Robert Rodriguez has been on the job for just about two weeks. For him, it’s all new. The sunshine. The hoodie he donned. And the players he’s about to coach.
Toward the end of ASU’s spring ball media session last Thursday, Rodriguez was chatting with a few ASU media relations folks. Defensive lineman Stanley Lambert waltzed by, on his way to the grill station.
Rodriguez stopped his conversation. He walked up to Lambert and slapped him on the arm, a mile-wide grin smeared across his face as he stared his new 6-foot-4, 225-pound toy up and down.
“Man, if you were a rose, you wouldn’t even have thorns,” Rodriguez told him with a chuckle. “I’m gonna teach that dude to use his long arms and long legs.”
Rodriguez is the most contemporary addition in Tempe. And that’s saying something. Even the freshmen early-enrollees got on campus in January. And the other five recent assistant coach hires by Herm Edwards had all been arranged before Signing Day. Rodriguez arrived in mid-February.
He only adds to ASU’s pro model, having been previously the Minnesota Vikings assistant offensive line coach. Some could look at his move as a regression. NFL to college isn’t an often-used career track. The new man in Tempe felt like ASU was different, that it offered something no other school did.
“I said, ‘Well, hell, I could come here and coach like an NFL coach,’” he said. “They’re calling it the pro model and it’s exactly that. I walked in and I put my hands up, looked outside at the weather -- I had one meeting with coach Marvin Lewis and one meeting with coach Herm Edwards -- and I’m like, ‘I’m home.’
“I’m going to get to do it my way. I’m going to get to coach technique and the things that are important to me I get to drive it home. It’s not all about being a used-car salesman … I get to coach, develop people and do this the right way.”
Rodriguez joked that he left his dream job for his dream job. He watched draft prospects and training-camp invites in Minnesota stall their career because they didn’t have the right technique. The coaches used to watch film of prospects, he said, and 90 percent of the time they’d remark, “Man, this guy is messed up.”
Rodriguez’s goal is that he can use all the same techniques and information he used with NFL pass rushers and give them to ASU’s youth. That he can develop that raw potential with younger players. Can help them succeed. Can help them thrive in the NFL.
At first, he admitted, he didn’t even know he wanted to make a career move.
The link to Rodriguez’s journey west was former ASU coach Tony White, who left for the defensive coordinator position at Syracuse in early February. White took an internship with the Vikings a year ago and the pair, who knew each other from their childhoods in El Paso, would joke about having Rodriguez land in Tempe.
“I didn’t expect it to go the way it did,” he said. “But it actually works out because what Marvin is trying to do, it marries up to what I’ve come up within the league.”
Rodriguez credits a lot of his coaching success to Vikings’ head coach Mike Zimmer and, to a larger extent, defensive coordinator Andre Patterson -- who was recently promoted from Minnesota’s defensive line coach and coached alongside Rodriguez at UTEP.
Both ran similar schemes and held defensive philosophies akin to Lewis, which works incredibly well to Rodriguez’s favor. With the departures of former defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales to New Mexico and White to Syracuse, the 3-3-5 has effectively left Tempe. That means, everyone -- coaches and players alike -- is learning a new defense, a four-down scheme -- not just the freshly-minted defensive line coach.
The other day, Rodriguez got some of his guys out on the turf for a short workout. They lined up and tried one of Rodriguez’s drills. It wasn’t pretty. He expected that -- because, well, it’s happened before.
“I told them, ‘I’ve coached a Pro Bowler every year I was in the NFL, and every single one of those dudes looked terrible doing that exact same drill for the first time. But they committed to it, they mastered it and they became Pro Bowlers -- and that didn’t happen overnight,’” Rodriguez said he told the Sun Devil D-linemen.
Rodriguez harped on a current example to get the point across. In Minnesota, he coached lineman Danielle Hunter -- who recently signed a five-year, $72-million contract extension. Yeah, that’ll get their attention. But while Hunter became the fastest player in NFL history to record 50 sacks, he notched just 1.5 during his senior season at LSU.
In other words: “Danielle Hunter was a sack machine and didn’t know he was a sack machine.”
That’s the goal for Rodriguez -- help guys reach their potential quicker. Hand them tools and techniques to be great and hope they apply the commitment to succeed.
“I’ve got to get to know my guys, but we're also gonna have a real high standard,” Rodriguez said. “You should see a disciplined group that really takes a lot of pride in the way they work day after day after day.”
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