Predator56
Senior Member
OrlandoSentinel.com
College football UCF football George O'Leary
Coming under scrutiny for pushing his players is nothing new for UCF Coach O'Leary
Scrutiny over pushing his players isn't new for coach
Josh Robbins
Sentinel Staff Writer
September 24, 2008
George O'Leary recently described his coaching style as "tough, but fair."
To be sure, the approach has helped O'Leary to win football games and coaching awards during his 40-year career. But it has also left him with a list of former players who claim he pushed them much too hard.
That group includes former Georgia Tech offensive lineman Zach Piller, who said O'Leary abandoned him after he suffered serious injuries in a 1995 bar fight.
And offensive lineman Dustin Vaitekunas, who claimed O'Leary ordered teammates to tackle him just because he missed blocks during a Yellow Jackets practice in 2000.
And there's former UCF defensive end DaQuwan McNealy.
McNealy, a Mount Dora resident, said his football career ended during an offseason workout session 20 months ago, with O'Leary standing over him just inches away, barking orders for him to do reps on a leg-press machine.
"I never did this much weight before," McNealy remembered telling O'Leary, but McNealy said O'Leary told him to try to press the weight anyway.
So McNealy, then an 18-year-old redshirt freshman, sat down on the machine, his back angled toward the ground. He recalls O'Leary above him, yelling, "Push the weight! Push the weight!"
McNealy tried -- and then blacked out. The weight crashed down and pushed McNealy's knees into his chest. "I heard guys saying that they saw me turn blue," McNealy said. "They said they heard the air just go out of me."
The next thing McNealy could recall, he was lying down on a bench, and O'Leary was holding his hand, asking McNealy to squeeze his fingers.
That, McNealy said, was one of his last encounters with O'Leary. McNealy spent the next four days at a hospital, and he said doctors eventually diagnosed him with high blood pressure, a leaking heart valve and vasovagal syncope, a condition that causes fainting.
Other former O'Leary players said O'Leary was tough on them, too.
Over the last several months, the Orlando Sentinel spoke with nearly 30 people who played for O'Leary at Syracuse, Georgia Tech or UCF, and while many of them called him the best coach they ever had -- a brilliant tactician who can be kind and welcoming behind closed doors -- most of the former players acknowledge that O'Leary drives his players hard.
"Some people can't handle the way he coaches and some people can," said Kareem Reid, who played defensive end at UCF for O'Leary in 2005 and 2006.
"He's two different guys. On the field, he's tough as nails. He'll curse you out in a second if you're doing the wrong thing and not giving effort. If you don't give effort, you're going to get it. Go talk to him in his office [and he's] very easy to talk to and understanding."
A polarizing figure
During his coaching career, O'Leary has been celebrated, and he's been condemned.
Fans revered him after he led Georgia Tech to the 1998 Atlantic Coast Conference co-championship and after he guided UCF to last year's Conference USA title, the school's first conference championship in football.
Others mocked him in late 2001 when he accepted the head-coaching position at Notre Dame and resigned days later because he had falsified some credentials on his r�sum�.
Now, O'Leary, a 62-year-old father of four with neatly parted white hair and a face reddened and arms freckled from years in the sun, faces one of his toughest tests of all: the fallout from the death of freshman wide receiver Ereck Plancher.
Plancher collapsed and died following a strength-and-conditioning workout on March 18, and Plancher's parents have told state and school officials that they intend to file a wrongful-death suit against the university.
His death undoubtedly stands as the low point in O'Leary's 40 years as a football coach -- a career that began at Central Islip (N.Y.) Senior High School in 1968 and has included two assistant-coaching jobs in the NFL.
"Nothing in my 40 years of coaching experience prepared me for the emotions of that day," O'Leary wrote in a letter to the Sentinel that was published on July 27.
O'Leary declined to be interviewed for this article.
"I just want to deal with the football program," he told a Sentinel reporter on Aug. 26. "I don't want to talk about myself. I think there's been enough written about me."
On Sept. 6, the Sentinel gave a letter to Joe Hornstein, UCF's associate athletic director for communications and marketing. The letter listed specific anecdotes culled from interviews with former players and offered O'Leary a chance to respond.
In an e-mail message, Hornstein said O'Leary and school officials would not comment.
Hornstein wrote: "I understand that you can and will find detractors over a lengthy 40-year coaching tenure willing to speak negatively, but such would be the case for any college football coach or elected official or business leader."
UCF President John Hitt and Athletic Director Keith Tribble have expressed their support for O'Leary in recent months, but after Saturday's 34-7 drubbing at the hands of Boston College, fans' support may be waning. As of Tuesday afternoon, an informal poll of 69 fans at UCFSports.com showed that fans are roughly split on whether O'Leary should be fired.
