New IU Coach Wilson Pulls No Punches

This is a profile on Indiana football coach Kevin Wilson, written before his first season on the job.

Link To Original

Before Butch Parker agreed to an interview about Kevin Wilson, the new Indiana football coach and his friend of close to 40 years, he had a question.“Does everybody up there still have their panties in a bunch?”

It was obvious what Parker meant. The assistant football coach and assistant athletic director at Maiden (N.C.) High School in North Carolina wanted to know more about the reaction to the infamous radio tussle. He wanted to know if Indiana fans were afraid they’d hired a cantankerous hothead or elated that they had a straight-shooter with backbone who wouldn’t stand for jokes at the program’s expense.

Because he knows Kevin Wilson can be both of those.

He’s also a brilliant football mind, an effective teacher and perhaps exactly the jolt Indiana needs for its almost eternally stagnant program.

He just isn’t subtle. Not in the least. He’s brutally direct with his players and demanding of them. He doesn’t suffer fools, pull punches or hold back when he feels the urge to say something. Parker knows full well that if Hoosier fans want to find out if Wilson can finally make Indiana a factor in the Big Ten, they need to brace for the occasional startling quote and for confrontations like the one they heard on the air earlier this month.

“That’s just the way that boy is,” said Parker, who is seven years Wilson’s senior. “Simple as that.”

A brief synopsis of the radio scuffle. While Wilson was on hold for an interview on their radio talk show on WNDE, hosts Dominic Zaccagnini and Jack Trudeau bantered about Indiana’s history of losing. Wilson, despite having no connection to that history, took exception. Zaccagnini and Trudeau took impassioned exception to his taking exception. Someone hung up early to end the conversation, and the audio went viral nationally within hours.

When it reached Maiden, Wilson’s hometown, it came as a surprise to no one.

His closest friends had already seen something similar. It was 2004, and then-offensive line coach Wilson and Oklahoma were preparing to play LSU in the Sugar Bowl for the BCS National Championship. Parker and Tom Brown, the long-time head coach at Maiden, were Wilson’s guests at a hospitality party for Sooner coaches, officials and fans on New Year’s Eve when one of the Sugar Bowl executives showed up with his daughter, an LSU fan. She started hollering, “Geaux Tigers.”

“Everyone was kind of taken aback,” Brown said. “But Kevin went right up to her and said, ‘Hey, you need to get out of here. You need to go somewhere else. This is an Oklahoma party. I don’t really give a damn who you are, you need to go somewhere else.’”

What happened on WNDE just proved that Wilson hasn’t yet changed much with his promotion.

When Parker was told that Indiana fans had a mostly positive reaction, applauding Wilson for standing up for the long-suffering program, he sounded relieved. If that would’ve gone over badly, this marriage might not stand a chance.

“Kevin, he might be a son of a bitch,” Parker said, using the phrase almost as a term of endearment. “He’s consistent with it, though. It’s not an act. That is Kevin Wilson. That’s what he’s been for 49 years. I don’t think he’s gonna change that.”

Chest-high fastballs

It’s easy to underestimate Wilson at first glance. He’s practically drenched in good ol’ boy with his impish grin, beer belly and southern charm.

But then he starts talking.

The words rush over his perpetually sand-papered voice at machine gun speed, and before you know it, you’re struggling to keep up. He doesn’t go on tangents but takes his answers on a straight line over several points, proving one and then moving on to the next before you can digest it all.

There’s an air of smugness to it, sometimes punctuated with biting digs at the listener. But Wilson’s earned a degree of self-satisfaction. Naturally whip-smart and quick-witted — he graduated at the top of his high school class and was a mathematics major at North Carolina — he has 26 years of experience as a college assistant coach. In that time, he’s been to 12 bowl games and three national title games. He won the Frank Broyles Award for the nation’s top assistant by guiding the most prolific offense in college football history at Oklahoma in 2008, and he’s coached six first-round NFL draft picks and a Heisman Trophy winner.

