ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Brady Hoke walked into his interview with hopefully his new boss and laid out his vision for the future. He passionately spoke about how he wanted to rebuild the program, how much it meant to him to turn it into a winner again.

He explained how much he was influenced by former Michigan coaches Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr, how he wanted to instill similar discipline and toughness, that he wanted to recruit players with integrity and character. He talked about his love for Michigan and how he felt a deep attachment to the school.

Brady Hoke spent eight years as an assistant in Ann Arbor and developed deep feelings for the program he now leads. AP Photo/Tony Ding

Hoke got the job. Before he started, his new boss pulled out a Michigan football mini-helmet. He wanted to be the first with Hoke's signature on Michigan paraphernalia.

But Hoke wasn't interviewing for the Michigan job. This was December 2002, and Hoke had just been hired by then-Ball State athletic director Bubba Cunningham to be the head coach at his alma mater.

"Basically I said, 'When you get back to Michigan as head coach, I want to have the first autograph on a Michigan helmet,'" Cunningham said. "So I got it."

Even then, Hoke and everyone who knew him knew where he would end up someday.

Tough as a raw steak

Hoke's toughness and leadership -- pillars of his teams at Ball State and San Diego State -- started before he knew he wanted to coach. Those things began at Fairmont East High School in Kettering, Ohio.

Then-sophomore quarterback Jeff Long was tossed into a game against Troy. Long hadn't expected to play and had no idea what to do. His center, Hoke, looked at him and said, essentially, "We got this."

Long, now the athletic director at Arkansas, bought it. It happened on the baseball field, too, where Long and Hoke combined to form a battery that eventually would influence college athletics.

"He was actually quite funny coming out as a catcher," Long said. "I remember he had a way of giving you a look and saying something funny that would break the mood and shake you out of anything like a bunch of balls thrown in a row. It'd be like, 'What the hell are you doing, Long? Throw the ball where I put my glove. It's that simple.'

"He could settle me down pretty quick because I was a little bit afraid of him, too."

Hoke's former high school coach, Rusty Clifford, said he figured Hoke would be successful at whatever he did simply because of the way he led and how tough he was.

Clifford went into the all-league coach's meeting in Hoke's senior year figuring he'd have to campaign for all his players -- including his senior center/linebacker.

No campaigning necessary.

For the only time in his eight years as Fairmont East's head coach, it happened that other coaches were arguing for an opponent's inclusion: Hoke.

"Unsolicited. They didn't have to say anything to me but they are telling the other coaches, 'OK, you better vote for that guy because he kicked our butt and he laid kids out,'" Clifford said. "They'd say, 'Let me give you a visual. We had this kid, he'd never been hit so hard in his life, this Hoke kid.' I'm sitting there thinking we're used to it because we see it all the time.

"But these guys went around from coach to coach, all have a personal story how he ripped or tore somebody up on their team. That's the kind of player he was."

After he played at Ball State, that intensity followed Hoke to Grand Valley State, Western Michigan, Toledo, Oregon State and eventually to Michigan, where he was hired in 1995.

Before one spring game with Carr, in which the winners of the game would eat steaks and the losers would have hamburgers and hot dogs, Hoke gave a pregame speech. He became so worked up he started rattling on about the steaks in front of his team in a Michigan meeting room.

"At the end of the speech he said, 'Men, we're going to be eating steaks,'" said former Michigan linebacker Mike Elston, now Notre Dame's defensive line coach. "Then he drank a whole bottle of A1 sauce."

Hoke spent eight years in Ann Arbor the first time before that meeting with Cunningham. As he embarked on his first head-coaching job, the Michigan influences followed.

Building blocks

Hoke arrived in Muncie, Ind., and went from arguably the most prestigious program in the country to one with very little clout.

Ball State was a consistent loser in college football, brief blips of success surrounded by mediocrity. Case in point: Cunningham's family and Hoke's family would tailgate together before home games. Cunningham said they were often one of the few groups of people there.

Family always has been important to Hoke. He married his junior high school sweetheart, Laura, and she has been involved with every coaching move he has made. She prefers to stay behind the scenes -- declining to be interviewed for this story through a Michigan athletic department spokesperson -- but those close to the Hokes point to her as a stabilizing force for her husband, the up-and-coming head coach.

"She's just the consummate coach's wife," said Long, who knew both of them in Kettering. "If you said, 'Draw me up the perfect coach's wife, somebody who understands the pressure, understands the time commitment, understands the relationships with the student-athletes, the players and the importance of that,' I mean, you would draw up Laura Hoke. You just would.

"She's exceptional."

