Guys of great stuff at the St John University WEB site on this amazing man and his team. go there and click on a few links and read if you have some spare time.
http://www.gojohnnies.com/football/
here is one from the Denver Post...go Gags!
Trinidad native Gagliardi, with 408 wins, on verge of becoming winningest coach in college game
By John Henderson
Denver Post Sports Writer
Special / David Sherman
St. John's John Gagliardi and the 8-0 Johnnies face 9-0 Bethel on Saturday, with a historic 409th win for the coach on the line.
COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. - Stroll through St. John's University and you wonder if this is home of a college football legend or if it's a renaissance painting.
Benedictine monks, cloaked in black, walk contemplatively across manicured lawns. Centuries-old school buildings in brick and red tile sit a forward pass from a calm, blue lake.
Every 15 minutes, bells from a towering abbey of glass and wood ring across nearby Clemens Stadium. On the opposite side of the 30-row grandstand, bordered by grassy knolls where fans picnic during games, is a kaleidoscope of Minnesota fall. Trees of orange, red, gold, brown and maroon stand lookout over a landscape so beautiful, Clemens Stadium is simply called the "Natural Bowl."
Advertisement
The serenity stretches past one end zone to a man who, in another 24 hours, could become the winningest coach in college football history. St. John's coach John Gagliardi, from the southern Colorado town of Trinidad, is sitting in his office, a 77-year-old man squinting at a newfangled computer screen. The scene strikes the same chord as that photograph two years ago of the pope sending his first e-mail.
Gagliardi isn't into computers. He's into "Winning With No." No tackling in practice. No calisthenics. No mandatory weight training. No yelling. No meetings. His playbook is a ream of 3x5 index cards. He lets his quarterback call the plays.
"He's a smart kid," Gagliardi said. "What the hell, he's smarter than I am."
Hardly. Not many coaches are.
And none has won more. At noon Saturday, second-ranked St. John's (8-0) hosts 10th-ranked Bethel (9-0). To Gagliardi, the game will likely lead to a 26th conference title and an automatic berth in the Division III playoffs.
To the nation, the win would be Gagliardi's 409th, breaking a tie with former Grambling coach Eddie Robinson for the most of all time. In his 55th year of coaching, 51 at St. John's, Gagliardi is 408-114-11.
Considering Division III schools didn't have 10-game seasons until 1975, his average of 7.4 wins, along with three national titles, is truly astonishing.
"It's not like he has just been out here for a long time," quarterback Ryan Keating said. "He's been out here for a long time, and he's been winning all the time."
In comparison, Florida State's Bobby Bowden, the winningest coach in Division I-A at 340-97-4, must coach another eight years, or until he's 82, to catch Gagliardi and Robinson.
"People talk about Bobby and once in a while they talk about me," said Penn State's Joe Paterno, just behind Bowden at 338-107-3, "but those two are unbelievable."
But unlike Paterno and Bowden, who have major budgetary advantages, Division III doesn't allow scholarships. St. John's is on a level playing field with every D-III school in the country. The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference also doesn't allow redshirts. The only recruiting advantage St. John's has is a reputation for winning.
And Gagliardi.
What's his secret? Here's a hint: Entering Gagliardi's senior year at Trinidad's Holy Trinity Catholic High School in 1943, football coach Dutch Clark went off to World War II. The principal, Father Sebastiani, canceled the season until Gagliardi walked into the office and said he would coach. The senior went on to lead his own high school to its first Southern Colorado Parochial League title.
"It's like, how did Mozart write symphonies when he was 7?" St. John's athletic director Timothy Backous said. "Quite simply, the man is a football genius."
From the ground up
You can tell Gagliardi (pronounced Goll-ARE-dee) was the scourge of small-town southern Colorado football as he's still a rugged 6-feet-2. But he has the kind, round, bespectacled face of your grandfather. For the past 30 years, he has been in this office, which his wife of 47 years, Peg, decorated with pictures of dignitaries ranging from former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant to the pope.
"We'd be in caves if not for wives," Gagliardi says.
WINNINGEST COACHES
A look at the all-time college football victory leaders.
