Croom sticks to the Plan

Sylvester Croom walked out the door and down his driveway on the unusually warm Sunday morning of Sept. 17, 2006, not exactly eager for the 15-minute drive from his house to the office.
He was going to work early. Tulane had beaten his Bulldogs at home the night before, handing Croom his 19th loss in 25 games as the Mississippi State football coach. Croom was sick about it. He’d treat that feeling like he had so many times before: Watch film, see what went wrong, fix it.

But before Croom reached his car door, something in his front yard caught his eye. There it was, staring right back at him, a sign bearing two words that would force the turning point of his career at State:

FOR SALE.

“So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, somebody really wanted to put that in my yard to drive all the way out to Oktoc, before the sun comes up,” Croom recalled. “And then I’m also thinking to myself, what would I have done if I had seen him do it? And that scared me. Because there’s no telling what I would have done.”

So he drove, in a daze, to campus, where a thought took root:

To heck with all this.

He knew that he could leave Mississippi State and the network of colleagues he had made in the NFL, coupled with his coaching resume, would land him another job.

“So at that point, you know what I said? At the end of the season, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

For three days following the Tulane loss, Croom wrestled with his thoughts.

“In my head and talking with my agent - he and I went back and forth,” Croom said. “He said don’t do it, I said no, I’m not going to do anything because I would never walk away from my players and not finish the season and I would never put (MSU athletic director) Larry (Templeton) in that position.

“But the end of the season, this is it.”

The Plan is written in the front part of a three-ring binder that rests on a shelf above a laptop in Croom’s spacious second-floor office of MSU’s Bryan Athletic Administration Building. He handed a copy of the “Organizational Manual” to a visitor on a recent day.

“Just sort of thumb through that,” he said, passing the white binder across his desk. “You’ll see.”

Eight tabs neatly divide The Plan, though the most space is occupied by practice schedules and other season-specific information. At the front, there’s a mission statement, followed by core principles.

Croom spent his 2003 summer vacation writing this. Weeks earlier, Alabama had chosen Mike Shula as its coach, replacing Mike Price after his infamous short-lived tenure in Tuscaloosa.

Croom had interviewed for the job, too. He didn’t have The Plan then, at least not on paper. He couldn’t help but think that was part of the reason he didn’t get his dream job.

“I said, ‘OK, I may not get another chance, but at least, when it does come, I’ll have it ready to go,’” he said.

That chance came some six months later, at a Marriott in Appleton, Wis. Croom was a running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers. Templeton was hiring a head coach to replace Jackie Sherrill, who had retired weeks earlier with the Bulldogs headed to a third straight losing season.

“I remember about three hours into the first session I had with him,” Templeton said. “I said ‘Coach, talk to me a little bit about the type of offensive coordinator and the type of defensive coordinator that you would hire.’ And he reached into his pocket, and he said ‘You know Woody McCorvey and you know Ellis Johnson?’ And he was nine-deep into who he wanted as assistant coaches.”

Yes, The Plan was that detailed. Its central tenets: Everything that’s done has the players’ long-term welfare in mind. Discipline off the field means discipline on it. Conditioning means a State team won’t wilt in the fourth quarter.

Player defections were in The Plan. That’s good, because there were dozens of them.

Templeton recalled the team’s first meeting with Croom after the coach agreed to take the job.

“They weren’t prepared for him,” Templeton said. “They were slouched down in their chairs, some of them were asleep, couple of them were late, and one poor soul’s cell phone rang about five minutes into his comments.”

Poor soul, indeed.

“He asked him to leave the meeting,” Templeton said.

Enduring criticism was in The Plan.

Sort of.

Croom was no dummy. He knew that a long-term plan that meant his team would lose more often than not early wouldn’t exactly make him popular. But he admits he was not prepared for the venom.

“I didn’t realize how many people didn’t realize how bad of a shape this program was in,” Croom said. “That’s what shocked me. That’s what totally shocked me.”

Croom couldn’t believe he was criticized for making players go to class. For calling out underperforming players to the press. (That’s how his mentor, his coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant did it, after all.) For making them earn their depth chart positions in the spring.

He was incredulous when a fan asked him if it might be better if State reverted to its old ways, hinting that winning now and taking NCAA sanctions later was essentially OK.

“I’m sitting there thinking, the old ways are what got you here in the first place,” Croom said. “So you’d rather go back and do what you know does not work than go ahead and fight through this and try something new and give it a chance? You know what you’ve been doing doesn’t work.”

For some fans, the honeymoon ended three games into Croom’s tenure, with a home loss to lower-level Maine in 2004. By the time the 2006 team started 0-3, capped by that 32-29 loss to Tulane, Croom was embattled.

The dark cloud, which was marked by low attendance at home games and mountains of criticism via phone calls and Internet message board chatter, was hard to ignore for anyone close to the program.

“It seemed like when I would get down he would come pump me up,” Templeton said. “And I think when he got down, I was down there pumping him up.”

Croom leaned heavily on his confidants. His wife, Jeri, is his most trusted one.

Football-wise, he spoke often with his agent, Rick Davis, former colleagues Bobby Ross and Pat Dye and college roommate Mike Washington.

“Anybody who starts to get that kind of thing, it goes with the territory, so to speak,” said Ross, the former Georgia Tech, Army and San Diego Chargers coach, and a friend of Croom’s. “You can be up and high as an astronaut one day and as low as a snake in the ground on the other.”

