Hansen: Tradition, salary drove Bob Elliott to Notre Dame

Bob Elliott leaves Iowa State again, this time to coach Notre Dame’s safeties. And what happens? He still has to deal with Oklahoma’s passing attack.

Life can be cruel. By moving from Ames to South Bend, Elliott drops Oklahoma State’s potent offense from the 2012 schedule. But he keeps Landry Jones of Oklahoma while adding Matt Barkley of Southern California.

Elliott was in the office bright and early Wednesday morning trying to figure out how to shut them down — with a handful of starters gone from last year’s secondary — when I asked him to shift his attention from the near future to the recent past.

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OK, so why leave Iowa State? Was it, as some say, because the Cyclones already had one of the best defensive coaches around in head man Paul Rhoads?

No, Elliott said, adding that Rhoads is, indeed, a great secondary coach. But that wasn’t it?

“Honestly,” Elliott said. “We loved Iowa State and enjoyed everything about it. I really like what Paul is doing with the program. He’s always looking for the edge that might bring them a victory. He’s also the best head coach I’ve ever been around as far as connecting with the players. Not by being easy on them, but by having them buy into what he’s doing.”

Why leave then? Two reasons: a) Elliott could use the bump in pay, and b) moving to Notre Dame allows him to work in a storied football program with a history of competing for the national championship.

A history major in his undergraduate days at Iowa, Elliott, 58, calls himself a “football traditionalist.” The son of former Michigan coach Bump Elliott, Bob Elliott grew up in Ann Arbor.

“Like Michigan, Notre Dame is awash in history and tradition,” he says. “It gets everybody’s best shot all the time.”

That’s both good and bad. Notre Dame finished 8-4 last season, which is more than acceptable at most places.

Yet if Brian Kelly doesn’t continue to show improvement in the next few years, Elliott will be on the move again.

“Every school has its problems,” he says. “There are no great jobs. Only jobs you make great. I came in here with my eyes wide open.”

With former Hawkeyes Bobby Diaco and Kerry Cooks sharing the defensive coordinator job, with strength coach Paul Longo having been on Iowa’s staff for 11 years, and former Iowa State assistant Tony Alford coaching the running backs, the comfort level is high.

Elliott used to tell Diaco and Cooks what to do. But Elliott says he’s fine with the role reversal.

One of the things he liked about Iowa was the coaching staff collegiality — something the players notice. Something, Elliott believes, that has resulted in so many Hawkeyes in coaching. Something that continues today.

“The players saw how much the coaches enjoyed what they did. The atmosphere was so positive. They looked at those guys and said, ‘That’s what I’d like to do.’”

And the money? Notre Dame must have enough of it. The Fighting Irish employ two defensive coordinators, two defensive backs coaches.

Good thing. When Elliott joined Chuck Long at San Diego State, he and his wife, Joey, made a down payment on a house overlooking a golf course and the mountains in Rancho Bernardo, an upscale community in San Diego’s northern hills. A bad housing market immediately got worse.

“Timing has never been one of my strong suits,” Elliott says.

Selling now would be suicide. With all that equity tied up, buying a second home is out of the question. So the Elliotts wait it out, renting wherever they go, hoping the market bounces back.

“I have all kinds of respect for Chuck,” Elliott says. “He solved some real problems out there. But we took a backward step going to California. You work 30-some years to get in a position to retire and it falls apart. This move also represents an opportunity to get out of a hole.”

Notre Dame is Elliott’s eighth different school as a full-time assistant. When Hayden Fry retired, Elliott would have been a serious candidate to replace him.

Instead, cancer of the blood cells required a bone-marrow transplant, which threatened not only his career but his life.

After working as an assistant to athletic director Bob Bowlsby at Iowa for a year, Elliott became Dan McCarney’s associate head coach. Two years later, he left to become defensive coordinator at Kansas State.

Four years after that, when Bill Snyder took his much publicized “sabbatical,” Elliott left Manhattan to join Long at San Diego State. When Long was fired, it was back to Iowa State, this time under Rhoads.

“I don’t want people to think I’m here today, gone tomorrow,” he says. “Except for one or two times, I’ve been forced to move. The thing people don’t realize, if you’re not prepared to move in the coaching profession, you die.”

Which isn’t in any coach’s playbook.

Des Moines Register sports columnist Marc Hansen can be reached at (515) 284-8534 or mahansen@dmreg.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/marcdmr.

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Category: Iowa Hawkeyes Football