Red Brick Magic: Sean McVay, John Harbaugh and Miami University’s Cradle of Coaches

By Terence Moore

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio is recognized for its beauty, highlighted by the red brick throughout its grounds. Poet Robert Frost even called it "the prettiest campus ever there was." It has a nationally acclaimed business school, and it has spent the last decade providing more CEOs of Fortune 500 companies with undergraduate Miami Ohio degrees than any other. Yet, the best kept secret for those inside the Miami Ohio family is The Cradle of Coaches, and the astounding track record over the last century of producing some of the greatest coaches, managers, and sports executives in sports history.In Red Brick Magic: Sean McVay, John Harbaugh and Miami University's Cradle of Coaches, Miami Ohio alum and pioneering sports journalist Terence Moore explores this unparalleled sports leadership legacy, from Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown, Ara Parseghian, and Bo Schembechler to John McVay, John Harbaugh, Sean McVay, and everyone in between.Highlighted by Sean McVay's Super Bowl LVI win with the Los Angeles Rams the record fourth NFL championship captured by a team coached by a Miami Ohio alum Moore tells the inside story of how a mid-major sports school in the Mid-American Conference has evolved into an industry trailblazer, and a true powerhouse when it comes to producing leaders and thinkers helping shape the past, present, and future of the sports world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637274446

Book preview

Contents

Foreword by Kirk Herbstreit

Introduction

1. Forever Young

2. Bronzed

3. John Harbaugh

4. Best Friends Forever

5. The Hepburn Hilton

6. Shock and Awe

7. The Real Four Horsemen

8. A Nice Little Team

9. Embry, Smokey, and Woody

10. Misty Eyes

11. Ara’s Legacy

12. Lessons in Cradle Rocking

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Kirk Herbstreit

Judy Herbstreit is my mom and she is a football fanatic. She was influenced a great deal by my dad, Jim, who played running back, defensive back, and special teams at Ohio State for three seasons through 1960 under Woody Hayes and later became an assistant under Coach Hayes at Ohio State just after he graduated. He also spent parts of the 1960s in Oxford, Ohio, at Miami University as an assistant to Bo Schembechler and later to Bill Mallory, and those two individuals were among those responsible at Miami for what is called the Cradle of Coaches.

I wasn’t born when Dad arrived at Miami in 1963 to work for Schembechler and I was only days old in 1969 after he returned that season to Oxford as the defensive coordinator for Mallory. But through the memories of my parents and my own lifetime passion for the sport while working for ESPN, I’ve always had a sense of Miami’s special place when it came to producing legendary coaches. Sid Gillman, Hayes, Ara Parseghian, Paul Brown, and Schembechler are all part of that Cradle. Those are just some of the who’s who among football coaches associated with Miami of Ohio.

In addition to Schembechler and the other four guys I mentioned, you had Mallory, Dick Crum, and Randy Walker as head football coaches of significance at Miami and then elsewhere. You also had the Miami assistant football coaches who prospered after they took over their own programs, including Jim Tressel, Dick Tomey, John Mackovic, and Larry Smith. The history books show that Weeb Ewbank and Red Blaik joined Brown in doing amazing things at Miami during the early parts of the 20th century.

I’m more personally familiar with modern-day Miami guys. Sean McVay of the Los Angeles Rams and John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens followed the path of Ewbank as Miami graduates who won Super Bowls, and I’ve interacted with them while announcing NFL games for Amazon Prime Video. Then you combine Miami’s past with Miami’s present in producing memorable coaches as a mid-major program, it is simply mind-boggling. There are Miami coaching connections of greatness throughout the country—notably at Ohio State. It was there that I proudly received my Ohio State Captain’s Mug for being the Buckeyes’ quarterback during my senior year in 1992. My dad was blessed with that same honor his senior year in 1960. Hayes was Dad’s coach and later Dad’s boss when Coach Hayes put him in charge of the Ohio State defensive backs just weeks after graduating. 