“When you get beat and you’re losing you have a tendency to be losing your self confidence and you start questioning yourself,” said Dye, the former Auburn head coach and Alabama assistant. “I just told him you’ve got to fight your way through the thing, know and have faith in your raising and stick to it.”

But no matter how much Croom confided in his wife, his agent, his boss, his old roommate and those two old coaches, it couldn’t match his own inner dialogue.

“In a lot of ways, I still feel like I confide in my dad and Coach Bryant,” he said, a big, broad smile creeping across his face. “People think I’m crazy, but in a lot of ways, I still - and without moving my lips, I still feel like I talk to them.”

Being a standard-bearer for his race was not in The Plan.

Croom had tried this before. As the offensive coordinator with the Detroit Lions in the late 1990s, Croom was one of just a handful of African-Americans to lead an NFL offense.

He knew it, too.

“That ate me up because we felt like we were trying to prove things,” Croom said. “I was so obsessed with it, I lost 25 pounds because I wasn’t eating. I was almost in a state of depression.”

So when he arrived in Starkville, and after he delivered the now-famous “there ain’t but one color that matters here, and that color is maroon,” line to plaudits at his introductory press conference, race wasn’t something to dwell on.

Not even in Mississippi, where the context of race is everywhere.

“When I took this job, I would not allow anybody to put that on my shoulders again,” Croom said. “I won’t allow it. Because I came to this conclusion that people who think that way, no matter what I do, it’s not going to change my mind anyway. It ain’t going to change their minds.”

Change was not in The Plan. Neither was compromise - from Croom or his bosses.

The deal was explicitly laid out to Templeton and then-MSU president Charles Lee when Croom interviewed in December of ‘03. Many players would leave, Croom said. Plenty of losses would ensue. There would be criticism. There would not be a quick fix.

A half-decade might pass before he could give the fans a winning season.

“I agreed with him,” Templeton said. “I agreed that we didn’t want to go through this every four, five years. That we were wanting to do it the right character way that he was talking about. He and I specifically talked about five years.

“Did either one of us know it was going to be that tough the first two? No.”

Despite the criticism, Croom hardly wavered. His offensive coordinator and assistant head coach, Woody McCorvey, has remained by his side despite nearly non-stop chirping from fans regarding the team’s offense. Most of the remainder of his staff has left only for better opportunities, save for two coaches who were reassigned after last year’s three-win season.

Croom didn’t dip heavily into the junior college ranks for a quick recruiting fix. He still keeps the same philosophy: If a prospect can’t make academic progress and has character questions, he’ll pass.

Croom will tell anyone who listens that he’s grateful to the MSU administration for giving his plan time to work.

But somehow, somewhere along the way, he had to doubt whether it would work.

Right?

“(There was) no doubt,” he said, his voice rising, taking a staccato tempo. “If I was given time, none. Not that the plan would work. Now, I doubted whether I was going to be given time, yeah. I doubted whether I was doing a good enough job to convince the fans it was working. But the plan? No. Never. I knew what we were doing was going to work.”

So there Croom was, on a humid September Tuesday with that bitter Tulane loss still fresh, when his phone rang. It wasn’t his agent, with whom he had been discussing this vague idea of leaving at the end of the season. It wasn’t anyone offering him a new job.

It was Pat Ruel, the offensive line coach at Southern California. Croom had worked with Ruel when both were with the Detroit Lions.

“We got to talking and he said ‘I know you’re really down right now,’ ” Croom said. “And he said, ‘But you can’t give up on it.’ And I said ‘Yeah, Pat, I know that’s in the back of my mind, but I’m tired of fighting this battle.’ I said, ‘I don’t need this headache.’ ”

Ruel reminded Croom of all the things for which he had stood in the past. Then, the most pointed advice: If he abandoned The Plan after just three seasons, everything he stood for would be a lie.

“And when he said that, I said ‘You’re right,’ ” Croom said. “I said if I walk away and don’t finish, everything I’ve told those players is a lie. Everything.”

So Croom returned with new energy - and a few new practice and mental tips from Ruel. Later that week, State beat UAB, 16-10, in overtime at Legion Field.

Later that season, State earned what Croom now sees as a turnaround victory for his program - 24-16 over Alabama, his alma mater, in Tuscaloosa.

All of which brings Croom to where he is today: On top of the Bulldog world.

With a 7-5 record, his Mississippi State team is heading to its first bowl game in seven seasons.

There’s talk of a bigger payday. He was recently named the Southeastern Conference coach of the year by The Associated Press and the league coaches.

And he’s The Clarion-Ledger’s Mississippi Sportsman of the Year, an honor he’s sharing with Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

To think: Some 16 months ago, even the always-confident Croom wondered if it were all worth it.

“As hurt as I was by the sign being in my yard, you know what I finally figured out? It’s that these people don’t hate me,” Croom said.

“I came to realize it wasn’t me. It was whomever was sitting in this chair anyway. It was the head coach. Not me, Sylvester Croom. It was the head coach. Whoever was sitting in this chair was going to get that same criticism.”

Croom learned how to deal with it: Stick to The Plan.

This is a reprint of a Story in the Clarion Ledger News by Kyle Veazey