Also, more than 600 people -- many of them from Plancher's hometown of Naples -- have formed a Facebook group called "Fire George O'Leary for Ereck."
Ken Celaj, a former offensive lineman who played for O'Leary at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 1997, doesn't think O'Leary should lose his job.
Celaj said he would gladly have his young son play football for O'Leary one day and said of O'Leary, "If there was a war, that's the person that I would want to lead me in my war."
Celaj remembered a summer day in 1997 when O'Leary had all of Georgia Tech's seniors over to his home.
As they looked over the water, the players and their coach relaxed together.
"You learned that he was a human being," Celaj said. "He has feelings. He does care for people. Because when he's a coach, he's a hard-Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----. Whoever knows him knows that."
But Celaj also acknowledged that he often clashed with O'Leary.
One of Celaj's last practices isn't a fond memory. Just before Georgia Tech left Atlanta for the 1997 Carquest Bowl -- Tech's first bowl game in six years -- Celaj wasn't practicing well.
"I had a bad back," Celaj told the Sentinel recently. "He put me in the middle of a circle, and he had people just come at me. You know, boom!"
Celaj remembers what he was thinking as 10 guys took turns slamming into him: "If that makes you feel better, if you could sleep better at night knowing that you did that, Coach, if that's going to make me a better player, then the Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ---- with it. Bring it on."
Celaj, a team captain in 1997, was suspended from the bowl game because he committed an unspecified violation of team rules after the team arrived in South Florida.
Highs and lows at UCF
The Knights went 0-11 under O'Leary during his first season in 2004. They're 23-19 since, making two bowl appearances in the last three years.
But the team hasn't posted winning records in consecutive seasons under O'Leary. It has also struggled against schools from bigger conferences. Including the recent loss to Boston College, the Knights are 1-13 since 2004 against teams from conferences tied directly into the Bowl Championship Series. O'Leary is 0-4 against rival South Florida, and the team is 1-2 this year and struggling on offense -- all contributing to the fan unrest.
The program has improved in the classroom. According to school officials, last fall the team posted its highest in-season grade-point average in program history, with 44 Knights having at least a 3.0 GPA. In addition, 39 UCF football players made Conference USA's 2007-08 Commissioner's Honor Roll -- more than any other school in the conference.
"I love the guy," said former NFL player Tim Green, who played at Syracuse when O'Leary was an assistant coach there in the early to mid-1980s.
"I wish my own kids could have the experience of playing for George. . . . He understands the technical aspects of almost every position there is. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge about the game. He's as good as a coach can be."
Piller and Vaitekunas, the two former Georgia Tech offensive linemen, would disagree.
On April 27, 1995, Piller went out drinking with teammates when he got into a fight and was thrown through a glass window.
His right leg required hundreds of stitches.
Piller said that Tech coaches were unsympathetic and questioned his manhood. "He didn't give two [expletive] about me," Piller recently told the Sentinel.
On Sept. 25, 2000, Vaitekunas kept missing blocks during a practice.
O'Leary told four teammates to rush Vaitekunas at full speed from 6 yards away so Vaitekunas could see what it felt like to be a quarterback under a heavy pass rush. Two of the players tackled him, and he lay on the ground for several minutes afterward.
"I wanted to show what a speed rush looks like from the quarterback's standpoint," O'Leary said that season, according to The Associated Press. "I didn't expect those guys to tackle him. That was my mistake. I should have communicated better. But we never tackle the quarterback in practice. I was surprised it happened.
"I think the whole thing is getting blown out of proportion," he continued. "I coach hard, but I coach fair."
Vaitekunas quit the team after that and never played football again.
The criticism O'Leary has faced in recent months has upset former UCF defensive tackle Emeka Okammor, who described O'Leary as "tough on the outside, but real caring on the inside."
When Okammor told O'Leary that he wanted to try to sign with an NFL team as a free agent, he remembered that O'Leary asked his own agent to call some teams on Okammor's behalf.
"Anytime I've ever asked for anything from Coach, he's always given it to me," Okammor said. "It's hard for people to understand that because whenever he's outside his office, he's tough. He can't let players run over him."
In recent months, it's been difficult to speak to current UCF players about O'Leary. The UCF Athletic Association's policies after a catastrophic incident instructs coaches to tell their players not to discuss the episode, and when the Sentinel attempted to reach 15 current players over the summer via phone, none of them responded to messages.