As for those Ohio State–Miami connections, Hayes had two years of coaching success at Miami before he joined the Buckeyes in 1951. Here is another connection: when Dad became an assistant at Ohio State, he was there with Schembechler, a former Miami player who eventually was named the head coach of his alma mater before he left six seasons later for Michigan fame.

Dad became one of Schembechler’s assistant coaches at Miami in 1963, and after I spent years listening to my parents on the subject, I began to realize this whole Cradle of Coaches thing went deeper for our family than just Dad’s connection to Schembechler and Coach Hayes. I talk about my personal connection to Schembechler and Coach Hayes in my book Out of the Pocket: Football, Fatherhood, and College GameDay Saturdays.

During the year I was born in 1969, Dad began as the defensive coordinator at Miami under Mallory, and Mom said our home in Oxford was a small, white farmhouse with a green roof. It turned out our place used to sit at the same location as Yager Stadium, where Miami football teams play today after they moved there in 1983. 

As for Miami’s former home called Miami Field, I’m told the first football game I ever attended was on Saturday, September 13, 1969. It involved Miami hosting Xavier in the middle of campus at that old stadium of Ewbank, Brown, Gillman, Hayes, Parseghian, Schembechler, and the rest. Miami won 35–7 during that season opener on the way to a 7–3 finish, but I wasn’t aware of that or much of anything else. I was three weeks old.

So, I obviously don’t recall the first time Dad worked closely with Coach Hayes, who ranked among the most storied of those Cradle of Coaches members for Miami. Dad left his parents’ home in Cincinnati for college at Ohio State during the late 1950s and he developed a special bond with Coach Hayes. This was the same Hayes noted by some for his demanding ways and his explosive temper, but I was told by Dad and others that he also was kindhearted. 

When Dad graduated from Ohio State during the spring of 1961, he had Mom and my sister, Teri, and they struggled financially in a small apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Coach Hayes came to the rescue. The Old Man, as his assistants and players called him, made the 22-year-old Jim Herbstreit his full-time defensive backs coach before the 1961 season. That was only until Miami gave Schembechler its head coaching job in 1963, and Schembechler asked Dad to join him. Dad agreed. He remained one of Schembechler’s assistant coaches at Miami before he entered the business world for a year, but then Dad returned to coaching in 1965 at the University of Akron. Miami, though, remained in Dad’s future. After Schembechler left Miami for the University of Michigan following the 1968 season, Mallory became Miami’s head football coach and he hired Dad as his defensive coordinator.

I got a handwritten note from Ellie Mallory in October 2020, and that was two years after the death of her husband, Bill, the former Miami coach and graduate of the college. Ellie wrote that she found a 1969 Miami football media guide in her late husband’s files, and it mentioned Coach Hayes called Bill to say, You need to hire Jim Herbstreit as DC.

She also wrote: Of course, Bill said, ‘Yes sir’ and called your dad for an interview and hired him! Your folks and their then-two children lived in a house where the present Miami University football stadium is located.

I learned another interesting story about our time in Oxford from my mom. She said football was so important at Miami and in my dad’s life during August of 1969 that my birth was induced because fall practices were beginning for Miami. She said there was no hospital in Oxford at the time, so she and Dad jumped in their Volkswagen, drove the 13 miles to Hamilton, Ohio, and then Dad dropped her off at the hospital for my birth while he headed back to Miami for football practice. To help supplement the meager salary of an assistant college football coach, my mom used to babysit for neighbors during those Miami days to earn money before I was born. That’s partly why Dad returned to the business world after he spent that 1969 season with Mallory.

Looking back, there is no doubt my football destiny began inside of my Oxford cradle. That was in the midst of a bigger cradle that just keeps rocking with coaches and is so deftly depicted in Terence Moore’s book.

—Kirk Herbstreit

Introduction

The lunch meeting in the summer of 2016 switched from discussing the food inside the steakhouse to the scrapbook sitting between us on the other side of the condiments and empty plates. Page after page, I kept turning to my stories in The Cincinnati Enquirer from the late 1970s about the Indiana University football teams coached by Lee Corso.

