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Christensen changes culture at Wyoming
April 27, 2009 12:04 PM
Posted by ESPN.com's Graham Watson
LARAMIE, Wyo. -- More than 40 minutes had passed in what was supposed to be a 70-minute practice, and head coach Dave Christensen had seen enough.
After a series of dropped passes, overthrown balls and fumbled snaps, Christensen, Wyoming's new football coach, blew his whistle.
"What the [expletive]! This is an hour-long practice and you guys can't focus for an hour? Get in the end zone."
The team, which is down to 53 players after injuries decimated the ranks, jogs toward the end zone as Christensen follows barking. This is the 13th of 15 spring practices and the Cowboys have come to learn that giving anything less than 100 percent, even in a shortened practice, will result in nothing but bad things for them.
AP Photo/Laramie Boomerang, Andy Carpenean
Dave Christensen hopes to turn things around at Wyoming.
Christensen's lecture is met with a series of unison "Yes sirs" by a bunch of players who aren't sure what's going to happen next. And then Christensen does something neither he nor any of the coaches he's worked for has ever done before.
He starts practice all over again. From the beginning.
He blows his whistle, the team jogs to other side of the field, around the goalpost and into the same stretch lines it formed almost an hour ago. The Cowboys go through every stretch and ultimately every drill again. It was their very own version of Groundhog Day.
This is the new Wyoming football.
For years, practices had been unstructured, loose affairs that had players goofing off, former coach Joe Glenn fraternizing with donors in the stands of War Memorial Stadium, and the hitting almost at a bare minimum.
With Christensen in charge, the cushy lifestyle is gone and in its place a discipline-based structure that has been the foundation of winning programs at Kent State, Washington and Missouri. And now Wyoming.
"It was a slap in the face, but it's good because we lacked discipline last year and you could see that with all the mistakes we made and all the turnovers we had," defensive lineman John Fletcher said. "Him coming in and installing his system and how he wants things run, it's helped us out a lot.
"The tempo just wasn't there at all and the enthusiasm that all the coaches bring to practice, we just didn't have that at all. Not only does it pick up the tempo of practice having the enthusiastic coaches out there, but it picks the kids up, makes them want to go out there and work a little bit harder. It's a good change for us. It's hard for some kids right now because we had it so easy in the past and now they're working our butts off pretty good."
Jovial Joe
When asked about former coach Joe Glenn, Wyoming athletics director Tom Burman took a minute to search for the right word, trying not to paint a poor picture of a coach that was beloved because of his personality not because of his coaching skills.
"Joe was a very positive kind of coach and what I mean by that was that he was more, I don't want to call him a cheerleader, but he was more of an inspirational leader than probably he was dealing with the X's and O's," Burman said. "He was kind of rah-rah and always upbeat ... He was definitely more hands-off."
Jim Cowsert/Icon SMI
Quarterback Karsten Sween said he was afraid to make a mistake under the previous regime.
Consequently, Glenn's hands-off mentality led to lax practices run haphazardly by assistants. There was no continuity because there was no tolerance for mistakes, especially at quarterback. Senior Karsten Sween, who emerged as the starter out of Christensen's first spring, said quarterbacks constantly lived in fear of making a mistake because they'd be pulled out of drills or games. Three different quarterbacks started at different times last year and often all of them would play in a single game. Sween said the quarterbacks were informed at the beginning of the week which one would be starting that Saturday and even that could change depending on how the practices went.
"The situation with the quarterbacks where different people were playing every week, that's almost impossible to play in," Sween said. "You know the coaches don't have confidence in you. It was ludicrous because you can't play under a circumstance where you make one mistake and you're out. That's any job. So, it was a lot of pressure.
"There have been a lot of expectations and a lot of letdowns in the past. So that was just like the peak of, 'what am I going to do? Obviously, I'm horrible. I can't play. I make one mistake.' And so, it was just kind of a bad deal."
Because of the mixed messages, the offense, which ranked in the 100s in total offense each of the past two seasons, could never find a rhythm and subsequently, the Cowboys relied on their defense to help them win games. That created a division between the offense and the defense where players were blaming either side of the ball for losses.
