ARKANSAS STATE SPRING FOOTBALL

Anderson makes most of do-over

In the four months since he was hired, Arkansas State Coach Blake Anderson has shown an appreciation for the opportunity he thought was gone after once leaving the profession in 2004.
In the four months since he was hired, Arkansas State Coach Blake Anderson has shown an appreciation for the opportunity he thought was gone after once leaving the profession in 2004.

JONESBORO - Blake Anderson has always been a coach, a recruiter and a teacher.

There was a time, though, when he was using those skills to groom insurance salesmen instead of football players,and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever find his way back into the profession he decided on when he was 15 years old.

Anderson will hold his first spring game as Arkansas State’s head football coach at 7 tonight at Centennial Bank Stadium, and Monday he will put a cap on his first spring practice as a head coach at any school on any level.

In the four months Anderson has been on the job, he has shown an enthusiasm and appreciation for the opportunity he wasn’t sure he’d ever get again after leaving the coaching profession in June 2004.

“There were no guarantees when I walked away,” Anderson said. “I had to know that there was a possibility that I might not get back in.”

Anderson, 45, left college coaching for two years to run his father’s insurance business in Hubbard, Texas, a small“speed trap” of a town located between Waco and Corsicana.

Instead of recruiting quarterbacks and teaching the Spread offense he was just starting to perfect, Anderson found himself traveling throughout Texas recruiting new salesmen and teaching them tips of a different trade.

His father, Scott Anderson, who still lives in Hubbard, said his son ran the company better than he did. Anderson enjoyed the work, too.

“I was doing the same job,” he said. “It was just a different feel.”

Anderson’s journey to Jonesboro to take a job that has been held by four people in the past four seasons is somewhat similar to Gus Malzahn and Bryan Harsin, his two immediate predecessors, who crafted impressive resumes as college assistants.

Anderson did as well, with a small twist and turn thrown in.

Resume-building occurred for Anderson the past six seasons under Larry Fedora at Southern Miss and North Carolina, where school offensive records were set. Anderson said he talked with Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State and Southern Miss (twice) about their open head-coaching vacancies before being hired by ASU Athletic Director Terry Mohajir last December.

Bryan Harsin had spent 12 seasons at two of college football’s most recognizable programs (Boise State and Texas) before taking the job at ASU, and Gus Malzahn was one of college football’s most sought-after assistants after serving as Auburn’s offensive coordinator in the Tigers’ 2010 national championship season.

The major difference between Anderson and the other two is that his journey included a two-year hiatus and stops at some of college football’s most obscure outposts.

Anderson toiled at Howard Payne in Brownwood, Texas, Eastern New Mexico in Portales, N.M., and at Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, before getting his first FBS-level job at New Mexico in 1999. He drove the bus at Trinity Valley Community College while he and his wife, Wendy, lived in and ran the dormitory on campus. From 1995-1998, he coached quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers and taught two physical education classes.

“You just kind of did it all,” Anderson said.

Things turned for Anderson when he bought into the Spread offense as it started trickling into college football in the early 2000s. His first encounter with the Spread came at Middle Tennessee in 2002.

There, he and Steve Campbell, now the head coach at the University of Central Arkansas, were made co-offensive coordinators with instructions to carry on the Spread offense started the previous season by Fedora, who had left for Florida. Campbell possessed Spread experience, Anderson did not.

“He was constantly wanting to know the why,” Campbell said. “That’s what good coaches do when they don’t know the answers. They not only want to know the what, but the why.”

Anderson sought out some of the game’s brightest offensive minds after the Blue Raiders stumbled to 4-8 in 2002, averaging more than 100 yards less than they had under Fedora.

He went to Lubbock, Texas, to meet with Sonny Dykes, then the offensive coordinator at Texas Tech, before stopping in Austin, Texas, for his annual visit with Texas offensive coordinator Greg Davis, who is now the offensive coordinator at Iowa.

