Mizzou’s Derek Dooley knows he has doubters. Here’s why the Tigers believe in him

Derek Dooley walked into a dimly lit and otherwise empty meeting room and shared something that annoyed him. The Missouri offense returns 10 starters from a season ago, including a Heisman hopeful at quarterback, and all of that talent has lent itself to a question Dooley said he has had to spend an entire summer hearing.

People want to know: How can Mizzou’s new offensive coordinator improve the Tigers’ offense from a season ago?

“Are you kidding me?” Dooley asked, with exasperation in his voice. He offered a brief presentation.

A projector displayed slides about turnovers, one of Dooley’s chief concerns as he enters his first season as a quarterbacks coach and coordinator. A chart showed Mizzou lost 11 fumbles and 14 interceptions. Another slide displayed the odds of winning SEC games when a team is plus-1 in turnover margin, plus-2, and so on. A season ago, the Tigers’ minus-8 turnover margin finished tied for 111th in the country.

After prefacing that he was not taking a shot at his predecessor, Dooley said Mizzou’s explosive 2017 offense really wasn’t that explosive. It was a lot of empty calories. Though the Tigers finished eighth in the country in total offense and quarterback Drew Lock threw for 44 touchdowns, MU gave the ball away too often and mustered just 18 points per game against bowl teams.

Imagine if, in response to so many questions about his vision for the Tigers offense, Dooley said he wanted to be 111th in the country in turnover margin and average 18 points per game.

“You guys would look at me like I’m crazy,” the 50-year-old coach said.

Even without Dooley making such an underwhelming promise, college football pundits seemed to consider Mizzou coach Barry Odom’s coordinator choice “unexpected” at best. Dooley did not call plays during his last run in the Southeastern Conference, when he was head coach at Tennessee. He lasted just three seasons with the Vols, once compared his team to the German forces on D-Day and signed a recruiting class without an offensive lineman.

“God, I’m so past that,” Dooley said. “People still want to bring that up? They’re already on another coach! Their second coach! … I don’t understand why you can be in a profession 23 years, and they take 32 months of the 23 years and say that’s who you are as a coach.”

A tabulated volume one of the Dallas Cowboys’ 2017 offensive playbook sat on the room’s conference table, serving as a reminder of where Dooley has been since Tennessee and why Odom and Lock each bet on him as they enter a critical 2018 season.

Odom needs to prove he’s the long term answer at head coach, Lock wants to become more NFL ready, and both are trusting a man who spent the past five years coaching wide receivers in the pros to craft a more sophisticated offense.

“The unfortunate part, in our business and in our world, is narratives matter,” Dooley said.

Perhaps Dooley will earn another head coaching opportunity. At the very least, he can alter his perception in the SEC with a good season.

But first he must address this turnover problem. He turned to a wall of whiteboards. The names of the 18 teams that gave the ball away the least last season and their corresponding number of wins were scribbled in marker.

Traditional powers LSU, Alabama and Penn State were listed. But so were Florida Atlantic and Army. Some played fast, others played slow. Most were bowl teams, but two of the teams Dooley circled — Tulane and Tulsa — weren’t.

The point: There are multiple ways to construct an offense. Success can arrive in different and unexpected forms.

A ‘death march’ at Tennessee

Before the last game he coached in the SEC, Dooley called David Perno, his best friend and a former baseball coach at Georgia.

“I feel like I’m on a death march,” Dooley told him.

The Vols started the 2012 season 2-0 and were ranked heading into a week three matchup against Florida in Knoxville. That’s when Dooley’s final slide began. The Vols lost seven straight conference contests, including a 51-48, quadruple-overtime game against Missouri. After leading 21-7 at the half, his team sat on the ball with the game tied in the final minute.

The Vanderbilt game was a week later, and the Commodores blew out the Vols. Tennessee fired Dooley the next day, with one game left in the regular season.

He went 15-21 in three seasons at Tennessee. That game against Missouri is one of many losses that shouldn’t have happened and served as black marks on his tenure.