"You don't win games when everyone's not getting along and that's one thing that we weren't doing very well," linebacker Weston Johnson said. "And it's easy to point fingers when you're losing."
The coaching almost encouraged the division by splitting the locker room up into offense on one side and defense on another. Even in practice, defensive players would take cheap shots at offensive players out of frustration often with no punishment from coaches.
"One of the biggest things that always bothered me was the lack of coaching when something went wrong," Sween said. "It was always like, 'Well, make the play. Just do it right.' And they really wouldn't give you all the tools to do that."
Off the field, accountability was the issue. Players would be late or even miss meetings with no consequences. Several players said their teammates wouldn't go to class and the coaches didn't say anything. Quarterback Adam Berry, who was a true freshman last year, said it was the most unstructured program he'd visited and that it just continued throughout the season.
But no one ever stopped to question the method and nothing changed even as the team continued to struggle.
"To be honest, we didn't know a difference," Sween said. "We just thought this is how it is everywhere."
A new attitude
Christensen knew that Wyoming was where he wanted to coach. Even before the job officially became available -- there were rumors of Glenn's departure long before he was officially fired -- Christensen had his agent make sure his name was in the mix. Christensen had been a candidate for other Mountain West openings at New Mexico and San Diego State, but it was the commitment by both the administration and the fans at Wyoming that sold him on his new school.
But when he took the job, he was floored by stories about the past regime. He was asked why he stood out in the middle of the field during practice when Glenn spent practice time schmoozing with donors or passing out candy to kids in attendance.
Christensen had to ask for goalposts and a clock on his practice field because Glenn never had either installed. He was asked by elderly booster after a meet-and-greet function one evening if he'd play the piano or sing the fight song to the group -- a staple of Glenn's shtick after every booster function -- and Christensen replied that he'd do his best to entertain 12 Saturday's out of the year, 13 if things went well.
But despite all of the faults Wyoming had, the cupboard wasn't bare and Christensen inherited a team that wanted some sort of structure even if it didn't know what structure was.
"I talked to players at the end of the year before, the seniors, and I sensed there were some issues, but I chose not to deal with it at that time," Burman said. "Last year, as the season was winding down, I talked to some players and they loved coach Glenn and they thought he was a great man, but they felt like they needed a change. We obviously needed to get better on offense. So, I think the kids, they didn't know what needed to change, they're probably not in a position to make that call, but they knew that the status quo wasn't going to work."
David O. Bailey/US Presswire
Players enjoyed playing for Joe Glenn but a lack of accountability hurt the program.
The first thing Christensen did upon arriving at Wyoming was change the locker room. He mixed offensive and defensive players together and emphasized that Wyoming was going to be a team. He didn't look at film from last season and instead decided to give every player a fair shot at a starting position. He laid down the ground rules for meetings, academics, behavior during practice and mapped the punishments if the rules weren't followed. As Christensen installed the no-huddle, spread system that made him famous at Missouri, he allowed practices to be physical, which resulted in some injuries, even some career-ending ones, but showed his team how tough he needed them to be. He allowed his quarterbacks to get hit, forcing them to make quick decisions.
"What really hurt us the last few years, we got beat by Utah two years ago 50-0, we got hammered that year 47-7 at BYU, and I don't want to say we quit, but we didn't compete for four quarters like we should have and that's what we've got to get away from," Burman said. "We just cannot tolerate that. We can't allow that to continue. That's not how this program was built over the years. We may not have been one of the most successful teams in the Mountain West Conference or even the old WAC, but we were always one of the tougher teams."
Early on, the new system took its toll. Players left the program because it wasn't the lax system for which they'd signed up. Other players found themselves so beaten up that Christensen wouldn't allow them to play for safety concerns. Christensen was down to 53 practice players by the end of spring practice because of injuries and defections and he had to bring in alumni just to have a proper spring game.
"Obviously, I knew there would be some issues or else they wouldn't be hiring a new football coach, but I didn't know a lot about personnel here when I took the job," Christensen said. "But there was virtually no resistance, which was so encouraging because I put a lot of demands on them. I'm no harder on these guys than I've been on any team I've been with. If I'm too hard on them that depends on whose opinion that is."