Anderson peppered Dykes with questions about the Red Raiders’ passing game, and many of the principles he plans to use at ASU came from those sessions. Anderson watched Davis’ work at Texas for seven consecutive springs. Anderson would meet with Davis for a few days, head back to wherever he was coaching at the time, then call a few days later with follow-up questions.

“I remember the first spring we were going through protections,” Davis said. “A couple of days later, he called and he said, ‘Hey, did I write this down right?’ ”

It was from those meetings that the offense Anderson likes to describe as “fast paced basketball on grass” started to take shape.

“I grew up always working and feeling that I had to outwork everybody,” Anderson said. “I was not the most talented. I wanted to prove that I could do it.”

ADDING PERSPECTIVE

Scott Anderson said he knew Blake had finally landed a good gig in 1999 when dad didn’t have to help his son move to New Mexico, where he was hired as running backs coach.

“We’ve rented a lot of U-Haul trailers,” Scott said.

By 2004 Anderson had helped the Blue Raiders’ offense steadily improve over three seasons, even though they never had a winning record, but he abruptly resigned June 1, 2005. His father had suffered a heart attack not long before, and Anderson took that as a sign he had gone full-throttle for too long.

“My wife and kids were sick of me coaching,” said Anderson, who was 36 at the time. “It was just like, ‘You need to get perspective.’ I had none. I wasn’t probably a very good husband or father. I was a workaholic.”

Anderson didn’t coach football or play golf, one of his favorite hobbies, for two years as he worked to save his father’s business, but he still talked to coaches and visited clinics. He knew coaching wasn’t out of his system completely.

Enter Rickey Bustle, who in 2007 had completed his fifth season as coach at Louisiana-Lafayette and was in need of a receivers coach and an offensive coordinator. Bustle hired Anderson as receivers coach after interviewing him at a coaches clinic in El Paso, Texas, and after Bustle’s offensive coordinator hire changed his mind, Anderson got that job, too.

It didn’t matter to Bustle that Anderson had been away from the game two seasons.

“That was his business,” said Bustle, who is now the offensive coordinator at North Carolina A&T. “He had impressed me that much.”

Anderson didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

He joined Fedora’s Southern Miss staff in 2008 after one season at Louisiana-Lafayette, and in four seasons at Southern Miss, Anderson helped Fedora build one of the top programs competing outside a BCS conference. Southern Miss broke school records for total offense in 2010 and 2011, and in 2011 Southern Miss finished 12-2 and 19th in the final BCS rankings.

Anderson moved with Fedora to North Carolina, where the Tar Heels averaged a school-record 485.6 yards per game in 2012 and ranked 49th nationally with 425.7 in last year’s 7-6 season.

Then, Dec. 19, Mohajir called to offer him his first head-coaching job in the town where he was born.

“There are only 128 of these suckers,” Anderson said of head coaching jobs at the FBS level. “It could have been any number of 100 or 1,000 guys that could have been sitting in this seat.

“I’m just grateful it was me.”

ASU spring game WHEN 7 p.m. today WHERE Centennial Bank Stadium, Jonesboro ADMISSION Free

At a glance BLAKE ANDERSON

POSITION Head coach BORN March 24, 1969 AGE 45 HOMETOWN Hubbard, Texas COLLEGE Sam Houston State (1992) FAMILY Wife, Wendy; children, Callie, Coleton, Cason

COACHING RESUME YEARS SCHOOL POSITION 2012-2013 North Carolina Off.coordinator/QBs 2010-2011 Southern Miss Off. coordinator/QBs 2008-2009 Southern Miss QBs/run coordinator 2007 La.-Lafayette Off. coordinator/WRs 2002-2004 Middle Tenn. co-off. coordinator/WRS 1999-2001 New Mexico Wide receivers, RBs 1995-1998 Trinity Valley Off. coordinator 1994 Howard Payne Wide receivers 1992-1993 E. New Mexico WRs, grad assistant

Sports, Pages 17 on 04/18/2014

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