Small schools and full DVRs: Why Longo can win at Ole Miss
OXFORD - There are certain things you’ll do to get to where you want to go.
For Phil Longo, to take the long path from a New Jersey high school to a succession of small colleges to the Southeastern Conference, sacrifices were made. The coaching clinics, the rounds of golf not played, the nights slept in cars — and the DVRs that are filled with college football games.
“Our DVR is full with all the games,” Longo's wife, Tanya said. “My girls will be like, ‘Can we tape one Elena of Avalor?’”
“When he does get a chance, he likes to golf,” said former Slippery Rock coach George Mihalik, who hired Longo as his offensive coordinator in 2011. “But definitely, he needs a lot more time on the course.”
Longo’s golf game and his daughters’ ability to binge watch Disney Junior programming suffer because most of his time has been devoted to football. He’s spent the past two decades developing an offense which is predicated off Air Raid passing concepts with a downhill running attack included.
He landed at Ole Miss a month ago where he will serve as offensive coordinator for his first job at an FBS program and where he’ll be in charge of lifting the Rebels’ offense from good to great.
******
It’s that commitment to the game that has taken Longo from Parsippany Hills High School in New Jersey to Ole Miss.
As a running back at Rowan University, Longo knew he wanted to enter the coaching profession. And for those first few years he stuck with what he knew, which was Norm Chow’s BYU system and something similar to the San Francisco 49ers’ West Coast offense.
“You draw from your experiences you have and I had minimal experiences at that time,” Longo said. “So the first four or five years of my career, I was on everybody’s doorstep and I just tried to learn as much as possible, just like every other young coach.”
RELATED: Ole Miss chooses Jacob Peeler as receivers coach
His desire to learn more brought him to a late 1990s coaching clinic with Mike Leach, then-Kentucky’s offensive coordinator and now Washington State’s coach. After meeting Leach, Longo elected to adopt his offense and that’s where the system the Rebels will run this fall was born.
Longo sharpened his scheme at programs such as Minnesota-Duluth, Southern Illinois, Slippery Rock and most recently Sam Houston State.
Longo led the Bearkats to the FCS’ No. 1 ranking in total offense each of the past two seasons and the No. 1 scoring offense in 2016.
“The guys we’ve had here, we all have great knowledge of the game and how you should attack certain things,” coach Hugh Freeze said last month. “But someone who has done it as long as (Longo) has in his system, it comes instinctively to him. I think that’s something we needed.”
From the outside looking in, there’s a bit of Freeze in Longo — a man whose coaching career started at the high school level;who was equipped with an up-tempo offense that rose from some of the lesser-known reaches of college football to the SEC, and who also had a DVR littered with college football games.
******
Leach stood in similar shoes 20 years ago when he rose from offensive coordinator at Division II Valdosta State to the same post at Kentucky.
He’s heard the same doubts about handing an SEC offense to a coach whose background is far away from the Power 5, and he’s very opinionated about it.
“I’ve got bad news for all these levels people,” Leach said. “Your level isn’t special, your conference isn’t special. All this 'different level this, different level that.' That’s crazy.
“How is it better? Somebody coaches better athletes, somehow they morph into something smarter? That’s crazy. I mean, you still have problems, you still have 11 parts you can wiggle around to counter the other 11 parts.”
RELATED: Ole Miss hires Tray Scott as defensive line coach
Longo has been good at moving his 11 around at every school he’s coached, even when he wasn’t on a level playing field.
You can learn about yourself as a coach when you don’t have the same resources as someone else. As the head coach at La Salle from 2004-05, Longo recruited and coached at a non-scholarship program but faced teams that did give out scholarships.
“I didn’t think it was a great experience at the time, but it was a great experience for me to learn to create numbers advantages,” Longo said, as La Salle discontinued football in 2007. “So it forced us to be at our best schematically to just to try and create an opportunity for our guys who weren’t nearly as good as who we were playing to have a chance at competing.”
******
Ted Schlafke has an extensive history with Longo. Schlafke played quarterback for Longo for two seasons at Minnesota-Duluth and lived with the Longos while he was a graduate assistant at Southern Illinois.
Now, as the passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach at South Dakota, he runs Longo’s system. He has a thorough understanding of Longo’s offense, maybe as much as anyone that is not Longo.
“The most unique part is probably that they don’t run a million different plays,” Schlafke said. “They’re going to run fewer plays at a more efficient level than anybody else. They’re going to become more confident than anybody else in it. There’s not a lot of plays when you go, 'Those guys didn’t know what they were doing.'”
Longo estimates he has about 25 plays in his playbook — just because there’s only so many plays doesn’t make it any easier to prepare for.
McNeese State head coach Lance Guidry faced Longo’s Sam Houston State offense three times over the past two seasons.
Game-planning for Longo’s offense was so demanding this season, Guidry and his defensive coordinator had to split the duties in half throughout the week because there was so much to cover.
The plan didn’t work — the Bearkats won 56-43 against McNeese State.
“One of the best guys that’s been in our conference for sure. … He changes his tempos all the time; he really knows what he’s doing,” Guidry said. “And because he knows what he’s doing, he can adjust to what he’s seeing from the defense. The kids play with a physical demeanor and it comes from him.”
******
Ole Miss has lacked a physical component to its offense and it’s cost the team, particularly during SEC West games.
Leach coaches in the Pac-12 now but coached in the Big 12 and SEC previously. He said he faced the most skepticism when he coached in the Southeast.
“First, it becomes it won’t work,” Leach said. “Second, they basically say, 'oh it’s a system,' suggesting that people who don’t do it that way — who just run it up the middle, stick all your asses together so one hand grenade can kill everybody — that’s the right way to do it. Since they do it the right way, they’re OK with the fact they lost.
“This is a great time to be in the SEC; everybody’s got the same offense: run right, run left, play action. And they tease themselves and say we threw it four more times a game this year than we did last year.”
Leach’s offense set six NCAA records and 41 SEC records while he was at Kentucky. Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury played quarterback for Leach with the Red Raiders and spent one season as an offensive coordinator in the SEC with Texas A&M.
Famed Aggies quarterback Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy under Kingsbury’s coaching.
“I talked about how Johnny translated to the SEC, and I think they have a similar player there in Shea Patterson,” said Kingsbury, who has known Longo for a few years and spoke to Freeze when he was going through his coordinator search. “I kind of relayed that message: (you need) a kid who can extend plays, which you know is huge with the defensive lines you face in the SEC.”
Longo visits Kingsbury every year to talk shop about offense and schemes. Kingsbury said Longo will stay at Texas Tech’s football offices watching film until 1 or 2 a.m. and sometimes slept in his car to be ready for the next day.
Kingsbury witnessed firsthand how potent Longo’s offense was when Texas Tech faced Sam Houston State in 2015 and won 59-45.
“If you get the numbers in the box, he’s going to get into the right run play and if you don’t, he’s going to hit you with some sort of pass concept that best attacks whatever you’re in,” Kingsbury said. “I think that’s what makes him really good — he’s going to have an answer for whatever you’re throwing at him.”
Contact Antonio Morales at amorales2@gannett.com . Follow him on Twitter .