In the Omaha World-Herald of
about March 10, 2015, Mike Riley, new Nebraska head football coach/former
Oregon State head football coach/former Linfield assistant football coach,
talks about his mentors: Bear Bryant, Alabama (1971-1974), Ad Rutschman,Linfield (1977-1982) and John Robinson, USC (1993-1996). Text about Coach Rutschman (who was head coach of Linfield football, 1968-1991) is below:
AD RUTSCHMAN
Linfield College (1977-82)
“Ad Rutschman was a teacher.
He’s actually the best teacher of sports technique that I’ve ever been around.
He taught guys how to play. I was an assistant for him in kind of three ways.
When you’re at a small college, everybody wears a bunch of hats. He was the
athletic director, the head football coach and the head baseball coach. So I
did a lot of administrative stuff for him in the athletic director part of it,
I was defensive coordinator for his football team and I was the JV baseball
coach for his baseball program. So I got to basically follow him around and be
with him all the time. I think the biggest thing I got from him is that he
taught guys how to play. How to hit, how to field, how to pitch. It was how to
drive-block, how to backpedal. He could teach it all. He was one guy in football
that I’ve known that could coach any position. To this day, I admire that
because there’s not many guys like that. I don’t claim to be that guy. I think
it’s hard technically to be an expert at all that different stuff. He taught
guys how to do things.”
Photo shows clipping from
the World-Herald. Thanks to Gerry Painter, Wildcatville contributor, for
providing the clip.
To read the entire piece, go
to this URL ...
... scroll down a bit and look for the Mike Riley mentors sidebar to an article about Paul Chryst, Wisconsin head
football coach. Or, click on the photo above to make it larger and the sidebar easy to read.
