid would do,” cornerback Jarrick Bernardconverse said.
Knowles' persona is tough but quirky. He is a vegan. He loves to smoke cigars and take pictures with his players following wins.
It all might seem strange, but there is a method to the madness.
Everything he does resonates with players.
“Driven, excited, maybe bizarre at times,” said Duke coach David Cutcliffe, who hired Knowles as his defensive coordinator in 2010. “But that is a bizarreness about him that you learn to love quickly.”
Four years ago, Oklahoma State players were not sold on their new coordinator.
Knowles entered with a temperament they did not expect. He yelled a lot. He broke clipboards on the sideline.
And the Cowboys' defense was a mess, holding just one Big 12 team — Kansas — below 30 points while going 3-6 in conference play.
The players did not quite understand Knowles' complicated system.
Knowles went back to his lab. He examined the notebooks, determined what was good and bad.
He adjusted. So did the players. They got on the same page. The mad scientist won again.