The Hokes, who have a daughter, Kelly, turned the Ball State football team into a large group of sons. That family atmosphere helped shape a program that slowly turned around.

Hoke grabbed linemen in his first few classes. In 2005, he picked up a quarterback turned wide receiver in Dante Love. The next year, he added MiQuale Lewis, a small, speedy running back from Fort Wayne, Ind., and Nate Davis, a quarterback from Bellaire, Ohio.

The three would help spur Ball State's turnaround. The players bought into Hoke's lessons from Carr and Moeller.

"You could see a toughness in their football team, the way they played, fundamentally sound, well-coached," said Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, who, as the coach at Central Michigan, often faced Hoke. "All the things that are going on that when you watch film, you know that's a well-coached football team. They play tough, play physical.

"They had everything a good, successful program would have, and you know that started at the top."

In 2007, Ball State went 7-6 -- the Cardinals' first winning season in a decade. National perception started to change that season, when Ball State almost beat Nebraska in Lincoln. (The Huskers won 41-40.)

Brady Hoke built programs at Ball State and San Diego State with a familial atmosphere and an emphasis on toughness. Christopher Hanewinckel/US Presswire

Half a country away, then-San Diego State athletic director Jeff Schemmel started paying attention, too. He thought he had a program that, with the right coach, could become a player in college football right in the middle of one of the nation's most fertile recruiting areas.

Yet the Aztecs could never break through.

After Hoke & Co. almost beat Nebraska, Schemmel started researching Hoke in case he ever needed a new coach. In 2008, Ball State went 12-0 in the regular season. San Diego State faltered and fired Chuck Long.

Schemmel knew whom he wanted.

"He was at the top of our list from day one," Schemmel said.

What attracted Schemmel to Hoke was what attracted Cunningham before and Michigan AD Dave Brandon later: the way he built a program.

There's no coincidence that in a Hoke news conference almost every answer has the words toughness, intensity or effort in it.

Those are the tenets of a Hoke-run team.

"Toughness, running the football, stopping the run," Hoke said when asked how he would describe the traits of his teams. "Adversity and playing through it."

Two seasons after Schemmel hired Hoke, San Diego State beat Navy in the Poinsettia Bowl, 35-14. It was the Aztecs' first bowl win since 1969.

Thirteen days later, Brandon fired then-Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez. He wanted to hire a coach who understood Michigan's tradition.

Few fit like Hoke, who said during his opening news conference Jan. 12, with his friends and family looking on, "I can promise you, we would have walked to the University of Michigan."

The perfect fit

Dennis Franchione remembers the maelstrom when he was hired at Alabama in 2001. It felt as though everyone in the state wanted a piece of his time. The intensity was white-hot, the pressure tangible.

Immediately, he learned he could have spent every minute doing something someone else requested if he didn't budget himself. Within his first two weeks, Franchione developed a code. His working in the coaches' meeting room became his understood Do Not Disturb sign.

Hoke is one of 20 coaches who have made the jump from a non-BCS FBS school to a BCS school since 2001. Only five, though, have taken over programs that have won national championships in the past 20 years: Franchione at Alabama, Urban Meyer at Florida, Derek Dooley at Tennessee, Al Golden at Miami and Hoke at Michigan.

"Make sure you put your family, your players and your coaches first," Franchione said. "Then do all the other things that you can, whether it is raising money or alumni functions, you do what you can.

"But you just need to be careful that you don't get caught up in things like that and not taking care of your football team as well as you need to."

Hoke has done that. He put traditions in place -- from giving his players personalized tridents hanging in the meeting room to Friday night clam chowder dinners initially instituted by former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler.

He also made it clear that working with his players is paramount to anything else.

"We have high expectations," Hoke said. "I really don't care what anybody else thinks because we're going to do everything that we can to help these kids succeed, and I'm not talking about just the football. That's the third thing we worry about. It's about helping them develop as young men and mentoring them.

"And the football takes care of itself. I don't worry."

The most common theme surrounding Ann Arbor these days is that Hoke gets it. He understands recruiting in Michigan. He understands the tradition. He understands everything about Michigan.

"This, to me, has been -- and for a long time -- the ultimate place where I wanted to be as a football coach," Hoke said when he was hired in January. "I was fortunate enough when Coach Moeller hired me and fortunate enough to be here for eight years. And believe me, it was eight great years.

"This place means an awful lot to us."

That shouldn't be a surprise. His love of Michigan helped land him his first job.

And the autograph he gave the first man who gave him a chance as a head coach? Cunningham, now the athletic director at Tulsa, still has it.

It's in his den.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan sports for WolverineNation. He can be reached at michaelrothsteinespn@gmail.com or on Twitter @mikerothstein.