Yes, that Lee Corso, the future ESPN college football analyst who predicted the outcome of big games by wearing the mascot head of the team he picked. I covered Indiana back then for The Enquirer when I was fresh out of Miami University up the road in Oxford, Ohio. Just before I had Corso’s Hoosiers as part of my newspaper beat, the guy across the table from me was a two-time team captain for Indiana named Tim McVay.

Wait.

Tim McVay?

John McVay’s son? The son that John McVay from my old San Francisco Examiner days of the 1980s used to call, My little boy, Timmy during some of our conversations? Tim McVay, the brother of the younger John McVay who shared that name with their father and who lived in my dormitory at Miami University?

Oh, and Tim McVay’s son is Sean McVay.

That Tim McVay and I spent our lunch remembering the same coaches, the same administrators, the same sights and sounds around Memorial Stadium and the same places throughout that Big Ten campus in Bloomington, Indiana, mostly known for the movie Breaking Away and the explosive Bobby Knight. Long after enjoying dessert, we discussed players from Tim McVay’s Hoosiers of the mid-1970s, especially since many of them remained during my time covering Indiana football in the latter part of the decade.

Wow, Tim McVay was all of that at Indiana University just before I got there? Some big-time reporter I was to not realize that. That’s what I kept thinking between bites. After all, I didn’t discover anything involving Tim McVay’s Hoosier Hysteria heroics until days before our lunch during that summer of 2016 and I was in my ninth year doing a weekly Sunday sports show for Atlanta’s WSB-TV, and Tim McVay had been the Emmy-winning executive at that station as vice president and general manager for the last five of those years.

Given everything else regarding the McVays and myself, my television connection with Tim McVay was intriguing enough, but then came that lunch, Indiana University, Corso, and all of those stories. This wasn’t a coincidence. This was more of the same of how I’ve spent decades interacting in various ways with significant folks associated directly or indirectly to Miami University, where I graduated in 1978.

By the way, this Miami not in Florida isn’t just any college. It’s an extraordinary one within a breathtaking setting of red-brick buildings, and the university has several nicknames for the ages: Yale of the West, Mother of Fraternities, and the Cradle of Coaches.

So many iconic sports figures are associated with Miami University after playing, coaching, or doing both in Oxford, and it mostly was a football thing. It eventually became an all-encompassing thing. Cradle members have included the winningest college football coaches ever at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Army, and the entire Ivy League. You have the founder of two NFL teams who invented the playbook, the facemask, and a bunch of other integral aspects of football. You have the CEO for nearly half of the Super Bowls ever played. You have the first Black general manager in the history of U.S. major professional sports leagues. You have a Baseball Hall of Fame manager who had Jackie Robinson as one of his players. You have the guy who invented Rocky Top as Tennessee’s unofficial song while winning more basketball games at the school than anybody. You have the college baseball coach with more lifetime victories than any of his active peers through the 2023 season.

Then there are the contributions of the McVays to Miami University fame. Their legacy on campus began with the older John McVay, class of 1953, who was a captain on the football team. He became general manager of the San Francisco 49ers and built a franchise that won five Super Bowl rings. The younger John McVay, class of 1975, was twice an All-Mid-American Conference defensive back for the nationally acclaimed Miami University football program of the 1970s when it evolved into a mid-major powerhouse. Sean McVay, class of 2008, wasn’t much of a player on campus, but at a ridiculously young age, he coached the Los Angeles Rams to two Super Bowls, including a world championship in February 2022.

I have unique tales about all of them. With apologies to Gus Kahn, the lyrics writer for the classic song It Had to Be You published in 1924 when Miami University coaching legend Weeb Ewbank (three NFL world championships) first enrolled on campus, it had to be me writing this book. Before I arrived at Miami University in the fall of 1974, there already were signs I was destined to become the definitive person to chronicle the past, the present, and the future of the Cradle of Coaches.