Coach Victories, Years
John Gagliardi 408, 55
Eddie Robinson 408, 57
*Bobby Bowden 340, 38
*Joe Paterno 338, 38
Bear Bryant 323, 38
Pop Warner 319, 44
Roy Kidd 315, 39
Amos Alonzo Stagg 314, 57
*Frosty Westering 303, 41
Tubby Raymond 300, 36
*-Active
It's early October, two days before the homecoming game against Gustavus Adolphus, and Gagliardi is shrugging and gee-whizzing his way through an explanation of his success. On a shelf is a Pepsi can emblazoned with his image. John Gagliardi bobbleheads are hot items in this area 90 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. The school bookstore sells sweatshirts reading, "Anyone can have a football coach. We have a legend."
"Oh, I don't know. I just use common sense," Gagliardi says. "Hell, I probably had the benefit of not playing in college. I had to figure everything out on my own."
Take recruiting. Division III schools' recruiting budget is the equivalent of what Florida State spends on postage. When Gagliardi arrived at St. John's in 1953, he wrote every Catholic high school in the country. He brought in kids from Chicago and Philadelphia.
However, he looked at the starting lineup and every player could drive to their hometown for lunch. Keating grew up only 3 miles away in Minnetonka.
"Not one of those guys had I been in their high school," he says. "Not one. Why should I go to their high school? If I can get them here and they look at the school, I've got a shot at them."
Unique coaching approach
Who wouldn't want to go to a school where you'll get hit more going through registration than in practice? No, the Johnnies do not practice tackling. Ever.
Why? Coaches Paterno and Bowden, listen up. Out of 183 players on his roster at midseason, only one was out with an injury.
"Guys we get are good tacklers," Gagliardi says. "They tackled in high school. But you've got to get them to the ball. Kids say, 'How can I prove I can tackle?' 'Well, I know you can tackle. You wouldn't be here otherwise."'
Offensively, Gagliardi's coaching career predates the face mask. Over the past half-century he has ridden the crest of every offensive wave that splashed across the football landscape. He ran three backs in the 1960s. In the 1970s he junked the triple option for a quadruple option.
He ran in the 1980s. He passed in the 1990s. Today, the Johnnies average 189 rushing yards and 259 passing yards and on average are outscoring their opponents 41-9.
"That's the reason for his success," receiver Blake Elliott says. "He has been doing this for 50 years. He has seen kids who had to live through the draft and hippies and now he's working through Generation X."
Practices at St. John's resemble a Greek intramural jamboree - except for the flawless execution. More than 180 kids big and small cover the field. This is Division III. There aren't many 300-pounders. Well, there are, but most of them are 5-8.
The abbey bells ring. The players scatter to formation.
"We don't have a whistle," Gagliardi says. "They know exactly what to do. They're like cattle."
First comes calisthenics. At St. John's on this day, calisthenics consist of the ankle roll: 180 players lifting one leg, rolling their ankle and moaning simultaneously. Then there's the air push-up. That's right. It's 180 guys standing up pushing their arms out. The favorite is the beautiful-day drill. Everyone lies on the ground, looks up at the beautiful blue sky and talks to their neighbor.
"Opponents just kill us in jumping jacks," Elliott says sarcastically.
Asked who has the team's best bench press, Elliott says with a smile, "Probably a transfer from (Division II) Bemidji State. The only reason John knows where the weight room is is because there are girls there."
Practice is nothing but scrimmaging. There isn't a tackling dummy in sight. The coaching staff develops two dozen plays that would work against the next opponent. By the time Saturdays roll around, they've practiced each play about 30 times.
The precision tops anything seen in Division I-A practices, the ones not hidden by a locked iron gate. Keating and Elliott never miss a connection. Every defender is in position to make a tackle but uses a gentle nudge instead.
The team never has mentioned the record. Neither has Gagliardi. You wonder how much he even cares. When he won No. 400 during the playoffs last year in McMinnville, Ore., St. John's officials set up a ceremony at midfield. But they couldn't find Gagliardi. He was off alone, walking to the locker room. "I just wanted to sit down," he says. "I'd been standing for three hours."
Will this be different?
"I think he's very proud of it," says his son, Jim, his offensive coordinator. "But I think he's most proud of having lived long enough to get there."
Colorado prep dynamo
In 1910, Ventura Gagliardi left Grimaldi, on the tip of Italy's boot, and moved to Trinidad to mine coal and open a blacksmith shop and then a body shop. John was the fifth of nine children, and Holy Trinity had only seven boys in his class, most sons of Italian immigrants. They were like brothers. They often gathered behind their high school for shinny hockey, a brutal game using milk cans, sticks and lots of teeth.
