Rutgers v Maryland

Rutgers coach Kyle Flood celebrates with his team following a 41-38 win over the Maryland Terrapins at Byrd Stadium on Nov. 29, 2014, in College Park, Maryland. (Rob Carr | Getty Images)

DETROIT — Head coaches are celebrities these days. You see so much of them in television interviews as the big bowl games approach, these elite level football coaches ... guys with the right haircuts and hair sprays and made-to-order suits. The commentators will tell you about their multi-digit salaries or, conversely, how they must suddenly win to keep their jobs.

It's enough to make you forget what a coach is really supposed to be in this time when the words "teacher" and "friend" often get lost ... words that still should have meaning from Pop Warner all the way on up to the national championship game.

As a case in point, this is the story of one coach, Kyle Flood, who takes Rutgers into the Quick Lane Bowl against North Carolina on Friday at 4:30 p.m., two of his former players and the kind of bond they forged almost a decade ago that still has meaning today.

It begins during a time when a football lifer named Kyle Flood had already been head coach at St. Francis Prep and offensive line coach at C.W. Post and Hofstra. Now Rutgers, under Greg Schiano, was looking for another offensive line coach. Kyle Flood knew about it. He was in New Jersey and he drove past Rutgers but never stopped. A year later, the job was open again and this time, when he got to Rutgers Stadium, he made the decision.

"He walked into my office and shook my hand told me, 'I wasn't going to turn around and drive away again,' '' Schiano recalls. "We had a great meeting."

He got the job.

At the same time, an all-star high school lineman from Pennsylvania named John Glass was haunting the weight room at Rutgers. He had been rehabbing a blown knee for a year since his transfer from New Haven University. The year Flood took the job, they met for the first time in the weight room.

"That first year under him he would see me or Sameh McDonald (who played alongside Glass) and he'd smile and say the same thing:

"Feet wider than hips ... knees inside of ankles."

And then they'd laugh.

It became a mantra for the three of them. And the three of them eventually rode it to the Insight Bowl in Phoenix, the genesis of a reborn Rutgers football program and a turning point that Flood and Glass and, yes, Schiano never forgot. It was the end of a journey that began when Rutgers football was a late-night comedian's dream, a whipping boy for self-acclaimed campus intellectuals and a long, wide crazy quilt of its failures.

Just before that game, Glass told me:

"I took and passed my final exams this week and I'll be the first in my family to graduate a four-year college. Coach Flood has had a lot to do with that."

Reminded of that the other day, he expanded on what he had said:

"Coach Flood was the big reason I graduated. He cared about me as person and player. One day he told me he had overheard me talking about a paper I had done for an African studies class and said he wanted to read it, so I printed him a copy.

"When he gave it back the next week, he thanked me and said he enjoyed it and then he said something that told me a lot about him. He said he had wanted to read it to learn more about me.

"What I'm trying to tell you is that, to me, that's what the expression 'a player's coach' means. He cared, and he could teach. He made us students of football ... made us relate our position to those of all the others on the field.



"I read where some people keep asking if he can he take this program where it needs to be, and I think they got the right guy. I used to watch him on the field and wonder how he'd be as a head coach. I saw the way he went about his business. I saw how he'd joke with a player. I saw how he demanded performance but never would embarrass a player."

Back at that Insight Bowl, Flood told me how he had watched Glass and McDonald grow as players and men.

"I marvel not at how they progressed," he said, but looking at the mileau of what was then Rutgers recent football history, "but how they did it right in the teeth of the public perception."

Glass is now an offensive line coach at Bethlehem Catholic High School ... a teacher with a class of his own.

"I teach what he taught me and how he taught me," Glass said. "I went back to Rutgers for the spring game this year and I was turning a corner in the stadium and he was coming the other way. When he saw me, he smiled and hugged me. The smile was genuine. The hug was genuine. It was though I had never been away."

It is the same today — almost a decade later — with another player off that Insight Bowl team. Sameh McDonald is an offensive line coach at Weequahic High School. He remembered the way Flood would sometimes put down the clicker in tape sessions with the offensive line and suddenly talk about something he and his wife had done at the mall or something from back when he was a high school algebra teacher.

"He would do it to make us laugh, give us a break from the tension. For me, he will always be my coach," McDonald said. "I was talking with Anthony Davis, who came after me at Rutgers and plays for the 49ers, and he said when you went out on the field, you went out there not only to play for yourself but to represent Coach Flood. And believe me, as long as he is at Rutgers, there will be a bunch of guys who go out there and play for the same reasons.

"How long am I out of college? He still sends me texts or picks up the phone to see how I'm doing. He is the ultimate teacher."

Rutgers arrives for Quick Lane Bowl