Michael Vick to embark on new coaching journey at Norfolk State

Moments after the first home game of the College Football Playoff era began Friday night at Notre Dame Stadium, Michael Vick is on the phone explaining how he plans to build a program capable of winning at Norfolk State.

While Marcus Freeman became the first Black head coach to win a CFP game, bringing the Fighting Irish one step closer to winning a national championship, Vick is starting from scratch. He is assembling a staff. He is working to recruit players. He is loading his children into the car as he explains how he will explain his vision of Spartan football to the players and parents.

“I understand the position Norfolk State is in,” Vick said. “I understand where we are. There will be a lot of kids who will be looking for opportunities to play football, to play at a level where they can continue to grow. I’m looking forward to that part, working with kids.” every day, as opposed to, you know, a two-day football camp.

“Instead of watching them grow for two days, I can now train them every day with a great coaching staff that will help ensure these kids play their best brand of soccer.”

Who is on that staff? He’s working on it. Which players do you want to sign? The best. What is your timeline for success? Make tomorrow better than today.

Vick, 44, officially became the 19th football coach at Norfolk State, a relatively young historically black university without any wins at the FCS level. In fact, the program hasn’t finished with a winning record since 2021, which was the last year a Norfolk State player, Justin Smith, signed a professional football contract, signing a deal with the Houston Roughnecks in the USFL.

In 2011, it looked like the Spartans were ready to take a step forward after winning the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) Championship and earning a bid to the FCS playoffs, only to have the title stripped from them in 2016. A total of 48 student-athletes were found ineligible in 11 sports and three football teams between 2009 and 2011.

The university endured two years of NCAA-mandated probation as well as scholarship reductions in all 11 sports. When Dawson Odums took over the football program in 2021, he did so after compiling eight consecutive winning seasons with four Western Division titles and a conference championship at Southern University. Still, his first season was the only one in which the Spartans won more games than they lost over the next four years. Odums was relieved of his duties in November, posting a 15-31 record during his four seasons at Norfolk State.

Enter Vick, who had been waiting for an opportunity to return to coaching since taking his first internship for Andy Reid and the Kansas City Chiefs in 2017. Vick has maintained a constant dialogue with Reid when it comes to the topic of coaching. He spoke with Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin about the prospect of coaching as well. Recently, he picked the brain of perhaps the most well-known success story of a player-turned-coach: Deion Sanders.

Sanders led Jackson State to a pair of SWAC championships before heading to Colorado, where he turned the program from two wins before his arrival to four in his first year and nine in his third, with the Heisman winner playing for him.

“I approached Deion just to have a conversation with him,” Vick said. “The conversation was more about philosophy and the most important steps to get started. It reminded me that I would have a lot of people supporting me.”

But Vick, who has been with FOX Sports since 2017 and serves as an analyst for “FOX NFL Kickoff,” first needed to make the right decision. He had two options during this last coaching cycle: Norfolk State and Sacramento State.

The Hornets had built an attractive program, reaching the FCS playoffs in three of the last four years. Former head coach Troy Taylor accepted a Power 4 head coaching position at Stanford in December 2022. They had also built an NIL community with the goal of raising $50 million and ascending to the highest division in the sport.

“Sacramento State had a great situation. They had tons of NIL money and tons of opportunities,” Vick said. “But I didn’t want to make my decision based on money. I wanted to make it based on what I could do and who I could help sincerely. And I think I can help on both sides. But I felt it was great to come home and do it in my backyard and that was probably the deciding factor, having the opportunity to do it where I grew up.”

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When Vick called, it was from a number with a 757 area code, where he made his name at Warwick High School in Newport News, Virginia, also known as Tidewater. The Tidewater area is renowned for the talent it has produced, especially in sports. The list of star athletes the 757 has produced is staggering, from Vick and Lawrence Taylor in the NFL, to Alonzo Mourning and Allen Iverson in the NBA, to three-time Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas.

When Mack Brown became North Carolina’s head coach, he made recruiting the 757 a priority, developing players like Dre Bly, who later coached for Brown in Chapel Hill and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. , just like Brown.

“We actually recruited Tidewater like they were in state,” Brown said. said Me in 2021. And the legacy of the place and the people who left their mark on America was another recruiting advantage for the coach who also turned Vince Young and Drake Maye into household names.

“Nowadays, you need to be an attractive place,” Brown said. “And if people see that you’re having fun and that your players are your best recruiters, then they’ll tell the other kids, ‘Come here, man. This is cool. This is fun.’ What you see is real. They’re not making it up. these things.”

No one was more fun to watch than Vick, nor more ruthless when a play fell through. During his college playing days at Virginia Tech, Vick criticized Florida State running backs Tommy Polley and Roland Seymour so much in the 1999 Sugar Bowl that both tore an ACL in their knees. Vick was such a talented athlete that he was selected in the 30th round of the 2000 MLB Draft by the Colorado Rockies, despite not playing baseball since the eighth grade. It wasn’t a question of whether the Atlanta Falcons would select him with the first pick in the 2001 NFL Draft. The only question was what would Vick do in the NFL? The answer: whatever you want.

He was so cold that we called him by his first and last name. “Mike Vick” was like shouting hallelujah in church. By the time he appeared on the cover of “Madden 2004,” he had already broken the game. Playing with Vick on the joysticks was cheating.

When Vick left the NFL, he did so as the first quarterback to rush for 1,000 yards in a season. He was a four-time Pro Bowler and was named NFL Comeback Player of the Year in 2010 after his return to the league following 21 months in federal prison for his involvement in a dogfighting ring. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2018 and will likely be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In the meantime, he hopes to fill the minds and hearts of student-athletes who want to play for him, giving them a platform and a plan to succeed.

“The wins and losses will define themselves,” Vick said. “At the end of the day, it’s about being relatable. It’s about kids being able to come up to you and ask questions, having the door always open, not being afraid to come up to you and tell you how they really feel. It’s a mutual friendship. It’s a mutual relationship that you try to develop.”

Michael Vick is an iconoclast, who broke the boundaries of the quarterback position in the NFL and introduced the mobile QB not as a gimmick, but as a necessity. In the process, he experienced ups and downs that many have never had and will never experience. With that experience has come such deep knowledge that he simply feels called to spread it. To pour it out in the place that raised it. To pour it into the players who remind him most of himself, whose story hasn’t started out very different from his. I just wanted to have the opportunity to be great. He is being given that opportunity once again as a coach and is looking to extend it to those who choose to play for him.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and host of “The Number One College Football Show” podcast. follow him on @RJ_joven.

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