THE LIFE OF REILLY : Former El Camino Coach Is Now Trying to Work His Wizardry With Charger Quarterbacks
SAN DIEGO — Who is this guy, and why is he here?
We know this much:
His name is Jack Reilly.
He was hired by the San Diego Chargers last year, but most of his salary was paid by the University of Utah.
The Chargers had no openings on their coaching staff last season, but they made room for this guy.
He has this CIA-like personnel file in the team’s public relations department--it’s empty.
He hangs around the quarterbacks, looks like Phil Donohue, talks like Tip O’Neill and laughs like a guy who has spent a lot of time watching Charger quarterbacks.
“Even when I go home,” he said, “my kids ask, ‘What do you do with the Chargers, Dad?’ ”
Well, we can tell you this: He’s supposedly so good at his job, the Rams wanted him to become their receivers coach this year.
The World League of American Football also went after him. The league offered him the position of head coach in London, but he chose to accept a two-year contract and remain incognito with the Chargers.
“I’d rather be going to a Super Bowl than a World Bowl,” said Reilly, a former El Camino College and Beverly Hills High coach.
We can also assume he’s a dreamer, but who is this guy?
“Everybody in football knows who he is,” Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard said. “He’s a passing wizard. He spent a lot of time with guys that he felt were innovators like (Ram coach) Ernie Zampese and (former San Francisco 49er coach) Bill Walsh. In some ways he’s like Ernie, he could lock himself in a little room and just work on passing stuff.”
Get him out of the closet. If ever there was an offense in need of help in its passing game, this is it. The Chargers ranked third in the league in rushing, but dropped to 24th when they put the ball in the air.
“Our offensive line can knock people off the ball and our backs can run hard,” Reilly said. “But we realize when they put nine-man fronts up there that we cannot just run the ball.
“We’ll put more little gadgets in than we’ve had before, more screens and all of that should make the running game that much more effective.”
Someone, however, has to throw the football.
“I think (quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver) is better and has improved in all of his areas,” Reilly said. “He will always have the personality of being the gambler. There’s some real advantages to that, but he knows he has to learn to not be so impatient.”
Patience is what Reilly is all about. As Beathard said, “All Jack Reilly wants to do is coach, go to his place in Sun Valley and fish.”
He’s the kind of guy, Tolliver said, “that will never get an ulcer. He’ll live to be 100.
Said Tolliver: “It’s easy come, easy go with Jack, but listen, he wants us all to be the next Joe Montana. It’s like: ‘OK, guys, here’s where we want you to be.’ That’s all, just like Joe Montana.”
Although he obviously has high standards, it’s Reilly’s low-key approach to working in the NFL that has allowed him to help the Chargers.
Last year was an experiment. Reilly knew Beathard from their days of playing touch football together, and Beathard liked Reilly. He recommended him to Coach Dan Henning, and Reilly went to work quietly trying not to get in the way of the other offensive assistants.
“I didn’t want it to pose a threat to anybody,” Beathard said. “The way Jack’s personality is, I felt it wouldn’t. Jack was also very sensitive about that.”
We know this about Reilly: He was so sensitive about his first-year role with the Chargers that he would go so far as to step away from the quarterbacks if he noticed a photographer at work. The equipment manager was quoted more last season than this guy.
“I knew if I was going to stay over the second year it wasn’t going to be on coaching expertise,” he said, “but on staff compatibility.”
Reilly was fortunate from the outset, however. He was working alongside former USC Coach Ted Tollner.
“I think it’s a real credit to Ted, because Ted’s making it work for Jack,” Beathard said. “If Ted were a different type of personality, he could say I don’t want him around here.”
After last season, Henning appointed Tollner, who is his top assistant, offensive coordinator. He asked Tollner to not only oversee the quarterbacks, but the receivers, running backs and linemen as well.
“I told Ted if he was going to have that job of offensive coordinator he couldn’t be looking at just one position,” Henning said. “That’s what Jack does; he watches the quarterbacks.”
Reilly knows quarterbacks. He began his coaching career at Beverly Hills High, then began turning out productive quarterbacks at El Camino.
Todd Hons went on to earn most-valuable-player honors in the Fiesta Bowl for Arizona State. Tim Green helped Tollner’s Trojans win a Rose Bowl, and Larry Egger became the foundation for success at Utah when Reilly joined the Utes as offensive coordinator.
Scott Mitchell, a Reilly protege at Utah who now backs up Dan Marino, set 10 NCAA records and helped his team lead the nation in passing offense with 395.9 yards a game.
“I think to win you have to run the football,” he said, although his track record tells a different story. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind about that. Here, our personality is to get after them and pound the football. But to complement power football, you have to throw the football.”
During the off-season, the Chargers took stock of their offensive attack and dedicated this year’s training camp toward making significant adjustments.
“We are concentrating on three areas this year,” Reilly said. “We need to improve on big plays on first down, scoring in the red area (inside the opponent’s 20-yard line) and scoring in the two-minute offense. Those are all pass-oriented situations that we need to improve on.”
Under Tollner’s guidance, Reilly works on the quarterbacks’ mechanics and their approach to the game. He talks to backups John Friesz and Bob Gagliano, while Tollner runs Tolliver and the first unit through its practice paces. There are a lot of laughs.
When Friesz takes command, Reilly takes Tolliver aside. There are a lot of laughs.
“I think Tolliver’s going to be a good pro quarterback,” Reilly said. “He’s improving all the time. Trying to improve at the rate everybody else wants him to, now that’s the hard part.
“Friesz is coming on strong. I think he’s a very promising quarterback. The whole thing is, I think we’ve learned that we’re really better across the board at that position.”
We’ve also learned this about Reilly: He approaches football as if it were a game. His hair has turned white, but it has nothing to do with working with Tolliver. He came to San Diego because Beathard is an expert at keeping football in perspective.
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get into the pro game,” Reilly said. “I thought it was too intense, but with Bobby and Dan, it’s nothing like that.”
He turned down an opportunity to join Tampa Bay a few years back because his family was happy in Utah. But if he had his choice, he said, he would still be making a habit of beating Beathard’s touch football team each weekend rather than sitting in an NFL press box.
“If he wants to lie about those passing games, he might not make it through the whole preseason, and you can put that in the paper,” Beathard said with a smile.