“People might think he’s cocky,” Brown said. “I think he’s just confident. I think he knows so much about what he’s doing, he has no reservations about it. It’s just ‘That’s the fact, Jack.’ That’s how it’s gonna be.”

That’s usually harmless, except on those occasions when he appears to abandon all tact and/or subtlety.

Exhibit A at Indiana was the McNutt Residence Hall incident a week after he got the Indiana job. Wilson was written up after an expletive-laden confrontation with residence assistants after getting lost looking for his guest suite.

Since he arrived there have been other examples that were less egregious but still somewhat jarring. In spring practice, he made several unprompted disparaging comments about his new charges. He said early on that his team was “mentally weak,” and that he figured to play a lot of true freshmen he hadn’t even seen yet because they had to be better than the players he had. When asked after the spring game what two freshmen had done to start on the first team offensive line, he said, “I don’t think they’ve been around long enough that they know how to play soft. . They aren’t part of the players’ union.”

Wilson doesn’t apologize for those comments, but he does fear that sometimes his bluntness distorts his public image. His friends describe him as fiercely loyal and giving. He’s generally light-hearted away from football, and his players say that for as tough as he can be, he’s always accessible and willing to talk to them outside of practice.

“I’d like to think I’m a little more good-natured than I think sometimes I come across as,” Wilson said. “I think I’m good-natured, upbeat, positive.”

He’s not blunt because he’s trying to be hurtful, he said. He’s just trying to tell the truth.

“It’s just being, just straight honest,” Wilson said. “It’s not about the politically correct answer. It’s not about making somebody happy or mad. I just think players and people respect it if they think you’re shooting them straight. You’re not trying to be a suck-up, you’re not telling them what they want to hear. You’re just throwing a fastball, chest high. There’s no curves. Just straight and down the middle.”

That’s what he’s always done, he said, and it’s a big part of what got him here.

Direct all the way

By several accounts, Wilson’s direct nature comes from his late mother Marlene and her side of the family. She and her three brothers were all notorious, never-let-you-get-a-word-in talkers. Marlene was just as brassy as the rest of them, and she could be just as cutting.

“She didn’t mind breaking it off in you if you were wrong,” Parker said. “She just came out and said it.”

That helped him get along just fine with Brown, who was also a fan of the straightforward approach. Wilson, also a basketball player and golfer, was a center, middle linebacker and captain on Maiden’s 1978 state championship team. That made him a celebrity in a three-stoplight town of just over 3,000 people that refers to itself as “The Biggest Little Football Town in the World.”

By the time Wilson was a sophomore in high school, he decided he wanted to be a football coach, with his goal being to replace Brown at Maiden. After graduation, he went to North Carolina as a walk-on despite scholarship offers from smaller schools, because it was the state school and where he thought he’d be working with the best coaches. It worked, and he earned a scholarship, then spent three years on staff as a graduate assistant.

After that, he needed a job, and he got an unusual opportunity that worked in large part because of his directness.

Bill Hayes was the head coach at historically black Winston Salem State in 1987 and was in the market for an offensive line coach. He’d had white coaches on staff before that, but it took a special sort of coach. One who didn’t mind having the tables turned and being in the minority for once, and one who could connect with people regardless of differences in background.

Wilson fit that bill better than Hayes could’ve hoped, so well that Hayes kept him on staff the next year when he got the head job at North Carolina A&T.

“He was smart and aggressive, and his background was such that diversity was something that he could handle well,” said Hayes, now Winston Salem State’s athletic director. “He was just matter of fact. He has a real solid way about teaching fundamentals and skills and life lessons in such a way that he’s easy to trust.”

The approach also played well with the late Randy Walker, who had recruited Wilson to North Carolina and hired Wilson as the offensive line coach at Miami (Ohio) in 1990. Wilson was soon the offensive coordinator and followed Walker to Northwestern in 1999. Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops picked Wilson up in 2002 when he was in desperate need of an offensive line coach, and Wilson’s methods also worked in Norman.