I later spent four years through graduation day in 1978 working on The Miami Student newspaper, helping to memorialize the greatest stretch in the massive sports history of the university. After the turn of the century, I served on the school’s alumni board for six years and I was a visiting professor for seven years in the Miami University journalism department. In addition, while I worked as a professional sports journalist for more than 45 years—from newspapers (The Enquirer, Examiner, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) to Internet (AOL, CNN, Forbes) to national and local television commentator (ESPN, CNN, MSNBC, NFL Network, and Tim McVay’s old Atlanta station)—I encountered the bulk of Miami University’s legends. You can attribute it to the sporting gods—or maybe to the friendly ghosts on campus, and supposedly there are many of them.

1. Forever Young

The streets are paved in red brick instead of pure gold. Nevertheless, Oxford, Ohio, sparkles as heaven on Earth, especially the 2,100 acres that comprise Miami University, and yes, Robert Frost spoke during the 1950s for eternity. He used the same mind that contributed to his four Pulitzer Prizes in poetry to say after one of his many visits to this college in the southwestern corner of the state, The most beautiful campus that ever there was.

The colorful and plentiful shrubbery complement those trees. The Georgian style buildings with the ancient and the recent blend together to look wonderfully the same for an institution that was signed into existence by George Washington. You never see the cleaning fairies who keep this a litter-free environment rivaling Camelot or maybe Emerald City. The manicured lawns are dominated by tall fescue with no weeds ever thinking about peeking through, with not a blade of grass allowed to sink or rise above four inches, and with the greenest of green shine during spring and summer. The 40 miles of sidewalks are free of leaves in the autumn and of snow in the winter. Perfection is expected around Miami University regarding those sidewalks and everything else.

Take the statues, for instance. Oh, those statues.

Around the far northern edges of Miami University, those statues rise majestically near Yager Stadium, the football home of the RedHawks. The setting is a valley dominated by oak, hickory, sycamore, walnut, hackberry, and ash trees, and the setting is just beyond the Black Covered Bridge that has hovered over Four Mile Creek since 1868 when Miami University was 59 years old and already ranked among the senior citizens of colleges west of the Alleghenies. The setting is also part of the whole campus—with its eternal beauty courtesy of those red bricks (always the red bricks).

When you’re in the midst of the setting, you’re using your senses more than sight alone. Gifted in 1939 by one of the four national fraternities started at Miami University, the Beta Bell Tower provides the time every 15 minutes. It plays Westminster Quarters, the same notes you hear from Big Ben in London. Want a delectable treat? Try an Oxford tradition since the 1920s. The locals and Miami University folks call them toasted rolls, which consists of warm bread covered with special icing and powdered sugar. The whole thing is smothered in butter.

Miami University…Beta Bells, toasted rolls, spotless everything, and eternal magic, which brings us back to those statues. Those statues almost breathe. I’m too young for that right now, Sean McVay told me during the fall of 2022, referring to his pending statue unveiling, but a a smile burst across his 36-year-old face.

Despite McVay’s words of amazement and doubt, his eyes of fire and focus told a different story about his worthiness. Forget too young. He was too extraordinary not to have a bronzed image of himself at Miami University. In the spring of 2023, his statue joined the one of John Harbaugh, his fellow NFL head coach and Miami University graduate, along with the sculptures for the nationally iconic likes of Paul Brown, Ara Parseghian, Weeb Ewbank, Bo Schembechler, and others with the same alma mater that produces greatness in many forms. The latest statue in the middle of Miami University’s bronze tribute to football coaching excellence spoke of what McVay has done, what McVay is doing, and what McVay will do through his talents wrapped around charisma.