Starting to believe
The first thing that catches the eye when walking into Christensen's office is a picture of he and former Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel on a bookshelf near the corner. Next to it is an autographed football from Missouri's 2007 Cotton Bowl team and up and down the shelves are memorabilia from a time that made Christensen a hot commodity in the head-coaching world.
While those things are keepsakes for Christensen, they're also motivators for any player who walks into his office and proof that Christensen has turned struggling programs around before.
Christensen has inundated his players with Missouri game film, especially on offense, so they can see how the offense they're learning is supposed to look. He's even asked Daniel to come to Laramie and spend time with his quarterbacks, something all of the quarterbacks are excited about.
For the first time since many of the players have been with the program, the offense is dominating the defense in practice and football is starting to become fun again. Although they know they're a long way from being one of the elite programs in the country or even the Mountain West Conference, there's a confidence and swagger that hasn't been felt around the program in a long time.
"We're doing so well on offense that guys are seriously talking about us beating Texas," Sween said of the Cowboys' second opponent next season. "And I'm like, 'Hold on guys, we just started learning this system and we have a long way to go.' But it's neat hearing that because we would have never said that a year ago and actually thought we had a chance."
Christensen's not ready to make any bold predictions or even set a timetable on when Wyoming might become a viable competitor. He has his hopes for the season, but likes to keep that to himself. After all, Wyoming is a program that hasn't had a winning season since 2004 and just two winning seasons since 1999.
The Cowboys were 4-8 last season and since the inception of the Mountain West Conference in 1999, the Cowboys have finished seventh or worse seven times.
But Christensen appreciates the enthusiasm and the fact that the players are starting to believe in what he's selling.
"I hope they feel like they can beat Texas, that's what the plan is," Christensen said. "You come out onto this field on game day, you come out to win. We'll come out to win every single week. Confidence comes when you start winning. And once the program's implemented and the players are in the right positions then you start winning and that will breed confidence."
Wyoming Cowboys, Dave Christensen
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Christensen changes culture at Wyoming
April 27, 2009 12:04 PM
Posted by ESPN.com's Graham Watson
LARAMIE, Wyo. -- More than 40 minutes had passed in what was supposed to be a 70-minute practice, and head coach Dave Christensen had seen enough.
After a series of dropped passes, overthrown balls and fumbled snaps, Christensen, Wyoming's new football coach, blew his whistle.
"What the [expletive]! This is an hour-long practice and you guys can't focus for an hour? Get in the end zone."
The team, which is down to 53 players after injuries decimated the ranks, jogs toward the end zone as Christensen follows barking. This is the 13th of 15 spring practices and the Cowboys have come to learn that giving anything less than 100 percent, even in a shortened practice, will result in nothing but bad things for them.
AP Photo/Laramie Boomerang, Andy Carpenean
Dave Christensen hopes to turn things around at Wyoming.
Christensen's lecture is met with a series of unison "Yes sirs" by a bunch of players who aren't sure what's going to happen next. And then Christensen does something neither he nor any of the coaches he's worked for has ever done before.
He starts practice all over again. From the beginning.
He blows his whistle, the team jogs to other side of the field, around the goalpost and into the same stretch lines it formed almost an hour ago. The Cowboys go through every stretch and ultimately every drill again. It was their very own version of Groundhog Day.
This is the new Wyoming football.
For years, practices had been unstructured, loose affairs that had players goofing off, former coach Joe Glenn fraternizing with donors in the stands of War Memorial Stadium, and the hitting almost at a bare minimum.
With Christensen in charge, the cushy lifestyle is gone and in its place a discipline-based structure that has been the foundation of winning programs at Kent State, Washington and Missouri. And now Wyoming.
"It was a slap in the face, but it's good because we lacked discipline last year and you could see that with all the mistakes we made and all the turnovers we had," defensive lineman John Fletcher said. "Him coming in and installing his system and how he wants things run, it's helped us out a lot.
