Mccaffrey followed his heart from Valor to job in Greeley
GREELEY» Ed Mccaffrey wasn’t the only one who’d waited years for this moment.
Earlier Friday, Roxye Arellano had nicked a few strands of red-and-gold tinsel from the wall at home — “Santa won’t mind,” she laughed — and used it as a liner around a little cardboard sign that she’d made and brought to ground floor of Northern Colorado’s swanky Campus Commons, a placard that read:
THANKS SANTA! YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT THE PUPPY! “We were so hyped (Thursday). We got the email and we
started jumping out of our chairs,” Arellano said of the news that Mccaffrey, the former Denver Broncos wide receiver, had been named the Bears’ new football coach. “This is full-circle for me.”
This is personal. In 1997, Arellano’s daughter Cherelle spent the holidays at Children’s Hospital, a 9-year-old girl arm-wrestling with leukemia. Some days, the good days, the kid got the upper hand. Other days, not so much.
But one of the best days, the day mama never shook, was when a pack of Broncos players walked in, armed stuffed with toys.
At one point, Mccaffrey strode over and handed a little girl he’d never met before a Barbie doll. Cherelle hugged it like there was no tomorrow. At the time, neither them knew how many tomorrows were left.
Cherelle is 32 now, and a mother herself. Arellano works in the financial aid office at UNC, one floor up from the news conference where Mccaffrey was introduced to the Bears faithful.
“He was the one who gave her a Barbie when she was 9 years old,” Arellano said, clutching the sign proudly. “He has no idea. But I do. I do. That just showed me respect for him. I’m so excited for the whole Mccaffrey family. It’s wonderful to have them as part of the UNC team. It’s really special.”
“I was ready”
Friday was special, Christmas two weeks early. A pep rally — cheerleaders, Klawz the Bear, players, families — crammed into a corner of the Commons. A celebration of a new era, dancing the fine line between genius and insanity.
“Look, I follow my heart,” the 51-year-old Mccaffrey, a Broncos star from 1995-2003, said of his first collegiate head coaching opportunity. “That’s the only thing I know how to do. I look at the work, I look for opportunities, and when I feel it’s right, I go for it.
“Because there are people at both ends of the spectrum: ‘You’re not going to want to take the time to stay there and coach at this level.’ And there are other people thinking, ‘Are you qualified to coach at this level?’ Well, which one is it? You know, we’ll find out.”
The story of Mccaffrey getting his first crack as a college football coach starts a little more than two weeks earlier with a phone call, but not the one you’d think. While coaching at Valor High School, the two-time Super Bowl champion with the Broncos rang up UNC athletic director Darren Dunn as a reference, as a favor, to recommend somebody else.
One thing led to another, and Dunn, who’d let Earnest Collins go after nine seasons and 72 losses in 100 games, claimed he and McCaffrey arrived at the same conclusion: Why not give a Ed shot at the head job?
“I would say it was mutual,” Dunn recalled. “It was mutual .., we started talking about the job and the opportunity.
“And I really felt like we were recruiting each other at the same time. I’m not sure who recruited first, but I know that we were both recruiting each other. When you speak to him, he’s such an unbelievable person and you want to be around him. And I thought he would be a great coach here for that.”
The why part for Dunn was easy, given a UNC program that’s been stuck in the margins, locally and nationally, with no place to go but up. The Bears have won four games, combined, over the last two years and produced only a pair of winning seasons, period, since the athletic department jumped from Division II to Division I in 2003.
UNC needed a public-relations jolt for a program that’s floundered since it joined the Football Championship Subdivision’s Big Sky Conference in 2006. Over the last 14 seasons, the Bears have averaged just 2.6 wins per season. They drew just 4,554 per tilt for Nottingham Field home games this past fall, or 53.4 percent of capacity.
Given all that, it was Mccaffrey’s interest that drew the double-takes. The former NFL wideout won a Class 5A state title in his first season as a prep head coach in the fall of 2018 and followed that up by steering Valor to the state quarterfinals.
The Eagles, 10-2 this autumn, are a franchise you either love, or love to hate. Either way, they’re a machine. The Bears are a gamble. A Superman leap of faith.
“As much as I was able to share with an incredible group of kids and coaches and student body at
Valor, I was slightly limited,” McCaffrey explained. “You don’t have the amount of time to spend with the kids teaching them the game. And I was ready. I was ready to take what I know and expand upon that and share it with bigger, stronger, faster kids that love the game of football. And I’m hoping that’s what I’ll get to do here.
“Again, I wasn’t actively looking to leave Valor, I loved it there … I’ve been blessed to be around a lot of wonderful people and have a lot of success, and that’s what I’m hoping to bring here. And there are no guarantees, right? There’s only opportunity.”
Plus, the four Mccaffrey boys — men, now — are grown up. Once the nest got emptied, Ed and wife Lisa figured, why not shake the thing up a bit?
“I think Lisa is the happiest person in the world,” Mccaffrey cracked. “She wants me out of the house. We’ve been staring at each other. She’s said, more than once, ‘Too much Ed. Too much Ed. Too much Ed Time.’
“But (my sons), they’re all in. They play during the season, but if there’s any time they can be here and support me — maybe in the off-season, they’ll be training here. When I do something, I consult my family, so that when you get me, you get my whole family.”
You also get skeptics. Including those on a roster who came to play for Collins, kids who can Google No. 87 or check out his Youtube highlights but don’t have the same reverence for the Mccaffrey legacy as the locals.
“I understand that there are going to be ex-broncos here,” UNC wideout Sam Flowers said. “But at the same time, his goal is to come in and help us win games and (develop) us. So that’s my main focus, being a player, is to understand him and just feed off of him, just to learn from him so I could become the best player I could be. I feel the team, as a whole, everybody is on the same page.”
“There’s just excitement”
Where this narrative goes next is anybody’s guess. Dunn said McCaffrey has already received roughly 100 calls or texts from prospective assistant coaches. The AD admits that he even got a few missives from family members with Christmas requests.
“Both my sisters have reached out to me to say, ‘Hey can I get an autographed (Mccaffrey) jersey for Christmas?’ ” Dunn laughed. “So I don’t really have to do a lot of shopping. I’m excited about that. There’s no question that there’s a lot of people that want to be around him.”
They’re all in, from campus to Fat Albert’s, a Greeley comfortfood staple roughly two miles from Nottingham Field that launched about the time the Broncos started holding training camp up at UNC in 1982.
“There’s just excitement,” said John Albert, Fat Albert’s kitchen manager — the restaurant was run and founded by his late father — and a UNC grad. “(My dad) was a big Romo fan, Bill Romanowski. He actually had John Elway in here before he was signed — way before me. I’ve just heard stories.”
There’ll be stories about Friday, too. About the day UNC walked over and stuck a pin on the college football map, the day the Bears and Mccaffrey rolled the dice together and set the ceiling in the clouds. Or, as another hand-written sign at the Commons put it: WE HAVE A COACH NOWWEWANTBAMA “A couple of (the kids) said, ‘Don’t do it, mom,’” Arellano said, shaking her cardboard and grinning wickedly as the tinsel danced. “I said, ‘You’re going to see me on the news.’ That’s what Grandmas do, right? We make scenes.”
Mission accomplished. “That’s hilarious,” the new UNC coach said. “That’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s unbelievable. I’ll tell you what: The people in Greeley and the surrounding communities have been so kind to me, that’s the least I can do, is try to give back. In any way that I can.”
Thanks, Santa. For everything.