Administration backs coach
Hitt and Tribble have tied UCF's football future to O'Leary. In 2006, O'Leary agreed to a 10-year contract extension that paid $1 million a year, with annual increases of 5 percent. The contract also includes incentive clauses based on attendance and on team performance on the field and in the classroom.
"I have the utmost confidence in Coach O'Leary," Tribble told the Sentinel in June. "I never doubted him in one way, shape or form."
The school has given O'Leary the resources to produce a winner. During his tenure, it has built an indoor practice facility and the school's first on-campus football stadium. Those new facilities may help UCF one day gain entry into a more lucrative conference.
Yet, it recent months, his frustrations have boiled over.
O'Leary spent several months boycotting the Sentinel after its April 11 report in which it detailed four players' anonymous accounts of the day Plancher died. He also said portions of the Sentinel's reporting were inaccurate, though he never offered specifics.
O'Leary has since granted access to the Sentinel.
During the Conference USA media days in Memphis, O'Leary made fun of a Hattiesburg American reporter, imitating the reporter's Southern accent and calling him "Gomer Pyle."
After UCF's first win of the 2008 season, a 17-0 victory over South Carolina State on Aug. 30, O'Leary snapped at a writer for the school newspaper at the postgame news conference.
McNealy, 20, spent the day of that game in his hometown of Mount Dora. He's no longer a college student and said he can't play football anymore.
He said that when Plancher died, several of his former teammates called him and told him that Plancher's collapse was eerily similar to his own.
Plancher collapsed and died after a workout that featured 75 minutes of weightlifting, 10 minutes of stretching, 20 minutes of agility drills and two sprints.
Four players who were there and spoke to the Sentinel said, by the end, Plancher was squinting as if he was being blinded by the sun and was making a low moaning noise as he breathed. Plancher fell during the final sprints, and O'Leary saw Plancher get up.
According to the four players, O'Leary singled Plancher out. They recalled O'Leary saying, "That's a bunch of [expletive] out of you, son."
O'Leary denied that claim, but he did acknowledge telling people around him, "He's better than that."
Soon, Plancher dropped to one knee. O'Leary said he didn't see Plancher collapse, but once he saw a trainer talking to Plancher, O'Leary asked Plancher if he had eaten breakfast.
O'Leary knelt over Plancher, and as the 19-year-old freshman from Naples drifted out of consciousness, O'Leary spoke to him.
O'Leary said he gripped Plancher's hand and said, "Squeeze my hand! Squeeze my hand!"
College football UCF football George O'Leary
Coming under scrutiny for pushing his players is nothing new for UCF Coach O'Leary
Scrutiny over pushing his players isn't new for coach
Josh Robbins
Sentinel Staff Writer
September 24, 2008
George O'Leary recently described his coaching style as "tough, but fair."
To be sure, the approach has helped O'Leary to win football games and coaching awards during his 40-year career. But it has also left him with a list of former players who claim he pushed them much too hard.
That group includes former Georgia Tech offensive lineman Zach Piller, who said O'Leary abandoned him after he suffered serious injuries in a 1995 bar fight.
And offensive lineman Dustin Vaitekunas, who claimed O'Leary ordered teammates to tackle him just because he missed blocks during a Yellow Jackets practice in 2000.
And there's former UCF defensive end DaQuwan McNealy.
McNealy, a Mount Dora resident, said his football career ended during an offseason workout session 20 months ago, with O'Leary standing over him just inches away, barking orders for him to do reps on a leg-press machine.
"I never did this much weight before," McNealy remembered telling O'Leary, but McNealy said O'Leary told him to try to press the weight anyway.
So McNealy, then an 18-year-old redshirt freshman, sat down on the machine, his back angled toward the ground. He recalls O'Leary above him, yelling, "Push the weight! Push the weight!"
McNealy tried -- and then blacked out. The weight crashed down and pushed McNealy's knees into his chest. "I heard guys saying that they saw me turn blue," McNealy said. "They said they heard the air just go out of me."
The next thing McNealy could recall, he was lying down on a bench, and O'Leary was holding his hand, asking McNealy to squeeze his fingers.
That, McNealy said, was one of his last encounters with O'Leary. McNealy spent the next four days at a hospital, and he said doctors eventually diagnosed him with high blood pressure, a leaking heart valve and vasovagal syncope, a condition that causes fainting.
Other former O'Leary players said O'Leary was tough on them, too.
Over the last several months, the Orlando Sentinel spoke with nearly 30 people who played for O'Leary at Syracuse, Georgia Tech or UCF, and while many of them called him the best coach they ever had -- a brilliant tactician who can be kind and welcoming behind closed doors -- most of the former players acknowledge that O'Leary drives his players hard.
