“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In the spring of 1994, Sonny Dykes was an assistant high school baseball coach in Texas oil country. During those months, when the dust from the diamond would explode off mitts and the pop flies would hang high in the parched Permian Basin air, football was the furthest thing from his mind. He was 24, a recent college graduate, and without a definable long-term plan. But one day after practice, a routine call home to check in with his mother altered everything. And when then-Texas Tech head coach Spike Dykes lifted the phone to answer, Sonny knew which 10 words were coming.
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“Hey, how you doing? OK, let me get your mother,” Spike always said. Sonny does an impeccable impression of his dad.
Up until then, Sonny and Spike’s bond revolved around the axis of sport and achievement, and above all, the dedication needed to succeed. Sonny and his mother, Sharon, were always joined at the hip. Kindred jovial spirits. Spike was a college football coach in the state of Texas. In high school, Sonny would often wake up to as many as 10 for sale signs planted in the family’s front yard on Sunday mornings after a tough loss the night before. When Sonny was a first baseman at Texas Tech from 1989 to 1993 — where Spike led the Red Raiders football program from 1986 to 1999 — he knew his dad wasn’t cutting out of the office to watch batting practice.
“That wasn’t his deal, you know?” Sonny said.
He saw the life for what it was early on: One that kept his dad so hyper-focused on everything else, everything Red Raider football all the time, that sometimes he wondered if he was good enough to be noticed. Spike loved and supported Sonny, and he knew he thought about him often — Sonny makes that clear. But for a kid who just wanted to nab his dad’s attention for a fleeting moment, it often felt like he would never get the opportunity.
Sonny is 52 now and in his first year as head coach at TCU after spending the last four seasons at SMU. Stops as head coach at Cal and Louisiana Tech preceded his move home to Texas. Inside his new office in Fort Worth, Sonny recalled how his first memory is football-related. It was in fall 1976, when Spike, then a Texas assistant, told a 6-year-old Sonny to come into the Longhorns locker room. Sonny stood still in front of his father as Texas head coach Darrell Royal informed the team that he was going to retire. Football has always coursed through Sonny’s veins, even in his early 20s, when his aspirations were to pursue anything other than life with a whistle dangling from his neck.
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“I wanted to do something completely opposite from what my dad did,” Sonny said.
But football was his destiny. There was this magnetism to it, beyond the money, beyond Xs and Os. Sonny is a rarity in the industry, having ascended to head coach despite never having been a college football player. Yet he saw the friendships Spike had with his peers over the years. The Dykes family vacationed with other coaches and their families. Sonny always yearned for that bond — that collective push toward an objective of walking out of a stadium victorious. It’s just how he grew up. Football colored every aspect of his life.
“My stubbornness got me thinking about other things,” Sonny said, “but at the end of the day, just that fear of losing that team and that family aspect and atmosphere was what got me into coaching as much as anything else.”
During that call in the spring of 1994, Spike pulled an everlasting audible on his son. He never handed the phone to Sharon. Spike, instead, asked questions. More than Sonny had ever heard from his dad. It was their first conversation since Sonny became a coach. A father-son mechanism Spike waited his entire life to trigger was finally there.
“I’d never had a 20-minute phone conversation with him if you added up every phone interaction we’d had our entire lives,” Sonny said. “He just asked questions. All of a sudden it went from a father-son relationship to a peer-to-peer relationship. For him, it changed everything. From that moment on, we had a completely different relationship.”
Sons pursuing the same profession as their fathers is a centuries-old endeavor. In college football, sons of coaches find that either spurning what they always adored — or held a particular disdain for at one time — is simultaneously privilege and a burden. You can’t deny your own DNA. These sons have it in there: The obsession with schemes, the drive to measure up, the desire to prove their worth, the obvious big break of being a coach’s son, and most of all, the reality that they have always been next in line. It was up to them to step forward.
Jim Harbaugh is going on and on about the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The PB&Js were a Jack Harbaugh speciality. During his 14 years as head coach at Western Kentucky, there were days when the team was hungry, resources weren’t exactly deep, and there were bellies to be filled. Jack, Jim’s father, knew how to get it done.
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“There’s always just a way,” Jim said. “You’re going to find it. That’s all I ever had to go on. I want to be like him … I wanted to be just like him … always wanted to be like him.”
Jim says it’s hard to address why so many college football coaches do what their dads did, because for him, entertaining the reality of not being a coach’s son and not following his dad’s path would be like asking a twin what it’s like to be a twin. Or, in his own paradoxical way of explaining things, what would it be like to not have the greatest dad in the world who has the coolest job in the world?
