Mike MacIntyre has four-point plan to rebuild CU Buffs football team

BOULDER???Mike MacIntyre's office is as bare as a freshman dorm room in August. Not even a family portrait is on his desk yet. When you talk about rebuilding jobs, his task ahead at Colorado cannot be more of a blank slate.

Then again, in only three years as a head football coach, the 47-year-old MacIntyre has proved he can turn a bare canvas into art worthy of Sotheby's. An exaggeration?

Obviously, you never saw San Jose State's football team play in 2009. Don't feel bad. Few did.

Colorado hired MacIntyre last month because of how he turned possibly the worst major-college program in the country into the best team in school history. Taking over after a 2-10 record in 2009, the Spartans went 11-2 in 2012.

How did he do it? What were the keys to turning around a dormant program that didn't even scratch the Bay Area sports radar ?

Colorado fans want to know. The Buffs' program is as rock bottom as the parking lot below Longs Peak, with seven consecutive losing seasons and coming off the worst season in school history at 1-11.

But if he can do it at San Jose State ...

"He's unbelievable," said veteran defensive coordinator Kent Baer, who came to Boulder after working with MacIntyre all three years in San Jose. "He was just learning how to be a head coach when he came to San Jose State."

Pulling up a chair in his office last week, wearing a blue dress shirt and khakis, MacIntyre talked at length about the art of the reclamation project. He described it like a preacher on a pulpit without being preachy, as if he had explained it many times before.

"You start with the young man first," MacIntyre said. "It's all about the kid."

His plan to rebuild Colorado is as organized as bullet points in a CEO's office. He has read every book on legendary coach John Wooden. Like Wooden's Pyramid of Success, MacIntyre has his four F's: foundation, family, future and football.

Foundation:

Mike MacIntyre (Denver Post file)

Building trust

The first thing he did in Boulder is the same thing he did in San Jose. He met with each returning player in- dividually. All coaches do this, but MacIntyre had a different goal.

"I'm a true believer in until the young men know you care, they won't care," he said. "It's about the kid and developing trust. The biggest fool is the person who thinks they can fool a young person. They'll see right through that."

He will have a team meeting Sunday then the position coaches will meet with each player. It's not to weed players out; it's to mesh players in. He has 17 starters back, nearly all intensely loyal to deposed coach Jon Embree. MacIntyre has some work to do.

"We want to build these young men up," he said. "And build trust. Until you build trust, nothing moves forward."

Family: Building bonds

At San Jose State, he broke down his roster into about nine 11- or 12-man "families." They were handpicked to form a hodgepodge of race, age, ability and personality.

They did community service together. They went to different meetings together. If one skipped a class, the whole "family" ran together.

"I want them to have camaraderie," MacIntyre said. "Have them do things together in small family groups so they get to know each other. I'll tell them all the time: I don't want to see them in cliques. I want them growing and liking each other. The only way is to get to know each other."

MacIntyre remembers when that clicked. In Week 2 last season, San Jose State was blowing out UC Davis 45-13. In the fourth quarter of blowouts, starters usually sit on the bench laughing and discussing where they're going after the game.

That week he knew they'd be good.

"Not a single player was sitting on the bench," MacIntyre said. "Every player was up cheering the other guys on. ... When I saw that, I said to myself and I told our staff after that game: 'We're going to have a special year. We're going to win a lot more games than anyone ever dreamed of.' "

Future: Hitting the books

When MacIntyre arrived at San Jose State, the school was under APR penalty. The Spartans could practice only 16 hours a week that spring instead of 20 and were limited to only 75 scholarship players instead of 85.

"If we ever dipped," he said, "we were going to get hammered."

So he hired a new football academic adviser and met with his academic staff once a week. He had his coaches ? from graduate assistants to himself ? check classrooms. He had players who missed class run or roll the football field.

"Future is what I call academics," he said. "That is their future. Besides the NFL, that's the key. You can only play a little while. Then when it comes to football, they're freed up. They feel good about themselves. They like the guys on their team. They're doing well academically.

"They play better."

San Jose State's APR of 981 in 2010-11 was the school's highest since APR began in 2004-05.

"The culture changed to where it was a way of life," MacIntyre said. "Academics became very important."

Football: Canvass the state

Life philosophies are great, but any pyramid will crumble if you don't have the right workers. During his third day of spring practice in 2010, MacIntyre looked around at the small, slow Spartans and said, "I knew it was going to be tough."

At the time, San Jose State's football name was as prominent in California as San Jose's city council. The Spartans had two winning seasons in 17 years and been to one bowl game since 1990. In 2009, the Spartans averaged only 15,344 fans at home games.

MacIntyre decided the best way to get the San Jose State name out is meet the coaches at every high school in the state. Every one. Yes, all 1,048. From the Mexico border to Yreka brush- ing up against the Pacific Northwest, MacIntyre's staff hit the California freeways, back roads and dirt roads.

And each spring, they hit six to eight schools a day. They would shake hands with the coach, tell them what they're about and oh, by the way, you have any speedy tailbacks? By the end of his three years, MacIntyre's staff had visited 918 schools. The other schools, they called. His coaches shook so many hands, they have stronger grips than Colorado's defensive linemen.

"Everything in life is about relationships," MacIntyre said. "There's an old (United Airlines) commercial that I loved. There's a room full of people and the president comes in and he has a stack of airplane tickets and he just gives them to his staff: 'Go see the people. Forget this e-mail. Forget this texting.' The same thing you've got to do here."

And he'll do the same thing here. Colorado has only about 350 high schools. His staff already knows every gas station along Interstates 25 and 70.

Also, since most prep players in California couldn't find San Jose State with Mapquest, his staff found them. Over the summers, they held ingenious traveling camps in San Diego, Bakersfield, Los Angeles (twice) and Sacramento, as well as San Jose.

When his coaches went to the prep coaches, they would hand out flyers about the camps and give them stacks of brochures. For $40, area players came for four hours of instruction.

"That," Baer said, "was our gold mine."

Camping camaraderie

The Bakersfield camp attracted 200 kids. Two camps in L.A. attracted 300. In San Diego, the staff would crash at a coach's family beach house in nearby Oceanside with coaches sleeping on couches and air mattresses.

"It was great camaraderie," Baer said. "We're barbecuing, playing games on the beach at night. We had the fire going. We talked about that camp that day. Then you have a really good list."

The camps' impact on San Jose State's success was shocking. MacIntyre estimates those camps produced 80 percent of last season's roster, none of whom were recruited by Pac-12 schools.

Traveling camps are illegal in the Pac-12, but MacIntyre will hold traveling coaching clinics for Colorado prep coaches.

This project will take a while. CU has no proven quarterback, the worst defense in school history and its best playmaker, wide receiver Paul Richardson, is coming off knee surgery.

But MacIntyre has a plan. He has his four F's. He is laying a foundation ? if not new carpet.

"If you do those things daily, then it'll happen," he said. "We're going to do the same things here, and it'll happen."

John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnhendersondp

Going up, and quickly

A look at San Jose State's progression in the three years with coach Mike MacIntyre:

Source: http://feeds.denverpost.com/~r/dp-sports/~3/w0zhyXNVR6s/mike-macintyre-has-four-point-plan-rebuild-cu

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