By the time Gagliardi was the best athlete at school, he almost didn't have coaching as an option. His older brother, Frank, was wounded behind enemy lines in France.
While the injured Frank was hiding behind some hay, he heard the sound of approaching German soldiers. They pounded their bayonets into the straw in case any Americans were hiding there.
None hit him.
As the next-oldest son, John would have been obliged to take over the family business if anything happened to Frank. Instead, he coached his buddies and adopted the serene philosophy he has today.
"They were smart, good guys and good players," he says. "How can I boss them around?"
After his stunning coaching success as a high school senior, he flew up the coaching ladder: St. Mary's High in Colorado Springs, where he graduated from Colorado College, Carroll College in Helena, Mont., and then St. John's, where he got a raise from $2,400 to $4,200. One catch: He had to coach hockey. Hockey? Gagliardi didn't even know how to skate.
No problem. Using the same principles he used in coaching basketball, he built a better winning percentage than current coach John Harrington, a member of the United States' 1980 Olympic "Miracle on Ice."
Gagliardi has had offers to leave. Army pursued him in the 1950s. He interviewed at the University of San Diego but couldn't stand the traffic. Grant offered an assistant's job with the Vikings. He turned them all down.
Meaningful victories
He wanted to be in charge on a game day such as Gustavus Adolphus. On a postcard-perfect day, with the fall colors exploding as a backdrop, 8,000 people watch St. John's roll, 35-13. Elliott, whom the Denver Broncos have scouted, returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown and caught a touchdown pass. They missed nary a tackle.
While players from both teams mingle on the field with families and friends, seemingly forever as only Division III schools can, Gagliardi holds court in his office. Family and friends gather and laugh. He's eating a roast beef sandwich. No one brings up Robinson.
But it's one more down. Saturday, the countdown could end. Of all the coaches of all the schools through all the years, this man with roots from tiny Trinidad, could become the winningest college coach in the history of the game.
"If I don't pass him, No. 2 isn't bad," he says. "It won't change my life. I won't get a raise."
No. Just a chair. He'll just want to sit down. And the rest of the coaches in the United States can kneel beside him.
http://www.gojohnnies.com/football/
here is one from the Denver Post...go Gags!
Trinidad native Gagliardi, with 408 wins, on verge of becoming winningest coach in college game
By John Henderson
Denver Post Sports Writer
Special / David Sherman
St. John's John Gagliardi and the 8-0 Johnnies face 9-0 Bethel on Saturday, with a historic 409th win for the coach on the line.
COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. - Stroll through St. John's University and you wonder if this is home of a college football legend or if it's a renaissance painting.
Benedictine monks, cloaked in black, walk contemplatively across manicured lawns. Centuries-old school buildings in brick and red tile sit a forward pass from a calm, blue lake.
Every 15 minutes, bells from a towering abbey of glass and wood ring across nearby Clemens Stadium. On the opposite side of the 30-row grandstand, bordered by grassy knolls where fans picnic during games, is a kaleidoscope of Minnesota fall. Trees of orange, red, gold, brown and maroon stand lookout over a landscape so beautiful, Clemens Stadium is simply called the "Natural Bowl."
Advertisement
The serenity stretches past one end zone to a man who, in another 24 hours, could become the winningest coach in college football history. St. John's coach John Gagliardi, from the southern Colorado town of Trinidad, is sitting in his office, a 77-year-old man squinting at a newfangled computer screen. The scene strikes the same chord as that photograph two years ago of the pope sending his first e-mail.
Gagliardi isn't into computers. He's into "Winning With No." No tackling in practice. No calisthenics. No mandatory weight training. No yelling. No meetings. His playbook is a ream of 3x5 index cards. He lets his quarterback call the plays.
"He's a smart kid," Gagliardi said. "What the hell, he's smarter than I am."
Hardly. Not many coaches are.
And none has won more. At noon Saturday, second-ranked St. John's (8-0) hosts 10th-ranked Bethel (9-0). To Gagliardi, the game will likely lead to a 26th conference title and an automatic berth in the Division III playoffs.
To the nation, the win would be Gagliardi's 409th, breaking a tie with former Grambling coach Eddie Robinson for the most of all time. In his 55th year of coaching, 51 at St. John's, Gagliardi is 408-114-11.
