Russell Street Report Street Talk Getting to Know Marc Trestman

Marc Trestman does not look the part. While this has affected his career before, it hasn’t changed his appearance.

His tightly combed hair and pursed lips suggest a calculated man. And indeed, Trestman weighs analytics heavily in everything he does. Hell, he made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a stockbroker in the early 90s, and in that field, those traits are more or less a prerequisite; in the NFL, however, not so much.

One popular description of Trestman’s appearance is “lawyer-ish,” and it isn’t all that out of line, what with Trestman having passed the Florida bar exam in 1983. However, as people are well aware, the presence of lawyers in the NFL is often not a welcome addition, and is more often than not, a necessary evil. In short, Marc Trestman doesn’t – and never has – fit the cookie-cutter mold of an NFL coach.

He does not have the traditional coach’s path, but it is clear that each step has had a distinct effect on his present self.

Here’s his professional resume

’81-’82 – University of Miami Volunteer Coach

’83-’84 – University of Miami Quarterbacks Coach

’85-’86 – Minnesota Vikings Running Backs Coach

’87 – Tampa Bay Buccaneers Quarterbacks Coach

’88 – Cleveland Browns Quarterbacks Coach

’89 – Cleveland Browns Offensive Coordinator

’90-’91 – Minnesota Vikings Quarterbacks Coach

’95-‘96 – San Francisco 49ers Offensive Coordinator

’97 – Detroit Lions Quarterbacks Coach

’98-’00 – Arizona Cardinals Offensive Coordinator

’01 – Oakland Raiders Quarterbacks Coach

’02-’03 – Oakland Raiders Offensive Coordinator

’04 – Miami Dolphins Assistant Head Coach

’05-’06 – North Carolina State University Offensive Coordinator

’08-’12 – Montreal Alouettes Head Coach

’13-’14 – Chicago Bears Head Coach

Trestman was influenced by some of the greats in coaching history – Howard Schnellenberger, Bud Grant, Bill Walsh. Like all coaches though, he’s had his share of bumps along the road.

Remember how I mentioned he was a stockbroker? That was the gap you see up there between 1991-95. Well, he took a paycut from the 49ers to return to coaching, but as so many in the coaching ranks have previously done, he failed, and failed again, and most recently with the Chicago Bears, failed in as public a manner as ever.

2014 – the sophomore season of his first NFL head coaching opportunity, despite his 25 years’ experience – was a disaster that saw the Bears get blown out in nationally televised games three weeks in a row from Weeks 13 through 15. Trestman and Jay Cutler were the goats, as the supposed quarterback guru and his pupil took a grave step backwards in the Bears’ development.

However, still, there are plenty who speak highly of the man who walked this zigzagged path to Baltimore. And while he certainly isn’t perfect, some of the opinions can begin to perhaps shed some light towards who he will be in Baltimore.

“Trestman, I think, first off, the issue that he had, probably, was managing us all, all the different personalities,” Martellus Bennett told the crew of NFL AM. “There’s a lot of big personalities [in the locker room]. And I think, for a first-time head coach in the NFL, dealing with all the personalities that you have, I think that’s hard when you got guys like me, you know, [Brandon] Marshall … Lance Briggs on defense, [Charles] Tillman.

“There’s so many guys with such outgoing personalities that managing those guys and bringing them all together is what a leader needs to do, you know? And that’s one of the toughest things.”

The above quotes are indicative of a first-time head coach struggling to deal with the workload and responsibility that comes with the job. John Harbaugh, by most accounts, has as good a pulse of his locker room as any head coach in the league, so there should be no reason Trestman should need to manage these personalities, at least not entirely. And besides, while he may have struggled on the management side, his game-planning was as impressive as ever.

“A lot of it comes back to the player preparation,” Martellus Bennett said. “If you’re not preparing to a high level, then the coaches can only do so much; the game’s not played on paper, it’s played on grass. On paper, we look great. On grass, we looked bad.”

”I think you go up and down,” Marc Trestman told the New York Times in January of 2003, before Super Bowl XXXVII, of being an offensive coordinator. ”You feel like you’re hot, that whatever you do works, and then you have a couple of years where you’re not throwing any strikes. But you just have to keep grinding.”

And despite Trestman’s experience and intellect, he still felt overwhelmed at times.

“’I never went through a process of being trained as football coach,” he said in that same NY Times piece. “I was always thrown into things, always a mercenary. I was thrown into more responsibility than I deserved at a young age.”