That talented coach debated his future in January 2023 after his Los Angeles Rams imploded. They were the worst defending Super Bowl champions in history with a 5–12 record. No NFL team finished 2022 with fewer total yards, and McVay is considered an offensive guru. The Rams’ injuries were massive. In addition to losing Mr. Everything receiver Cooper Kupp to ankle surgery in November, they spent long stretches without their most valuable players on offense (quarterback Matthew Stafford) and defense (lineman Aaron Donald), and neither was a poster guy for the fountain of youth. The 34-year-old Stafford suffered a spinal cord contusion while recovering from a concussion. The 31-year-old Donald considered retiring so seriously the summer before his season-ending ankle injury in late November 2022 that he filed the paperwork. Who knew about their future status?

Plus, the Rams had the NFL’s worst salary cap situation. They also had traded away every one of their first-round draft picks since 2016 and they ended the 2022 season without one through the 2023 NFL Draft.

On a personal level, the family-oriented McVay became a newlywed during the summer of 2022. Moreover, his wife (Veronika Khomyn) is also from Ukraine, which meant the couple suffered horror by horror throughout her country’s nasty war with the Russians. His beloved grandfather (John McVay) also died during the season, and nothing summed up the Rams’ woes more than what happened in November 2022 in Kansas City. With national television cameras rolling during the first half of their game against the Chiefs, Sean wasn’t looking on the sidelines when he sauntered into the path of Rams tight end Roger Carter sprinting toward the field. Carter’s helmet crashed into the left side of Sean’s face, and the blow was strong enough to knock off his headset. Sean stayed in the game. It was a good shot, but I’m okay, he told reporters later, talking about his face but not about the Rams who eventually finished the season as an embarrassment.

Sean was so gone from the Rams. Then he wasn’t.

The Rams’ season from hell ended on a Sunday in mid-January of 2023, and after he consulted mostly with his soul, he decided before the close of the week to return for a seventh year to prove his sixth was a mirage. He previously led the franchise to five winning records, four playoff berths, three NFC West titles, two Super Bowl trips, and that world championship. He told reporters via Zoom in March 2023: I’m really committed to not having this become a story every year because I know that’s probably something that people are asking or wondering and I don’t take that lightly. That was why the reflection—because there was never a doubt whether you wanted to coach again. It’s really just, ‘Are you going to be able to have the appropriate perspective to be the best version of yourself for the players and the coaches?’ And I feel confident that that can exist moving forward.

Let’s return to the other time McVay nearly retired from the Rams, the NFL, and coaching. It followed triumph instead of turmoil.

McVay’s ability to hold an audience captive by his presence was so evident while he took his Rams to a Super Bowl victory in February 2022 that he was offered $100 million by Amazon to leave the sidelines for Thursday night broadcasting of NFL games on Prime Video. He stayed with the Rams, and they made him the richest coach in the league with a deal worth $15 million to $18 million a year through the 2026 season.

Sounds lovely, but Sean McVay was a yes away from operating as the next John Madden in the TV booth for tons more than that. He also could have become another Charles Schwab on Wall Street. His best friend (or at least one of them since he has many legitimate ones) thought he’d grow up someday to prosper as something like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. One of our other closest friends is worth billions, and he uses his helicopter to fly in Sean from time to time to motivate his sales team, said James Chase, who did financially well himself as a Miami University graduate. He became an accomplished entrepreneur in West Palm Beach, Florida. He said of his old Oxford housemate during three of their four college years: I’m telling you. Sean has this master memory. Just one time and he knows everything about you. How deep it goes with him is incredible. It’s a God-given gift. He knows what you ate for breakfast on July 10, 1991, when you turned 10 years old.

Sean’s grandfather, John McVay, agreed when we conversed early during Sean’s NFL coaching career. Like Sean, the grandfather was a Miami University player and graduate, and the grandfather spent decades using his own splendid recall to do everything in football from coaching at the high school, college, and pro levels to constructing five Super Bowl-winning teams as general manager of the San Francisco 49ers. The grandfather told me he imagined his grandson prospering in the military. I really did, said the grandfather as passion dominated his voice and his face a few years before his