Stan Drayton’s lesson-filled path to being Temple’s head football coach

Asked for a little tour of his resumé, Stan Drayton takes you through it, from childhood in Cleveland, off-field lessons learned playing for a Division III national champion, all the coaching stops on the way to his current big office at 10th and Diamond, home of Temple’s head football coach.

Drayton’s coaching run includes two national titles, both working for Urban Meyer at two powerhouse programs, plus a couple of entry-level stints in the NFL. You ask Drayton about the brightest coaching minds, and who and what helped him the most, he will steer the conversation in interesting directions, to a well-known former Temple assistant who gave him a key recommendation early in his career, to a pivotal season in Starkville, Miss. …

Wait, this little stop isn’t on his resumé: Two winter months in France?

After 14 assistant-coaching stops, Drayton didn’t walk into Temple with any naivete about the task at hand. He’s seen fine football coaches lose their jobs. He watched his own small-college offensive coordinator go on to become an NFL head coach. (Joe Philbin, once the Miami Dolphins head coach, now offensive line coach of the Dallas Cowboys.)

Drayton knows he’s selling both Temple and himself, and at first glance, he’s the right kind of salesman, more sure of himself than full of himself. He’s already ahead of the last guy, who wasn’t really a salesman at all, or the guy before him, who was a Salesman with a capital S.

Whether it works for Drayton, who knows? He has to start over, as the Matt Rhule years are now officially a distant memory. Just understand: In terms of a coach who gets the whole landscape, past the often insular world of college football, put Drayton down more in the Rhule category.

Drayton was a national champion himself before he was a coach, playing tailback for Allegheny College in 1990. Was there any false sense as he started coaching — hey, this stuff is easy? No, Drayton said, because the acclimation to college was not easy.

“Inner-city kid to a pretty rural town,” Drayton said. “Around kids who were coming from a totally different demographic than I was coming from.”

The football? Maybe that was the easy part.

“I realized then even though we were a good football team, if we didn’t have good leadership, that could have been a tough culture to really be a part of,” Drayton said, crediting both his head coach, Ken O’Keefe, who warned him how this was going to be different, and Allegheny’s veteran players, who proved to be welcoming after he got to the campus in Meadville, Pa., 40 miles south of Erie.

Even if the assimilation took some effort, Drayton had an upbringing that offered possibilities.

“My parents divorced when I was probably 4 or 5 years old,” Drayton said. “I lived with my mom, but every weekend I was with my dad. My mom lived in the city. My dad lived in the suburbs. So I had a little bit of a taste of this and that. I can’t honestly say I hung around the best people for me when I was in the city. And I kind of felt out of place when I was in the suburbs.”

His neighborhood, the East Side of Cleveland.

“I didn’t really start playing football until I was in the ninth grade — that was my first time putting on equipment,” Drayton said. “I come from a track family. We’ve got Olympic gold in our family.”

His father’s first cousin, Otis Drayton, was a sprinter at Villanova, and won a gold medal in the 4x100-meter relay in the 1964 Summer Olympics.

“Everybody was pushing me to run track,” Drayton said, and he did willingly, winning conference titles at Allegheny.

His dad ran track?

“My dad played football,” Drayton said. “My dad played semipro football. Never went to college, but he ended up playing for a team called Cadillac Music, which was a semipro team in Cleveland. He broke his leg really bad. He tried to deter me from football. So track was the first thing I was introduced to as a young man. I was fast.”

Again, be open to possibilities. Both his parents worked on that.

“I was a good student,” Drayton said. “I could make National Honor Society. … My parents did a great job — they tried to instill in me a big picture. They sent me to France for two months in the eighth grade. They wanted me to see there was something different than just Cleveland.”

As soon as he got off the plane … mission accomplished.

“I tried to reject the hell out of it,” Drayton said. “I don’t want to do that. I can barely make it in Cleveland Heights when I go see my dad — now you’re going to send me to France?”

The whole neighborhood chipped in for the expenses, he said, organized through the church.

“It was really an experience that changed my life,” Drayton said. “Both my parents got together and said this is what this kid needs, he needs to get out of the city.”

Two months in the winter.

“I skied in the French Alps,” Drayton said.

That’s officially different. This was a statewide French program. Drayton said he has a letter from President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on being selected. He spent time in Paris in addition to the Alps.

“I spent most of the time — I lived in the Castle Fountainbleau.”

You can’t make this up, and Drayton can’t forget. The Castle de Fountainbleau is outside Paris … Google it: “The medieval castle and subsequent palace served as a residence for the French monarchs from Louis VII to Napoleon III.”

“My French family was a German family who was military — the father was in charge of a corridor of the castle,” Drayton said. “We stayed in the corridor.”

The group of Ohio kids, maybe 15 of them, “all had our separate French families, spread around Paris.”

Drayton just happened to live in the castle. (He should really put that on his resumé.)

“It was the best thing for me, in hindsight,” Drayton said. “The people … they had a certain way of how they carried themselves that I was not accustomed to. Really, I have a tough time describing it. I don’t want to disrespect the French now. But they weren’t very nice, they weren’t very receiving.”

He wasn’t saying, he added, that Cleveland was full of compassion. But he knew everybody.

“I felt it from my French family, but outside of that, not necessarily,” Drayton said of feeling welcomed.

You could argue Drayton has spent his career being open to a bit of discomfort. A decade into his career, he spent three seasons with the Green Bay Packers, entry-level stuff, quality control, then some special-teams duties tacked on.

Drayton said he was thinking he wasn’t going to leave the NFL — “I’m liking this.”