"Some people can't handle the way he coaches and some people can," said Kareem Reid, who played defensive end at UCF for O'Leary in 2005 and 2006.
"He's two different guys. On the field, he's tough as nails. He'll curse you out in a second if you're doing the wrong thing and not giving effort. If you don't give effort, you're going to get it. Go talk to him in his office [and he's] very easy to talk to and understanding."
A polarizing figure
During his coaching career, O'Leary has been celebrated, and he's been condemned.
Fans revered him after he led Georgia Tech to the 1998 Atlantic Coast Conference co-championship and after he guided UCF to last year's Conference USA title, the school's first conference championship in football.
Others mocked him in late 2001 when he accepted the head-coaching position at Notre Dame and resigned days later because he had falsified some credentials on his r�sum�.
Now, O'Leary, a 62-year-old father of four with neatly parted white hair and a face reddened and arms freckled from years in the sun, faces one of his toughest tests of all: the fallout from the death of freshman wide receiver Ereck Plancher.
Plancher collapsed and died following a strength-and-conditioning workout on March 18, and Plancher's parents have told state and school officials that they intend to file a wrongful-death suit against the university.
His death undoubtedly stands as the low point in O'Leary's 40 years as a football coach -- a career that began at Central Islip (N.Y.) Senior High School in 1968 and has included two assistant-coaching jobs in the NFL.
"Nothing in my 40 years of coaching experience prepared me for the emotions of that day," O'Leary wrote in a letter to the Sentinel that was published on July 27.
O'Leary declined to be interviewed for this article.
"I just want to deal with the football program," he told a Sentinel reporter on Aug. 26. "I don't want to talk about myself. I think there's been enough written about me."
On Sept. 6, the Sentinel gave a letter to Joe Hornstein, UCF's associate athletic director for communications and marketing. The letter listed specific anecdotes culled from interviews with former players and offered O'Leary a chance to respond.
In an e-mail message, Hornstein said O'Leary and school officials would not comment.
Hornstein wrote: "I understand that you can and will find detractors over a lengthy 40-year coaching tenure willing to speak negatively, but such would be the case for any college football coach or elected official or business leader."
UCF President John Hitt and Athletic Director Keith Tribble have expressed their support for O'Leary in recent months, but after Saturday's 34-7 drubbing at the hands of Boston College, fans' support may be waning. As of Tuesday afternoon, an informal poll of 69 fans at UCFSports.com showed that fans are roughly split on whether O'Leary should be fired.
Also, more than 600 people -- many of them from Plancher's hometown of Naples -- have formed a Facebook group called "Fire George O'Leary for Ereck."
Ken Celaj, a former offensive lineman who played for O'Leary at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 1997, doesn't think O'Leary should lose his job.
Celaj said he would gladly have his young son play football for O'Leary one day and said of O'Leary, "If there was a war, that's the person that I would want to lead me in my war."
Celaj remembered a summer day in 1997 when O'Leary had all of Georgia Tech's seniors over to his home.
As they looked over the water, the players and their coach relaxed together.
"You learned that he was a human being," Celaj said. "He has feelings. He does care for people. Because when he's a coach, he's a hard-Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----. Whoever knows him knows that."
But Celaj also acknowledged that he often clashed with O'Leary.
One of Celaj's last practices isn't a fond memory. Just before Georgia Tech left Atlanta for the 1997 Carquest Bowl -- Tech's first bowl game in six years -- Celaj wasn't practicing well.
"I had a bad back," Celaj told the Sentinel recently. "He put me in the middle of a circle, and he had people just come at me. You know, boom!"
Celaj remembers what he was thinking as 10 guys took turns slamming into him: "If that makes you feel better, if you could sleep better at night knowing that you did that, Coach, if that's going to make me a better player, then the Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ---- with it. Bring it on."
Celaj, a team captain in 1997, was suspended from the bowl game because he committed an unspecified violation of team rules after the team arrived in South Florida.
Highs and lows at UCF
The Knights went 0-11 under O'Leary during his first season in 2004. They're 23-19 since, making two bowl appearances in the last three years.
But the team hasn't posted winning records in consecutive seasons under O'Leary. It has also struggled against schools from bigger conferences. Including the recent loss to Boston College, the Knights are 1-13 since 2004 against teams from conferences tied directly into the Bowl Championship Series. O'Leary is 0-4 against rival South Florida, and the team is 1-2 this year and struggling on offense -- all contributing to the fan unrest.
The program has improved in the classroom. According to school officials, last fall the team posted its highest in-season grade-point average in program history, with 44 Knights having at least a 3.0 GPA. In addition, 39 UCF football players made Conference USA's 2007-08 Commissioner's Honor Roll -- more than any other school in the conference.