In his only postseason appearance at Tennessee, the 2010 Music City Bowl, Dooley’s team lost after North Carolina purposefully took a penalty to stop the clock with 1 second left and kicked a field goal to tie the game. (The result led to the current 10-second runoff rule.)

Against No. 10 LSU in 2010, Dooley’s team had 13 men on the field for what would’ve been the game’s final play. With another chance, LSU won the game.

And against Kentucky in 2011, the Volunteers lost 10-7 to a Wildcats team playing a wide receiver at quarterback.

In addition to on-field struggles, Dooley’s micromanaging tendencies became an issue at Tennessee. He had a reportedly tense relationship with former players after he tightened the rules regarding when they could be inside the football program’s facilities. Dooley had come from Louisiana Tech, where he was used to handling everything. After one season as Louisiana Tech’s football coach, he also took on the role of athletic director.

Steve Davison, a prominent Louisiana Tech booster who was Dooley’s neighbor when the coach was at the school, said some might find the coach “a little abrasive.” Davison remembers Dooley accepted his first head coaching job without visiting Louisiana Tech’s campus. After arriving, Dooley “almost had a nervous breakdown” and told the university president that the school’s facilities were “disgraceful.”

“He kind of doesn’t have a filter. He kind of tells it how he sees it,” Davison said. “If you’re real sensitive ... that might put you off a little bit.”

Maybe Dooley would’ve handled working within the Tennessee ecosystem differently if he had more than three seasons of head coaching experience. But after Lane Kiffin left the school following one season and higher-profile names turned down the job, it fell to Dooley. He had to take it.

“With a little more time, if you’ve got any sense at all, you ought to be more mature, more experienced and learn from having more experience,” said his father, Vince Dooley. “But you’ve got to take the opportunity that you had.”

Dooley knew the expectations he faced at a big-time SEC program. He spent his childhood around his father’s 25-year run as Georgia’s head coach — on the sidelines, in the press conferences. The stakes have only risen since, as salaries have grown and patience has thinned.

“I don’t ever like to hear him be the butt of a joke in the SEC,” Davison said. “I don’t think he’s deserving of ridicule. He’s just a guy who didn’t have as much success as he needed to to keep the job.”

Prior to Tennessee, Dooley seemed to always bet on himself and succeed.

When Vince Dooley refused to let Derek play for him at Georgia, hoping he’d instead go to Princeton, Derek decided to walk on at Virginia, where he eventually earned a scholarship and caught 41 passes.

Afterward, he became a corporate litigation attorney in Atlanta who “had a wonderful career ahead of him had he decided to stay,” according to one of his former colleagues at the firm. But after two years making good money, Dooley opted to coach.

“It wasn’t my choice,” the dad said of the move to coaching. “Let’s put it that way.”

Still, it worked out. After taking a graduate assistant job at Georgia and coaching wide receivers at SMU, Dooley ended up on Nick Saban’s staffs at LSU and with the Miami Dolphins. Then he went to Louisiana Tech.

Though Dooley finished with a losing record at Louisiana Tech, he had inherited a program that won three games the season before he arrived and guided the school to its first bowl game in seven years. He also helped raise money for new facilities.

“There was never a time where in my life I ever thought somebody would say, ‘We don’t want you to work for us,’” Dooley said in his office at the Mizzou Athletic Training Complex, where the only visible memento from his coaching career is the metal Dallas Cowboys cup he sipped from. “You had that confidence that every job you do, people are going to like your work product.

“That (firing from Tennessee) was the first time in my career where people didn’t like my work product. Quite frankly, I didn’t like it.”

Finding peace in the NFL

Dooley feared stepping away from football would only elongate the emotional recovery process, so soon after Tennessee fired him, he jumped into his job with Cowboys, working under another former member of Saban’s NFL staff, Jason Garrett.

He said the opportunity gave him a renewed feeling that he was “doing a pretty good job,” and he was eventually able to be “self-critical” about his SEC flameout. He thought about the three years in three categories: things out of his control, things he did well and things he could have done better.