After all, some of Jack’s patented catchphrases to his children have reverberated through the current sports landscape, highlighted by the one Jim hollers out often to remind his players that no matter what, they are a single-celled football organism steamrolling toward a common goal.
“Who’s got it better than us?
“NO-BODY!”
Jim runs through the highlights of his childhood like he would a scout team preparing for a showdown with Ohio State: A first-grader with a shaggy haircut watching the clock inch closer. The bell is about to ring. Jim has already reached down to grab his backpack with one hand to sprint out the door. Wherever Jack was — Bowling Green, Iowa or Michigan — the elementary school days were their own test to see how swiftly Jim could make it to practice.
The rides home from practice were as anticipated as anything. That meant you’re one step closer to dinner. From 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., the Harbaughs crowded around the table to hear Jack report on the day. Jim and brother John couldn’t sit still until Jack talked about former Michigan star defensive back Dave Brown making a play in practice or legendary coach Bo Schembechler getting flustered with how hard Jack’s secondary crew was taking it on the offense. When Jack would try to ask the kids about their day, they canned quick answers to put the onus back on him to keep going until fellow assistant Denny Brown, former Michigan quarterback, stopped by to pick up Jack to go to the facility for game prep.
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In the offseason, though, is where the kids — Jim, John and sister Joani — were pressed into action. Jack brought home 16mm film to study from spring ball. Twice an hour, the film would break off and the kids had to get to work.
“You know that noise? That tick, tick, tick, tick?” Jim said. “As soon as it would break, we’d get to splice it with the hot splicer. You had to clip off the clip that was damaged with scissors and then put them together with the hot splicer contraption. You put the glue on the one side. One side could be glued. Other side couldn’t. Then hang it over the coat hanger to let it dry, and then it was good as new.”
Before the splicing and the glue, Jim confidently said the first time he knew he was going to do what his dad does was as a kindergartener. Jack was at Bowling Green then, and on the bus rides to the school, Jim would envision it. The path. The life. All of it. On days he sat in the back, those were days he saw getting off the bus as a player. But more often than not, he was in the front. And when the level swung those clear doors wide open, he saw a world where he led his coaches and players off the bus. The same way Jack did.
“That’s when I first started to remember: I’m going to play as long as I can, then I’m going to coach, then die,” Jim said.
Jim, now 58, is firmly in that second phase of his football life cycle. He’s coached in a Super Bowl. He recently led his alma mater, Michigan, to the College Football Playoff. His son, Jay, is Michigan’s special teams coordinator and safeties coach, ensuring the family tradition rolls on. And he starts listing the names of the coaches’ sons running around the facility, watching practices behind closed doors, maybe not fully understanding that some day soon they’ll feel that similar pull to the profession.
And just like the Jack Harbaugh kids did when they were younger, ask for an in-depth breakdown of the day’s events. The best sort of recap. A scouting report at dinner.
“Conversations, stories, football,” Jim said. “That’s been the whole life.”
The neighborhood kids were huddled up on a Monday evening in December 1986 to watch the hometown Detroit Lions take on the vaunted defending Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. When one friend made it clear he was rooting for the star-studded Bears, 14-year-old David Shaw couldn’t comprehend why. David’s dad, Willie, was the running backs coach for the Lions. A loss meant maybe having to pack up and move again.
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The Shaws already packed up and moved after David’s first-grade, second-grade and seventh-grade school years.
“This is my livelihood. This is not fandom to me,” David said.
The Shaws were in Detroit from 1985 to 1988. As David says, they were right after Billy Sims and right before Barry Sanders. The Lions won 20 games in the four years Willie was on staff. Similar to every other stop, the talks with kids at school were always football. All the time.
“Those ups and downs were palpable,” David said. “We talked about the Lions. We didn’t talk about what happened at Chrysler.”
David eventually ended up at Stanford as a wide receiver in 1991. Willie was on staff then, too. It was hard for David to shake the coach’s son’s reality. Not because he received preferential treatment. The opposite, in fact. Players called him “Coach Shaw” because he had a preternatural ability to teach teammates. It bugged him.
“Most of my life growing up, I was not going to coach. I was adamant about doing something else,” David said. “I wanted to own my own business, whether it was a restaurant or financial company or something. I wanted to do my own thing. That was my thought process all the way through college. I was going to do something else.”
He never got there. One of Willie’s old peers, Robin Ross, who was coaching at Western Washington University, asked Willie if David had any interest in being a coach’s assistant. David had completed a couple of internships in the financial sector, but thought it would be something to keep his mind busy until he made a life-defining career decision.