"I love the guy," said former NFL player Tim Green, who played at Syracuse when O'Leary was an assistant coach there in the early to mid-1980s.
"I wish my own kids could have the experience of playing for George. . . . He understands the technical aspects of almost every position there is. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge about the game. He's as good as a coach can be."
Piller and Vaitekunas, the two former Georgia Tech offensive linemen, would disagree.
On April 27, 1995, Piller went out drinking with teammates when he got into a fight and was thrown through a glass window.
His right leg required hundreds of stitches.
Piller said that Tech coaches were unsympathetic and questioned his manhood. "He didn't give two [expletive] about me," Piller recently told the Sentinel.
On Sept. 25, 2000, Vaitekunas kept missing blocks during a practice.
O'Leary told four teammates to rush Vaitekunas at full speed from 6 yards away so Vaitekunas could see what it felt like to be a quarterback under a heavy pass rush. Two of the players tackled him, and he lay on the ground for several minutes afterward.
"I wanted to show what a speed rush looks like from the quarterback's standpoint," O'Leary said that season, according to The Associated Press. "I didn't expect those guys to tackle him. That was my mistake. I should have communicated better. But we never tackle the quarterback in practice. I was surprised it happened.
"I think the whole thing is getting blown out of proportion," he continued. "I coach hard, but I coach fair."
Vaitekunas quit the team after that and never played football again.
The criticism O'Leary has faced in recent months has upset former UCF defensive tackle Emeka Okammor, who described O'Leary as "tough on the outside, but real caring on the inside."
When Okammor told O'Leary that he wanted to try to sign with an NFL team as a free agent, he remembered that O'Leary asked his own agent to call some teams on Okammor's behalf.
"Anytime I've ever asked for anything from Coach, he's always given it to me," Okammor said. "It's hard for people to understand that because whenever he's outside his office, he's tough. He can't let players run over him."
In recent months, it's been difficult to speak to current UCF players about O'Leary. The UCF Athletic Association's policies after a catastrophic incident instructs coaches to tell their players not to discuss the episode, and when the Sentinel attempted to reach 15 current players over the summer via phone, none of them responded to messages.
Administration backs coach
Hitt and Tribble have tied UCF's football future to O'Leary. In 2006, O'Leary agreed to a 10-year contract extension that paid $1 million a year, with annual increases of 5 percent. The contract also includes incentive clauses based on attendance and on team performance on the field and in the classroom.
"I have the utmost confidence in Coach O'Leary," Tribble told the Sentinel in June. "I never doubted him in one way, shape or form."
The school has given O'Leary the resources to produce a winner. During his tenure, it has built an indoor practice facility and the school's first on-campus football stadium. Those new facilities may help UCF one day gain entry into a more lucrative conference.
Yet, it recent months, his frustrations have boiled over.
O'Leary spent several months boycotting the Sentinel after its April 11 report in which it detailed four players' anonymous accounts of the day Plancher died. He also said portions of the Sentinel's reporting were inaccurate, though he never offered specifics.
O'Leary has since granted access to the Sentinel.
During the Conference USA media days in Memphis, O'Leary made fun of a Hattiesburg American reporter, imitating the reporter's Southern accent and calling him "Gomer Pyle."
After UCF's first win of the 2008 season, a 17-0 victory over South Carolina State on Aug. 30, O'Leary snapped at a writer for the school newspaper at the postgame news conference.
McNealy, 20, spent the day of that game in his hometown of Mount Dora. He's no longer a college student and said he can't play football anymore.
He said that when Plancher died, several of his former teammates called him and told him that Plancher's collapse was eerily similar to his own.
Plancher collapsed and died after a workout that featured 75 minutes of weightlifting, 10 minutes of stretching, 20 minutes of agility drills and two sprints.
Four players who were there and spoke to the Sentinel said, by the end, Plancher was squinting as if he was being blinded by the sun and was making a low moaning noise as he breathed. Plancher fell during the final sprints, and O'Leary saw Plancher get up.
According to the four players, O'Leary singled Plancher out. They recalled O'Leary saying, "That's a bunch of [expletive] out of you, son."
O'Leary denied that claim, but he did acknowledge telling people around him, "He's better than that."
Soon, Plancher dropped to one knee. O'Leary said he didn't see Plancher collapse, but once he saw a trainer talking to Plancher, O'Leary asked Plancher if he had eaten breakfast.
O'Leary knelt over Plancher, and as the 19-year-old freshman from Naples drifted out of consciousness, O'Leary spoke to him.
O'Leary said he gripped Plancher's hand and said, "Squeeze my hand! Squeeze my hand!"
