Job takes new Coastal Carolina University coach back to roots

CONWAY -- Joe Moglia was the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth in the early 1980s when his opportunity came to take a career leap up the ladder of the college football ranks.

The way he remembers it, he was offered a position on the Miami coaching staff right after the Hurricanes won the 1984 Orange Bowl over Nebraska to claim the national championship. The job came with the understanding that he would ultimately succeed Tom Olivadotti as defensive coordinator – a premier position for a driven young man who had attained his first high school head coaching job at the age of 22.

But Moglia would turn down the Miami job offer, deciding instead to get out of coaching altogether. Having separated from his wife, he knew he couldn’t afford to fly his kids back and forth from New Hampshire to Florida, and with coaching salaries then far less than they are now, well, he simply needed a different way to support his family.

“I wound up coming to the conclusion that I absolutely had to get out of coaching,” Moglia said Tuesday, telling the story to a room full of Coastal Carolina University administrators, supporters and media.

Nearly three decades after passing on that coaching opportunity, Moglia pounced on another one, agreeing last week to become the Chanticleers’ new head football coach – his first salaried collegiate coaching job since ending his tenure at Dartmouth in 1983.

The 62-year-old Moglia explained how a man who went on to make a fortune in the financial world, first at Merrill Lynch and later as CEO of TD Ameritrade, had found his way back to football.

“I don’t have any prepared notes, but I do want to share with you some of the stuff that you would not see in reading my resume,” he said during his introductory news conference this week.

And so he started at the beginning, telling of his childhood in a “gang area” of Manhattan, where he lost two of his best friends in high school, one to a drug overdose and the other during liquor store robbery.

“I’ve never done drugs, but there’s a decent chance at that point in my life that I might have been with the guy robbing the liquor store,” he said. “But the reason why I wasn’t was because I was playing football in high school.”

He’d go on to Fordham College, and while there, he’d launch his coaching career as an assistant at Fordham Preparatory School – the start of a 16-year coaching career that seemed to be on the rise when the Miami offer came his way.

At that time, though, he was living in an unheated storage room above the football offices at Dartmouth, weathering the cold New Hampshire winter and trying to support himself and his family through the divorce.

“The conclusion I reached is I really didn’t believe I could do the job that I needed to do as a coach if I couldn’t live up to my responsibility as a father,” he said.

Instead, he landed a job with Merrill Lynch and the company put him in their MBA training program.

“There were 26 of us in the MBA training program at Merrill Lynch,” Moglia said. “There were 25 MBAs from Harvard and Stanford, etc., and there was one football coach. And everybody at Merrill Lynch is betting this guy is never, ever going to make it here. But the reality was while it was kind of a tough beginning, the reality was everything turned out pretty well. And a few years later those MBAs were working for me.”

After 17 years at Merrill Lynch, he was offered the position of CEO at TD Ameritrade (then called Ameritrade), when the company needed somebody to spearhead a turnaround. By the time he decided to step down as CEO in late 2008 and transition into the role of chairman of the company, he had accumulated significant wealth – he’s been referred to as a billionaire, though he says that description is a “gross exaggeration.”

Lucrative offers soon came his way from other firms, along with potential television opportunities. But then a group of alumni from Yale contacted him as well to say the university’s head football coaching position might be open at the end of the 2008 season and they wanted to gauge his interest.

“And literally I remember taking the phone and kind of looking at it like this and said, ‘You guys understand I haven’t coached for 20 years?’ ” Moglia recalled. “They said ‘We know that, but we spent a lot of time looking at the skill sets that are really truly required of a successful head coach. We believe you’ve got those – why don’t you think about it?’

“So over the span of the next five months, that’s literally all I did. And I found I didn’t lose one second of sleep in any of the business opportunities, the media opportunities, the speaking opportunities, but I couldn’t get the football thing out of my head.”

While he didn’t end up at Yale, he found a friend in legendary Nebraska head coach-turned-athletic director Tom Osborne and would spend two years as an unpaid executive adviser to Cornhuskers coach Bo Pelini, working mostly with the defense and some with the team’s kickers.

Just like that, he was something of a rookie again, like in the MBA program with Merrill Lynch all those years earlier – but now as a seemingly out of place businessman back in the world of collegiate football.

He worked full-time hours, which as he said meant 14-hour days four days a week. He stayed in a hotel room in Lincoln, Neb., during the week and returned home to Omaha on Thursday nights to see his wife. Fridays were spent working with TD Ameritrade before meeting the team at the hotel and then sitting in the coaches’ box with a headset on Saturday.

Moglia did that for the 2009 and 2010 seasons before taking the job of president and head coach of the United Football League’s Omaha Nighthawks.

During most of that stretch, he said he was applying for college head coaching jobs across the country.

“I bet you I have applied to almost every Division I job that has probably come up over the span of the last three years,” Moglia said. “When Notre Dame came up, I applied at Notre Dame. I applied to Ohio State, etc., … But I’ve probably had about 15 or so pretty serious phone calls, probably about eight or nine interviews and probably three or four of them pretty serious interviews.”

About a week before Tuesday’s press conference, he started talking with Coastal Carolina – and since being formally introduced as the Chants’ new head football coach, many people have been talking about the former Fortune 500 CEO’s unusual move from the boardroom to the ball field.

With recognizable names from the college football world rumored and linked to the Chants’ open position in the wake of former coach David Bennett’s dismissal, Moglia’s hiring was certainly a surprise – and one that has generated many questions. But those who know him say he’s ready for the opportunity.

“He once told me he’s not a businessman that’s getting excited by coaching football; he’s a football man that went into business – which is a big difference, and he’s been successful,” Olivadotti said over the phone Tuesday.

The two have been friends since the early 1970s when they coached different high school teams in Delaware, and they worked together last year with the Nighthawks with Olivadotti serving as the team’s defensive coordinator.

“I always felt like he could do it,” Olivadotti said of Moglia’s return to college football. “I always said he was out of his element in business, but apparently he wasn’t. It doesn’t surprise me that he got back into [football].”

Osborne, meanwhile, said in a radio interview with ESPN 93.9 The Team’s Aaron Marks this week that he believes Moglia’s energy, intelligence and communication skills will translate well to his new role.

“If you can take an organization as large as TD Ameritrade and do the things that he did with it, you can certainly do that with a football team,” Osborne said. “So it is a little bit of an unconventional hire, but on the other hand Joe brings skills that the average football coach does not even approach. So I think he’ll do very well.”

That’s what the Coastal Carolina decision makers are hoping. Moglia is back where he started, and as he put it, he’s just a “football coach going back to football.”