Then Sylvester Croom, the Packers running back coach, took the Mississippi State head coaching job and offered Drayton a job as running backs coach. Croom told Drayton, “Listen, you can sit here and do what you’re doing for a few more years and maybe get a shot in five, or come down with me and continue to learn and grow.”

You ask Drayton about influences, Croom is way high on the list.

“A person of integrity, high integrity,” Drayton said. “And really my first example of an African American coach who was breaking barriers. Had been an offensive coordinator for the Detroit Lions at one time. Gets to be the first African American [head] coach in the SEC.”

Croom’s lessons had a direct bearing on Drayton’s path.

“He was constantly telling me what it is that we need to do as African-American coaches to be significant in this profession,” Drayton said. “Never allowing anyone to hold us to a low standard. Often enough, especially in college football, the African American coach — assistant coaches — you’re looked at as the recruiter. Let’s go get kids. And then, once they are done with the recruiting process, they have to be the one to keep everybody in check. Be the connector piece. Coach Croom always forced the issue — ‘No, learn quarterback play. Learn the whole system.’ He challenged me.”

Keeping the learning curve high was important, Drayton said.

“It wasn’t necessarily always about the X’s and O’s,” Drayton said. “I had an opportunity to see him in a challenging situation. I wanted to see him manage that.”

Asked about the smartest coaches in terms of who has X-and-O computer chips in their brains, Drayton said, “Let me work through the chain.” He started with a familiar name to longtime local football fans: “Dave Clawson,” Drayton said, mentioning Wake Forest’s head coach, who was Villanova’s offensive coordinator when Drayton first ran into him in 1996.

“One of the sharpest minds I’ve been around,” Drayton said of Clawson, also Tennessee’s offensive coordinator for a (tough) season when Drayton joined him in 2008. “He gave me my first opportunity to be a scholarship recruiting coach, at Villanova. He saw something in me, through Ed Foley.”

There’s a small-world connection. Foley, now on Matt Rhule’s Carolina Panthers staff, was at Penn long before he was a longtime Temple assistant and interim head coach during a couple of the coaching transitions. Drayton had been hired at Penn in 1995 after a season at Allegheny and a season at Eastern Michigan. Foley and Clawson were close.

“Ed called Dave Clawson and said, ‘Hey, this kid might be ready,’” Drayton said, remembering meeting up with Clawson at the Palestra for a Big 5 basketball game, a pretty memorable introductory setting. Drayton thinks it might have been a Penn-St. Joseph’s game. “The next day, there was an interview.”

Mark Ferrante, now Villanova’s head coach, also was impressed with Drayton from meeting him on the recruiting trail. He was pushing Drayton to Clawson and head coach Andy Talley. They’ve stayed close ever since.

“Best young coach we’ve ever had on staff,” Ferrante said, in terms of polish and maturity.

For Drayton, that was just the start. Another big X-and-O brain he spent time with later on?

“Tom Herman,” Drayton said of the man he worked for when Herman was Ohio State’s offensive coordinator and again when Herman was head coach at Texas. “Tom Herman is really a dynamic play caller. You don’t think he’s working hard at the game, but the game just comes really easy to him. As a coordinator, just the instincts, the timing of which play he calls, and having the ability to dissect defenses. If there was a new coverage that was kind of buzzing around the NFL and matriculated down to college football, he had already had it figured out and picked out the weaknesses and dissected things at a level that was really impressive.”

» READ MORE: Temple looks to surpass 2.5 win total as it opens season with Duke

How does Drayton put his arms around his time with Urban Meyer, at Florida (part of 2006 national title staff) and Ohio State (part of 2014 national title staff)?

“You work for Urban, you’re going to work your [butt] off,” Drayton said. “You’re going to learn a lot of football. You’re going to be held accountable for everything you do. He’s going to manage everything you do. You’re going to be part of a program that is fully aligned. You step outside of what he’s putting in front of us as a staff and a culture, you’re going to be exposed.”

Drayton could handle that. He’d had some of that even at Villanova. Drayton was the guy who saw Brian Westbrook dunk a basketball as a high school senior and decided he wanted him to play football for Villanova even though Westbrook had missed his senior football season to injury.

Talley was blunt, Drayton said, saying in front of all the other coaches, “Are you willing to put your job on the table for Brian Westbrook?”

“I’m like, ‘Man, this thing got really deep real quick here. But yes, I am.’ It was the first time I stepped out on faith like that as a coach.”

Westbrook was a game-changer, including for the Eagles. Drayton’s local connections go further, and back to Temple. Steve Addazio was Temple’s head coach just before Rhule. What was working with Addazio like back in the day? They were together on Meyer’s Florida staff.

“Addazio’s an Italian football coach, man,” Drayton said. “What I mean by that, he rides his emotions and wears ‘em on his sleeve every single day. Probably one of the most motivating coaches I’ve ever been around. … It is fourth-and-1 with him in every conversation you have with him.”

Drayton added, “A very thorough offensive line coach. He just pulls it out of those guys.”

Drayton’s own Philly stops were early but important, working under Al Bagnoli, (“Very professional, very, very thorough”) then Talley (“A personality, fun to be around … would bridge the gap of real life to football.”).

Being back, of course, the memories flood in. Drayton talked about taking his own children to the rowhouse where he and his wife lived in West Philadelphia when he worked at Penn, then going to Villanova — “I worked right underneath the stadium.” Then there was an apartment in King of Prussia, home during the Villanova years.

The resumé tour is over. The hard work of rebuilding Temple football has begun. Stan Drayton’s era starts Friday night at Duke, two teams picked last in their respective leagues, the AAC and the ACC.

If Drayton eventually pulls off a big rebuild, he’ll earn a nice vacation.

Maybe Paris in the springtime? Nah, that would be too comfortable.