"The tempo just wasn't there at all and the enthusiasm that all the coaches bring to practice, we just didn't have that at all. Not only does it pick up the tempo of practice having the enthusiastic coaches out there, but it picks the kids up, makes them want to go out there and work a little bit harder. It's a good change for us. It's hard for some kids right now because we had it so easy in the past and now they're working our butts off pretty good."
Jovial Joe
When asked about former coach Joe Glenn, Wyoming athletics director Tom Burman took a minute to search for the right word, trying not to paint a poor picture of a coach that was beloved because of his personality not because of his coaching skills.
"Joe was a very positive kind of coach and what I mean by that was that he was more, I don't want to call him a cheerleader, but he was more of an inspirational leader than probably he was dealing with the X's and O's," Burman said. "He was kind of rah-rah and always upbeat ... He was definitely more hands-off."
Jim Cowsert/Icon SMI
Quarterback Karsten Sween said he was afraid to make a mistake under the previous regime.
Consequently, Glenn's hands-off mentality led to lax practices run haphazardly by assistants. There was no continuity because there was no tolerance for mistakes, especially at quarterback. Senior Karsten Sween, who emerged as the starter out of Christensen's first spring, said quarterbacks constantly lived in fear of making a mistake because they'd be pulled out of drills or games. Three different quarterbacks started at different times last year and often all of them would play in a single game. Sween said the quarterbacks were informed at the beginning of the week which one would be starting that Saturday and even that could change depending on how the practices went.
"The situation with the quarterbacks where different people were playing every week, that's almost impossible to play in," Sween said. "You know the coaches don't have confidence in you. It was ludicrous because you can't play under a circumstance where you make one mistake and you're out. That's any job. So, it was a lot of pressure.
"There have been a lot of expectations and a lot of letdowns in the past. So that was just like the peak of, 'what am I going to do? Obviously, I'm horrible. I can't play. I make one mistake.' And so, it was just kind of a bad deal."
Because of the mixed messages, the offense, which ranked in the 100s in total offense each of the past two seasons, could never find a rhythm and subsequently, the Cowboys relied on their defense to help them win games. That created a division between the offense and the defense where players were blaming either side of the ball for losses.
"You don't win games when everyone's not getting along and that's one thing that we weren't doing very well," linebacker Weston Johnson said. "And it's easy to point fingers when you're losing."
The coaching almost encouraged the division by splitting the locker room up into offense on one side and defense on another. Even in practice, defensive players would take cheap shots at offensive players out of frustration often with no punishment from coaches.
"One of the biggest things that always bothered me was the lack of coaching when something went wrong," Sween said. "It was always like, 'Well, make the play. Just do it right.' And they really wouldn't give you all the tools to do that."
Off the field, accountability was the issue. Players would be late or even miss meetings with no consequences. Several players said their teammates wouldn't go to class and the coaches didn't say anything. Quarterback Adam Berry, who was a true freshman last year, said it was the most unstructured program he'd visited and that it just continued throughout the season.
But no one ever stopped to question the method and nothing changed even as the team continued to struggle.
"To be honest, we didn't know a difference," Sween said. "We just thought this is how it is everywhere."
A new attitude
Christensen knew that Wyoming was where he wanted to coach. Even before the job officially became available -- there were rumors of Glenn's departure long before he was officially fired -- Christensen had his agent make sure his name was in the mix. Christensen had been a candidate for other Mountain West openings at New Mexico and San Diego State, but it was the commitment by both the administration and the fans at Wyoming that sold him on his new school.
But when he took the job, he was floored by stories about the past regime. He was asked why he stood out in the middle of the field during practice when Glenn spent practice time schmoozing with donors or passing out candy to kids in attendance.
Christensen had to ask for goalposts and a clock on his practice field because Glenn never had either installed. He was asked by elderly booster after a meet-and-greet function one evening if he'd play the piano or sing the fight song to the group -- a staple of Glenn's shtick after every booster function -- and Christensen replied that he'd do his best to entertain 12 Saturday's out of the year, 13 if things went well.
But despite all of the faults Wyoming had, the cupboard wasn't bare and Christensen inherited a team that wanted some sort of structure even if it didn't know what structure was.