Considering Division III schools didn't have 10-game seasons until 1975, his average of 7.4 wins, along with three national titles, is truly astonishing.
"It's not like he has just been out here for a long time," quarterback Ryan Keating said. "He's been out here for a long time, and he's been winning all the time."
In comparison, Florida State's Bobby Bowden, the winningest coach in Division I-A at 340-97-4, must coach another eight years, or until he's 82, to catch Gagliardi and Robinson.
"People talk about Bobby and once in a while they talk about me," said Penn State's Joe Paterno, just behind Bowden at 338-107-3, "but those two are unbelievable."
But unlike Paterno and Bowden, who have major budgetary advantages, Division III doesn't allow scholarships. St. John's is on a level playing field with every D-III school in the country. The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference also doesn't allow redshirts. The only recruiting advantage St. John's has is a reputation for winning.
And Gagliardi.
What's his secret? Here's a hint: Entering Gagliardi's senior year at Trinidad's Holy Trinity Catholic High School in 1943, football coach Dutch Clark went off to World War II. The principal, Father Sebastiani, canceled the season until Gagliardi walked into the office and said he would coach. The senior went on to lead his own high school to its first Southern Colorado Parochial League title.
"It's like, how did Mozart write symphonies when he was 7?" St. John's athletic director Timothy Backous said. "Quite simply, the man is a football genius."
From the ground up
You can tell Gagliardi (pronounced Goll-ARE-dee) was the scourge of small-town southern Colorado football as he's still a rugged 6-feet-2. But he has the kind, round, bespectacled face of your grandfather. For the past 30 years, he has been in this office, which his wife of 47 years, Peg, decorated with pictures of dignitaries ranging from former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant to the pope.
"We'd be in caves if not for wives," Gagliardi says.
WINNINGEST COACHES
A look at the all-time college football victory leaders.
Coach Victories, Years
John Gagliardi 408, 55
Eddie Robinson 408, 57
*Bobby Bowden 340, 38
*Joe Paterno 338, 38
Bear Bryant 323, 38
Pop Warner 319, 44
Roy Kidd 315, 39
Amos Alonzo Stagg 314, 57
*Frosty Westering 303, 41
Tubby Raymond 300, 36
*-Active
It's early October, two days before the homecoming game against Gustavus Adolphus, and Gagliardi is shrugging and gee-whizzing his way through an explanation of his success. On a shelf is a Pepsi can emblazoned with his image. John Gagliardi bobbleheads are hot items in this area 90 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. The school bookstore sells sweatshirts reading, "Anyone can have a football coach. We have a legend."
"Oh, I don't know. I just use common sense," Gagliardi says. "Hell, I probably had the benefit of not playing in college. I had to figure everything out on my own."
Take recruiting. Division III schools' recruiting budget is the equivalent of what Florida State spends on postage. When Gagliardi arrived at St. John's in 1953, he wrote every Catholic high school in the country. He brought in kids from Chicago and Philadelphia.
However, he looked at the starting lineup and every player could drive to their hometown for lunch. Keating grew up only 3 miles away in Minnetonka.
"Not one of those guys had I been in their high school," he says. "Not one. Why should I go to their high school? If I can get them here and they look at the school, I've got a shot at them."
Unique coaching approach
Who wouldn't want to go to a school where you'll get hit more going through registration than in practice? No, the Johnnies do not practice tackling. Ever.
Why? Coaches Paterno and Bowden, listen up. Out of 183 players on his roster at midseason, only one was out with an injury.
"Guys we get are good tacklers," Gagliardi says. "They tackled in high school. But you've got to get them to the ball. Kids say, 'How can I prove I can tackle?' 'Well, I know you can tackle. You wouldn't be here otherwise."'
Offensively, Gagliardi's coaching career predates the face mask. Over the past half-century he has ridden the crest of every offensive wave that splashed across the football landscape. He ran three backs in the 1960s. In the 1970s he junked the triple option for a quadruple option.
He ran in the 1980s. He passed in the 1990s. Today, the Johnnies average 189 rushing yards and 259 passing yards and on average are outscoring their opponents 41-9.
"That's the reason for his success," receiver Blake Elliott says. "He has been doing this for 50 years. He has seen kids who had to live through the draft and hippies and now he's working through Generation X."