Along the way, he learned a lesson: “Whatever peace you’ve come to, solution you come to, you’re never going to convince anybody else that that’s it,” he said.

Dooley liked the anonymity of his NFL job. He did not have to answer to reporters about every mistake he made, and when he traveled for road games, he could spend downtime checking out the cities, even going to museums.

“It kind of got him out of the SEC for a while, let him go there, go coach ball, not worry about boosters or speaking engagements,” his friend Hamp McWhorter said.

But McWhorter believes Dooley became “a little antsy” during his final two seasons with the Cowboys. The coach fears becoming bored or stale. He thinks of a new job as a “rock in your shoe” that provides an extra jolt of energy and enthusiasm.

So of course he accepted Odom’s offer to be the Tigers’ offensive coordinator despite having never called plays before. A guaranteed salary of $900,000 that made him the highest-paid assistant coach in program history didn’t hurt either.

Working with the defensive-minded Odom, Dooley will essentially be the offense’s head coach, open once again to greater criticism than he was in Dallas.

“He had a little burning desire, unfinished business,” his brother Daniel Dooley said. “I know walking off that field at Vanderbilt, back at the Tennessee-Vanderbilt game, his last game — (coming back to college football) was something he always wanted to do.”

Bringing energy to Mizzou

Dooley is honest about what he doesn’t know. That includes what he would’ve said if he sensed Lock didn’t like his pitch the first time the two spoke over the phone, back when Dooley was still interviewing for the Mizzou job.

“I wasn’t going to sit there and be somebody I wasn’t,” Dooley said. “I wasn’t going to tell him something that I didn’t believe in or something that we weren’t going to do just to try to get him to stay.”

Lock’s father, Andy, and his private coach, Justin Hoover, both said the quarterback evenly weighed his draft stock and his opinion of the new offensive coordinator in his decision to come back for his senior year.

During that first phone call, Dooley, in his Southern drawl, told the quarterback how the Cowboys would have evaluated him and what skills he needed to improve. Lock had to make more intermediate throws that directly translate to the NFL, Dooley said, and if the pair worked together, Dooley promised Lock would be able to use NFL terminology with teammates.

Lock wanted to hear all of that, but every coach Odom brought to Lock was going to add pro-style concepts to the Tigers’ attack. Something less tangible, Dooley’s energy, is what really stood out to the quarterback during their initial phone conversation. It still does.

“I think it’s what makes our quarterback room,” Lock said. “I could just tell from our first conversation we were going to vibe pretty well.”

Dooley has trusted Lock “to be a pro before he’s a pro,” Hoover said. This summer, he let Lock be a counselor at the Manning Passing Academy and Elite 11 camp, two prestigious quarterback events Lock was not allowed to participate in under former coordinator Josh Heupel, now the head coach at Central Florida. Finding time to spend in the film room is more up to Lock now, and according to Hoover, “he’s a junkie more than ever before.”

This is how Dooley is coaching the Tigers, trusting his players and treating the implementation of a new offense as a cooperative task. During the spring, he would sometimes stop offensive meetings and ask, “Is this how we want to do it?”

“He’s a humble guy,” Odom said. “He’s open to say he’s been humbled.

“He’s willing to talk about some of the mistakes that looking back now for him, if he had to do it again, what he would do differently. That’s helped me out.”

Less than a year ago, Odom stood at a lectern following a loss to Auburn and declared MU as a turnaround project and himself as the man to fix it. After producing a six-game winning streak that is easy to poke holes through, his team still feels disrespected.

“Whenever we play well, it’s because the other team didn’t play well. It’s not because the Missouri Tigers are a good football team,” Lock said. “... That’s the chip we have on our shoulder.”

Dooley is carrying a chip on his shoulder, too — the 32 months that define a 23-year career. If all goes as the Tigers hope, they will collectively rid themselves of their doubters, and no one will look at their offensive coordinator like he’s crazy.

This story was originally published August 6, 2018 at 12:06 PM.