“Subconsciously, I think I had been kind of preparing for it. I didn’t know it would fit me so well,” David said. “I went up to Bellingham, did a lot of work with the guys before we started training camp. Office work. It was fine. I enjoyed myself. And then, the first day on the grass, first day of practice, I said, ‘Oh, my God. This is me.’ It was that ton of bricks that hit like, ‘You’ve been trying to avoid coaching but you have been preparing to do this your whole life.”
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David is 49 and has been Stanford’s head coach since 2011. He succeeded Jim Harbaugh when he left to coach the San Francisco 49ers. David was mentored by Bill Walsh, Denny Green, Jon Gruden and others. Above all, though, it was Willie whose persistence in the profession helped shape David’s approach to coaching. His dad told him to avoid emulating the personalities of star coaches. To be himself and only himself. To understand his strengths and limitations.
Their journeys came to a head in 2011, when David was named Stanford’s head coach. After Green accepted the head coaching position with the Minnesota Vikings in 1992, Willie was hired to be his successor. That lasted all of 44 hours, David said, before Walsh decided to return to coaching in Palo Alto. Willie was heartbroken. He’d never been a head coach. That close to the pinnacle of a career that pinballed him across the country, he had to reset expectations. Almost 20 years later, at David’s introductory press conference, Willie sat nearby and beamed.
“The pride, the joy, the tears … there’s not a shirt big enough on the planet to keep my dad’s chest from poking out,” David said.
David also represents a gaping hole in the world of college football. Of the 14 Black Division I coaches in college football, David is the only son of a former college football coach. Too often, David explains, Black coaches are encouraged to pursue coaching only skill positions like running backs, wide receivers and defensive backs, most of which are occupied by Black players.
“The opportunities? We would love for there to be more, but part of it is to cultivate the next generation of football coaches. I’ll just say it bluntly: There are a lot of Black quarterbacks playing right now,” he said. “These are guys that have the keys to the car, that are running the show on the field and if they want to transition toward coaching and coach quarterbacks and be offensive coordinators, those are the things we can help cultivate.”
Lane Kiffin bumped into one of his assistants at the coffee station inside the football facility at Ole Miss just a half hour before our scheduled interview. The assistant was his dad, 82-year-old Monte Kiffin.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s your dad,’” Kiffin said while pacing around the facility. “You get to see him every day. How unique is that?”
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Lane, 46, and entering his third year as head coach at Ole Miss, has hired his dad to work alongside him as often as possible. Lane and Monte were together at Tennessee, USC and Florida Atlantic before once again reuniting in Oxford. To this day, Monte is often the hit of the recruiting visits. Especially with parents. Especially with fathers.
“He has a real impact here, which you would maybe not assume at that age,” Lane said.
Monte’s official title is “analyst.” He’s with his son on everything where he’s needed. Which has always been the case. When Lane was offensive coordinator at USC in 2005, Monte was defensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Monte was known to own ridiculous hours. As in, going to work on Monday and not returning home until Friday. There were indentations of him sleeping on the couch in the players lounge. Bucs players used to joke that they were his alarm clock.
Lane would be in his office back in Los Angeles working late, but since Monte barely slept, he could call his dad. Being available to his son, no matter the hour or circumstance, was of the utmost importance because football was their shared universal language. And they always spoke it together.
“I never even pictured doing something else. Ever,” Lane said. “From my earliest memories, I just remember wanting to coach. Almost to a fault, as a player, because I do remember like being young in junior high and high school sitting there watching ‘Monday Night Football’ and other games with buddies and they’re all like, ‘I want to be like Cris Carter.’ I’m watching like, ‘There’s Tom Landry. Look at how they manage a game.’”
Lane was once a third-string quarterback at Fresno State in the mid-1990s and decided to stop playing earlier to transition to coaching. Before he quit, he would sit in on offensive staff meetings for as long as allotted before Jeff Tedford had to kick him out. Ninety-nine percent of quarterbacks see their playing days through. Lane opted to be the 1 percent. Which kickstarted his coaching career as an offensive mind, opposite of Monte, who was the godfather of the “Tampa-2” that helped Tampa Bay win a Super Bowl in 2003.
“I think it’s a great value that it happened that way, because I was always around defense and hearing defense and able to learn stuff defensively that would help me as an offensive coach,” Lane said. “The three long-term coaches I’ve worked for and been around in my life: my dad for forever, Pete Carroll, then Nick Saban. That’s pretty unusual. That’s basically 90 percent of your life.”
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As he continues to walk around the Ole Miss campus, an existential Kiffin ponders if he’ll be like Monte one day. Coaching into his 80s. Working for his son, the head football coach somewhere. Crashing the coffee station. Unwilling to give up the life he’s always known.