Practices at St. John's resemble a Greek intramural jamboree - except for the flawless execution. More than 180 kids big and small cover the field. This is Division III. There aren't many 300-pounders. Well, there are, but most of them are 5-8.
The abbey bells ring. The players scatter to formation.
"We don't have a whistle," Gagliardi says. "They know exactly what to do. They're like cattle."
First comes calisthenics. At St. John's on this day, calisthenics consist of the ankle roll: 180 players lifting one leg, rolling their ankle and moaning simultaneously. Then there's the air push-up. That's right. It's 180 guys standing up pushing their arms out. The favorite is the beautiful-day drill. Everyone lies on the ground, looks up at the beautiful blue sky and talks to their neighbor.
"Opponents just kill us in jumping jacks," Elliott says sarcastically.
Asked who has the team's best bench press, Elliott says with a smile, "Probably a transfer from (Division II) Bemidji State. The only reason John knows where the weight room is is because there are girls there."
Practice is nothing but scrimmaging. There isn't a tackling dummy in sight. The coaching staff develops two dozen plays that would work against the next opponent. By the time Saturdays roll around, they've practiced each play about 30 times.
The precision tops anything seen in Division I-A practices, the ones not hidden by a locked iron gate. Keating and Elliott never miss a connection. Every defender is in position to make a tackle but uses a gentle nudge instead.
The team never has mentioned the record. Neither has Gagliardi. You wonder how much he even cares. When he won No. 400 during the playoffs last year in McMinnville, Ore., St. John's officials set up a ceremony at midfield. But they couldn't find Gagliardi. He was off alone, walking to the locker room. "I just wanted to sit down," he says. "I'd been standing for three hours."
Will this be different?
"I think he's very proud of it," says his son, Jim, his offensive coordinator. "But I think he's most proud of having lived long enough to get there."
Colorado prep dynamo
In 1910, Ventura Gagliardi left Grimaldi, on the tip of Italy's boot, and moved to Trinidad to mine coal and open a blacksmith shop and then a body shop. John was the fifth of nine children, and Holy Trinity had only seven boys in his class, most sons of Italian immigrants. They were like brothers. They often gathered behind their high school for shinny hockey, a brutal game using milk cans, sticks and lots of teeth.
By the time Gagliardi was the best athlete at school, he almost didn't have coaching as an option. His older brother, Frank, was wounded behind enemy lines in France.
While the injured Frank was hiding behind some hay, he heard the sound of approaching German soldiers. They pounded their bayonets into the straw in case any Americans were hiding there.
None hit him.
As the next-oldest son, John would have been obliged to take over the family business if anything happened to Frank. Instead, he coached his buddies and adopted the serene philosophy he has today.
"They were smart, good guys and good players," he says. "How can I boss them around?"
After his stunning coaching success as a high school senior, he flew up the coaching ladder: St. Mary's High in Colorado Springs, where he graduated from Colorado College, Carroll College in Helena, Mont., and then St. John's, where he got a raise from $2,400 to $4,200. One catch: He had to coach hockey. Hockey? Gagliardi didn't even know how to skate.
No problem. Using the same principles he used in coaching basketball, he built a better winning percentage than current coach John Harrington, a member of the United States' 1980 Olympic "Miracle on Ice."
Gagliardi has had offers to leave. Army pursued him in the 1950s. He interviewed at the University of San Diego but couldn't stand the traffic. Grant offered an assistant's job with the Vikings. He turned them all down.
Meaningful victories
He wanted to be in charge on a game day such as Gustavus Adolphus. On a postcard-perfect day, with the fall colors exploding as a backdrop, 8,000 people watch St. John's roll, 35-13. Elliott, whom the Denver Broncos have scouted, returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown and caught a touchdown pass. They missed nary a tackle.
While players from both teams mingle on the field with families and friends, seemingly forever as only Division III schools can, Gagliardi holds court in his office. Family and friends gather and laugh. He's eating a roast beef sandwich. No one brings up Robinson.
But it's one more down. Saturday, the countdown could end. Of all the coaches of all the schools through all the years, this man with roots from tiny Trinidad, could become the winningest college coach in the history of the game.
"If I don't pass him, No. 2 isn't bad," he says. "It won't change my life. I won't get a raise."
No. Just a chair. He'll just want to sit down. And the rest of the coaches in the United States can kneel beside him.