"I talked to players at the end of the year before, the seniors, and I sensed there were some issues, but I chose not to deal with it at that time," Burman said. "Last year, as the season was winding down, I talked to some players and they loved coach Glenn and they thought he was a great man, but they felt like they needed a change. We obviously needed to get better on offense. So, I think the kids, they didn't know what needed to change, they're probably not in a position to make that call, but they knew that the status quo wasn't going to work."
David O. Bailey/US Presswire
Players enjoyed playing for Joe Glenn but a lack of accountability hurt the program.
The first thing Christensen did upon arriving at Wyoming was change the locker room. He mixed offensive and defensive players together and emphasized that Wyoming was going to be a team. He didn't look at film from last season and instead decided to give every player a fair shot at a starting position. He laid down the ground rules for meetings, academics, behavior during practice and mapped the punishments if the rules weren't followed. As Christensen installed the no-huddle, spread system that made him famous at Missouri, he allowed practices to be physical, which resulted in some injuries, even some career-ending ones, but showed his team how tough he needed them to be. He allowed his quarterbacks to get hit, forcing them to make quick decisions.
"What really hurt us the last few years, we got beat by Utah two years ago 50-0, we got hammered that year 47-7 at BYU, and I don't want to say we quit, but we didn't compete for four quarters like we should have and that's what we've got to get away from," Burman said. "We just cannot tolerate that. We can't allow that to continue. That's not how this program was built over the years. We may not have been one of the most successful teams in the Mountain West Conference or even the old WAC, but we were always one of the tougher teams."
Early on, the new system took its toll. Players left the program because it wasn't the lax system for which they'd signed up. Other players found themselves so beaten up that Christensen wouldn't allow them to play for safety concerns. Christensen was down to 53 practice players by the end of spring practice because of injuries and defections and he had to bring in alumni just to have a proper spring game.
"Obviously, I knew there would be some issues or else they wouldn't be hiring a new football coach, but I didn't know a lot about personnel here when I took the job," Christensen said. "But there was virtually no resistance, which was so encouraging because I put a lot of demands on them. I'm no harder on these guys than I've been on any team I've been with. If I'm too hard on them that depends on whose opinion that is."
Starting to believe
The first thing that catches the eye when walking into Christensen's office is a picture of he and former Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel on a bookshelf near the corner. Next to it is an autographed football from Missouri's 2007 Cotton Bowl team and up and down the shelves are memorabilia from a time that made Christensen a hot commodity in the head-coaching world.
While those things are keepsakes for Christensen, they're also motivators for any player who walks into his office and proof that Christensen has turned struggling programs around before.
Christensen has inundated his players with Missouri game film, especially on offense, so they can see how the offense they're learning is supposed to look. He's even asked Daniel to come to Laramie and spend time with his quarterbacks, something all of the quarterbacks are excited about.
For the first time since many of the players have been with the program, the offense is dominating the defense in practice and football is starting to become fun again. Although they know they're a long way from being one of the elite programs in the country or even the Mountain West Conference, there's a confidence and swagger that hasn't been felt around the program in a long time.
"We're doing so well on offense that guys are seriously talking about us beating Texas," Sween said of the Cowboys' second opponent next season. "And I'm like, 'Hold on guys, we just started learning this system and we have a long way to go.' But it's neat hearing that because we would have never said that a year ago and actually thought we had a chance."
Christensen's not ready to make any bold predictions or even set a timetable on when Wyoming might become a viable competitor. He has his hopes for the season, but likes to keep that to himself. After all, Wyoming is a program that hasn't had a winning season since 2004 and just two winning seasons since 1999.
The Cowboys were 4-8 last season and since the inception of the Mountain West Conference in 1999, the Cowboys have finished seventh or worse seven times.
But Christensen appreciates the enthusiasm and the fact that the players are starting to believe in what he's selling.
"I hope they feel like they can beat Texas, that's what the plan is," Christensen said. "You come out onto this field on game day, you come out to win. We'll come out to win every single week. Confidence comes when you start winning. And once the program's implemented and the players are in the right positions then you start winning and that will breed confidence."
Wyoming Cowboys, Dave Christensen
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