“I’ve always said no to that. Like, there’s no way,” Kiffin said bluntly. “But, you never know. First off, I’m not working for my son, which is hard to picture now since he’s 13. It’s hard to picture working for him. But … I guess you never know, though.”
In his first year as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons in 2004, Jim Mora Jr. helped lead Atlanta to an 11-5 record and an NFC South title. For all his success in the regular season during his time as an NFL head coach, Jim Mora Sr. was 0-6 in the postseason. Before the Falcons hosted the St. Louis Rams in the NFL Division Round, the elder Mora worried. Not about the game itself, but what a loss could mean for his son.
“My dad was nervous that his record was going to attach itself to my record and it was going to be the narrative of, ‘The Moras can win a lot of games but never a playoff game,’” Mora Jr. said.
Michael Vick and the high-flying Falcons smoked the Rams, 47-17. Mora Jr. tracked down the game ball and stuffed it in a locker in the Atlanta locker room.
“When we got home that night, I pulled the football out and gave it to him and said, ‘This is for you,’” Mora Jr. said. “It was a pretty emotional moment. I’ll never forget it. He worked so hard and never won a playoff game in the NFL. That was bonding. Big time. Big time.”
Many college football fans remember Frank Beamer as the man who helped lead Virginia Tech to national prominence, but Shane Beamer remembers the losing seasons. He can’t forget them. On his 16th birthday, Shane went to the DMV in Blacksburg to take his driver’s license test. It was a landmark day.
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The Hokies were coming off a 2-8-1 campaign in 1992. When Shane’s number was called, he walked up to receive his license. Instead the DMV employee examined it, pulled it back and told him, “You tell your dad he better win some football games if he wants to keep this thing.”
“It crushed me in the moment. It helped me be mentally tough and resilient as I am in this chair now,” said Shane, now 44 and the head coach of South Carolina. “There’s a lot of good about head coaching, but it is a vicious, vicious business, too. And it can be hard on families. I knew what I was getting into. It’s not always about winning 10 games every year. I’d been a part of two-win seasons as well. But it was in my blood. It was what I wanted to do.”
Scott Spurrier was a receiver for the Loudoun County High Raiders in 2004 when an offensive consultant made his debut that fall. It was the Head Ball Coach. His father, Steve, who famously led the Florida Gators to a national title and six SEC championships, had just left coaching the Washington Redskins. The Raiders were a triple-option attack primarily, but when Steve arrived he helped install some passing plays. The Fun N’ Gun was on display an hour outside of D.C. A year later, Steve took the South Carolina job, where he coached from 2005 to 2015.
Scott, like his older brother Steve Jr., chose to coach. Scott is now on the Arizona football staff.
“I’ve always tried to make it a personal goal that people don’t see me as Coach Spurrier’s son but see me as a Coach Spurrier,” Scott said. “You can absolutely let that weigh on you. Heck, my dad was a Heisman Trophy winner and coached Heisman Trophy winners and won championships.”
Sonny Dykes remembers reading a story years ago in ESPN as former Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops proudly spoke of making it a point to drive his kids to school every morning — or as often as he possibly could. There was a time in this profession when you were looked down upon for admitting you did anything other than sleep in the facility or recruit harder than anyone else.
“My dad, in his life, had very few regrets. But I do think he wishes he had been more … and he told me this before he died, ‘I wished I’d been more present,’” Sonny said. “He missed my sister’s homecoming coronation for a recruiting trip. I think he wished he could’ve been able to go to those things. … He told me, ‘If you get a chance to do this, make sure you’re there. Don’t miss it.’”
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The culture of obsessive work and masculinity is as dated as it ever has been in the business, Sonny said. Most of these sons of coaches said they have emphasized to their staffs the need for an attempt at work-life balance. Some dismiss their staff by 5 p.m. or earlier in the offseason. Some make it mandatory.
Sonny will take an iPad along with him to son Daniel’s flag football games or to dance competitions with daughters Ally and Charlie. There’s a way to be present and working. He is adamant about being there, about noticing the efforts of his children on the field or dance floor. And he understands that they will notice who is in the stands.
Two years before Spike died in 2017, Sonny’s Cal Bears went to Austin in 2015 and beat the Longhorns in a 45-44 thriller in the same stadium where he once stood as the 6-year-old next to his dad in the Texas locker room. Nearly 40 years on, Spike was waiting for Sonny inside the visitor’s locker room to wrap his arms around his son. Sonny chokes up rewinding one of the last football memories with his dad, the football coach — his dad, his peer.
“Things like that … you just remember those things,” Sonny said. “Those are part of your memory now.”
He was there.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of Michigan, Stanford and TCU Athletics)
