Hayden Fry's Legacy

Harry · December 24, 2011

WIN WITH MOTIVATION

Ferentz, the head coach at Iowa since 1999, was an assistant under Fry from 1981-89.

Notice the longevity of these stints? Fry insists he's never fired anyone. He hires winners, right? Can't fire a winner, can you?

Really, who would even have the gall to turn down an offer from Fry?

Barry Switzer did.

Don't fault him. He was young. Heck, they both were.

Switzer was a part of Fry's offensive staff at Arkansas in 1961. When Fry then left to coach at SMU, which had slumped since Doak Walker was there in the late 1940s, he asked Switzer to be his defensive coordinator.

“I looked at it as a good job,” Switzer said. “They had me over for dinner and we talked about it, but I decided to stay at Arkansas with my friend (and future OU coach) Jim Mackenzie. Hayden did fine there without me.”

Fry eventually turned the Mustangs into winners, stumbling on a secret in the process: Go where they haven't won in a while.

“I had the great psychological advantage in the world,” he said, “because I inherited at each school young men who were called losers, had their rump kicked and told they couldn't win. Those are the easiest people in the world to motivate. They're hungry. They want to win.”

And they did. They played in the Cotton Bowl against Georgia in 1966 and beat pre-Switzer OU on a failed two-point conversion in the 1968 Bluebonnet Bowl.

At North Texas, Fry won a Missouri Valley title in his first season. He lobbied to get the Eagles into a bowl, but no one wanted any part of them. Frustrated, he made North Texas an independent, scheduling the likes of Oklahoma State and Tennessee. (The Eagles beat the Volunteers one year.)

North Texas went 10-1 and 9-2 in his final two seasons there, but it never received a bowl invite. Surely something else, something with more promise, was out there.

Someone on his staff suggested Iowa.

Iowa?

“I didn't even know where it was located,” he said.

Read more: http://newsok.com/oklahoma-football-hayden-frys-legacy-goes-beyond-a-coaching-tree-featuring-bob-stoops-kirk-ferentz/article/3634632#ixzz1hQVpDi4f

SilverEagle · December 24, 2011

'

"The first personnel meeting Alvarez remembered being in at Iowa, Fry referenced a player being “an egg-hunter.” The other assistants nodded and moved on to the next topic. Alvarez looked around, confused.

“I'm thinking, ‘What in the hell's he talking about?'” Alvarez said.

Later, someone explained it. Because of the flash floods in West Texas, most houses were on stilts. At some point, families would send out their smallest child — closer to the ground — to locate the eggs that had washed away from the chicken houses. That child was the egg-hunter.

Translation: An egg-hunter was too small to play college football".

Hmmm, I wonder how small those guys were, because I seem to recall that Hayden recruited and signed a couple of 1K running backs from Dallas Carter that were probably considered "too small" by most people's standards.

Bernard Jackson was 5'11" X 175 and held the single season rushing mark (1453) for several years (until Patrick Cobbs broke it in 2003). Malcolm Jones was 5'6" X 165 and gained 1144 in 1980. Hayden was gone at that point, but Hayden originally recruited and signed him.