“We’re not much on lying,” Stoops said. “If you don’t want the answer, don’t ask us. At the end of the day, some might call it too harsh, but that’s how we are, and Kevin’s very much that way.”

Too harsh or not, the approach worked. The Sooners won six Big 12 titles in Wilson’s nine years on staff, and he installed an up-tempo offense that in 2008 scored more points (716) than any team in the history of Division I college football.

And finally this year, Wilson’s approach got him a head job. He reached the interview stage for head jobs at Iowa State, Southern Mississippi and East Carolina without receiving an offer in previous years, but Indiana athletic director Fred Glass was sold the first time he met him.

“He’s mentally tough,” Glass said. “He’s demanding. He’s a winner in that he has confidence that he can win, and I think he communicates that confidence to other people. … He’s a head football coach. He just is.”

Fords or Cadillacs

Jammal Brown hears Wilson’s name in the visitors’ lockerroom of Lucas Oil Stadium, and his face lights up.

“That’s my dog,” the Washington Redskins tackle says.

Brown is one of six first-round NFL draft picks that Wilson lists among his accomplishments in his Indiana media guide biography, and Brown is quick to agree that Wilson is a big part of the reason he’s still a pro after six years. When Brown won the Outland Trophy at Oklahoma in 2004 as the nation’s top lineman, he had an exact replica of the trophy made and gave it to Wilson. The coach still keeps it in his office.

“You gotta be a certain guy to be able to play for him,” Brown said. “You gotta be tough-minded. If you’re not that, you ain’t gonna be able to last. He wants tough guys, he wants guys that play with attitude. That’s what he demands.”

How does he convey that?

“By talking crazy to you,” Brown said.

Meaning what exactly?

Redskins tackle Trent Williams, another Wilson pupil who went No. 4 to the Redskins in 2010, heard the question, laughed and proceeded to belt out a lengthy string of F-bombs in imitation of his former coach.

But according to Brown, if you just heard the cursing, you missed the point.

“He used to ask me, ‘Do you want to drive a Ford F-150 or do you want to drive an Escalade?’” Brown said. “‘You keep taking that step on the backside, you’ll be driving a Ford F-150.’ . Stuff like that tends to hit me better.”

Indiana might not have as many players with the potential to drive Escalades, but after three straight 1-7 Big Ten seasons, they want to hear it straight as well.

“That’s what I love about Coach Wilson,” senior tight end Max Dedmond said. “He’s going to come up and tell you right where you stand, exactly what’s going on. He’s not going to sugarcoat anything for you.”

And they aren’t looking for him to change, to be any less demanding or blunt or occasionally harsh than he is.

“That’s how he’s gonna get the best out of his players,” Brown said. “Some coaches do things certain ways. Kind of like Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight was that type of coach. He was successful. Actually, Indiana should be used to it.”

Yup. He went there. Brown invoked the General.

Indiana is used to it, of course, and there are certainly ways in which Hoosier fans would love for Wilson to be the Bobby Knight of the football program. But the messy end of the Knight era gave them far too good of an understanding of the sort of Greek tragedy that can unfold when a brilliant mind with a combative personality goes unchecked until it’s too late.

Wilson does appear to share certain characteristics with Knight but is a bit bigger on social graces. His southern gentleman’s charm gives him an advantage Knight never had.

Plus, he seems to understand that he has to grow with his position. Even since the spring he appears to have become more comfortable with the media and more gracious in public settings. He knew going in that being the face of the program was going to be an adjustment, but he’s only now starting to truly grasp it.

“You’re always the head coach,” Wilson said when asked for the most important thing he’s learned in his first eight months on the job. “Even though you’re Kevin Wilson. I used to take a lot of pride in, ‘Well, I’m just being me.’ Well, me is still the head coach of the Big Ten state institution, Indiana University. With that comes the responsibility of communication, of the way we do our business, the way we treat others, the whole gig. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it’s 24/7, 365. Nothing’s never off the record because you’re a public figure. You’re always the head guy.”

So sometimes, the boy has to be a little different than who he is. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop throwing fastballs.