Most everything you could want to know about Trestman is included in this Yahoo.com piece by Les Carpenter. Of course, the tenor of this article – written in September of 2013 – was much different than the present chord. The firing of Trestman and former-General Manager Phil Emery – both of whom are the main focal points of the Yahoo feature – paint the narrative in a far different light.

Yet, at least personally, there is the prevailing sentiment that this Marc Trestman is more than prepared to take over the Baltimore Ravens offense. His experiences – his failures – have made him as battle tested as any; however, at his core, his tenets as a head coach were based upon the personal aspect of his relationship with his players. Sure, their production was important, but Trestman was interested in the human being.

It was actually part of the reason he had issues in Chicago – at the start of the 2014 training camp, Lance Briggs missed camp for an undisclosed reason. When pressed by the media the following day, Trestman told reporters that Briggs was on the West Coast for the opening of his restaurant. On the surface, for NFL reporters, this was a sign of weakness – a chink in what needs to be the impenetrable will of an NFL head coach.

But don’t confuse his leniency as not asking enough of his players, evidenced by his, to some, unorthodox coaching philosophy when it comes to game planning and film study.

From the aforementioned Yahoo! piece, this portion discusses his coaching of the Alouettes:

Trestman besieged them with details. Everything needed to be precise. Pass routes were to be run at exact angles, linemen’s stances required fingers on specific spots without a deviation of even a couple inches. But with each demand came an explanation. He told them why a sloppy pass route could lead to a bad throw or a lineman’s failure to stand in his assigned place might destroy a run play. He made each of them believe their role was the most important on each play because if they slipped up and something went wrong, the whole play could be compromised.

There’s no “right’ way to evaluate Trestman’s time in Montreal. The football part doesn’t properly translate, that much is sure – the CFL plays on a field nearly 12-yards wider and 30-yards longer than the NFL. But the coaching philosophy is probably the most important aspect of the whole ordeal – there was a concerted effort to focus not just on the football player, but on the human being. An understanding that the establishment of trust – trust in both the individual and the process – resulted in positive outcomes.

Trestman would go on to say in that same article:

“The lesson I learned [in Montreal],” he finally says, “is the more I gave and asked for nothing in return, the happier I got. That was it. That’s the lesson. Give them everything you got and don’t ask for anything in return. But you’ve got to do it with your heart. There’s a connection between the mind and the heart. If the heart’s not in it, you don’t get anything back.”

As mentioned previously, these quotes just feel different knowing somewhere along the way in Chicago things went wrong. But it is obvious that one thing Marc Trestman has no shortage of is introspection, as evidenced by his more-or-less autobiography. So hypothetically, he should be able to move forward and grow from that failure as well. You cannot ignore that failure, so it was especially interesting to hear what Bears’ tight end Martellus Bennett had to say about Trestman.

So was the problem that the Bears didn’t buy into the system? Greg Gabriel from CBS Chicago wrote the following when Trestman was fired:

In talking to Bears players and former players, I keep hearing the same thing. They don’t respect Trestman as coach and a leader. They feel he worries too much about the little things that have nothing to do with football and not the most important thing, which is their performance on the field.

In Montreal, those little things were what the Alouette players insisted made the difference in their explosive five-season stretch. Perhaps in Chicago, that was too much to ask of an entire NFL team full of egos and personalities as different as their backgrounds.

In Baltimore, the hope is that Trestman is the right man to transition from and build upon Gary Kubiak’s record-setting zone blocking offense. Trestman has earned his mettle as an offensive guru, with rousing success in both the passing and running game. In a minimized role, and not being asked to manage more than the offensive schematics, there are few reasons to believe he can’t find success. In addition, Ravens fans can hold out hope for sustained success, as it’s obvious NFL front offices haven’t been adamant about handing the head coaching reins over to Trestman. The odds of a repeat of the Kubiak one-and-done are slim.

He is a notorious genius, his mind always at work. Ravens fans now must hope that his past downfalls are behind him, and he has a firm grasp on what he should and shouldn’t try to do.

There is an undeniable similarity between the Ravens organizational philosophy and Marc Trestman: family is the key, and trust is paramount between all involved. He has big shoes to fill with Kubiak’s departure, and the offense will be expected to carry that momentum forward.

For what it’s worth, it appears as though Trestman’s past hiccups were the product of the head coaching role, and for that reason, I firmly believe he is the right man to take the Ravens offense to the next level. Time will tell.