Even when he’s off, Rick Neuheisel is on.
Sitting in the Arizona football complex on Day Who Knows What of the Pac-12 Networks Training Camp tour, the former UCLA (and Washington and Colorado) head coach is discussing his jettisoning from the Bruins and his rebirth as college football’s loosest lead analyst when ESPN’s Pedro Gomez walks by with his son, Rio, a soon-to-be-freshman on the Wildcats baseball team.
Gomez explains that Rio has come to Arizona after another pitching recruit was injured, opening up a spot.
“You never know when your opportunity is coming, you just know it’s coming,” Neuheisel says to young Rio, darting out his hand for a high five. “The definition of good luck is when opportunity and preparation collide. Go get ’er done.”
If you’ve been on a beat with Neuheisel, you’ve heard that phrase before. It might as well be his license plate frame.
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He’s far away from the cameras, but Rick Neuheisel, ever the optimist, can’t turn Rick Neuheisel off. He spins his departure from UCLA in 2011 as much as it can be spun; even the negatives come with a “Yeah, but.”
The team was eight games under .500 in his tenure, yeah, but Neuheisel set a foundation of recruiting from which Jim Mora benefited greatly.
The program was besieged by injuries to the quarterback position — his two inherited starters, Ben Olson and Pat Cowan, never played a down for him. His two groomed starters, Kevin Prince and Richard Brehaut, saw the training table more than the end zone.
Yeah, but he focuses on the team’s two bowl appearances.
The school paid him just 20 percent of the final year of his contract despite what he says was “guaranteed language.” Neuheisel, a lawyer, says he didn’t want to be “Larry Litigator.” Yeah, but he still calls it the most magical campus on earth.
It’s hard for Neuheisel to be that down, or at least for long, or at least in public.
“It’s eye-opening how much there is to do and how much fun life can be when you’re not tied to this regimen of around-the-clock football,” Neuheisel said. “I’ve reacquainted myself with my kids, with my wife. I don’t know if she likes it so much — she’s sending my résumés to every major university in the country.”
He jokes, but it’s not far off.
His youngest boy, Joe, will soon graduate high school. The other boys are already out of the nest — Jerry, a quarterback at Neuheisel’s alma mater, UCLA, and Jack, a wide receiver at Southern Methodist University. Pretty soon, the nest will be empty.
Then, Rick and Susan might give it another shot.
His wife misses the “85 sons we had with a team.”
Neuheisel misses the relationships most of all.
“The moniker of head coach, the esteem that goes with it, that wasn’t what attracted me to the job,” Neuheisel said. “It’s not like I didn’t enjoy it, but what attracted me to the job was to be able to have a hands-on impact on so many people.”
He rattles them off, both the general — “coaches, coaches’ kids, families of the staff, making sure they’ve got more access to the program; you can be a pied piper when you’re the head coach” — and the specific, such as former UCLA defensive lineman Datone Jones.
“You get to the kids who come from all walks of life, and you get to see the great stories: where they start, where they finish,” Neuheisel said. “The Datone Jones story is one I’m very proud of. I literally was there when he got up at 5 a.m. to get on a bus to get on a train to walk a mile to get to school to study for his SATs. To see him finish at UCLA and then be a first-rounder, that’s phenomenal.”
He wants it again, even if life is pretty cushy these days for the former Rose Bowl winner. The rigors of travel are minimal compared to his coaching career. He has a nice salary, a plush home and a wonderful family.
But he’s got that itch, a nagging itch, and it won’t quite go away.
Some people would blush at being called a natural on television, but Neuheisel says, “I thought I was a natural at coaching?” And it makes sense.
At age 33, he was promoted to head coach at Colorado, five years removed from a national championship, and he won 70 percent of his games. From there, it was Washington, which he led to four bowl games, including a Rose Bowl win, and where he won almost 70 percent of his games. After his tenure with the Huskies ended tenuously after he was fired for participating in a college basketball pool — he eventually won a $4.5 million settlement for wrongful termination — he signed on with the Baltimore Ravens in 2005 as quarterbacks coach and then offensive coordinator. He found his way back to UCLA amid much fanfare in 2008.
What’s the opposite of fanfare? That pretty much describes Neuheisel’s stint at his alma mater. The Bruins were a middling 21-29 in his four years, albeit with two bowl game appearances. There were big wins, and combined with gung-ho recruiting — UCLA ranked 13th, 10th and 14th in Scout.com’s national class rankings in his first three years before a 4-8 2010 season placed Neuheisel on the hot seat and prospects looked elsewhere — it appeared that the Bruins were ready to turn the corner.
They never did, and Neuheisel found himself on the Autzen Stadium field before his final game, the 2011 Pac-12 championship game at Oregon, when Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott came up to him offering an opportunity. The recently fired Neuheisel, who was allowed to coach the final game, said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve read, but I’ve got a lot of time on my hands.’”
And a match was made. Neuheisel has indeed proved to be a natural in another field, with his wit and humor and a guitar in hand. Entering his third year on television, he is now the de facto face of the Pac-12 Networks.
For now.
Because that itch is talking, and when it calls it sounds so sweet.
“People can’t imagine a 6-4, 280-pound guy being homesick, with tears in his eyes wanting to go home, and I put him in a car and drive to downtown Westwood to get an ice cream cone and tell him how I was homesick, and it makes it all better,” Neuheisel said. “That looks like it’s saved for the 10-, 11-, 12-year old, but it happens, and then the guy graduates and is off to the NFL or corporate America and calls you and says thanks. That’s the good stuff.
“That song by Kenny Chesney, ‘The Good Stuff?’ That’s the stuff you miss.”
