Penn State Football: Huff Hopes Road Trip to NFL Teams Pays Special Dividends

Pittsburgh and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and Detroit.

It was a special road trip this summer for Charles Huff and his sidekick, Sam Williams.

Special – as in special teams.

Huff, the Nittany Lions’ special teams coordinator and running backs coach, and his new assistant, Sam Williams, this off-season climbed into a black Chevy Tahoe – with Penn State plates – and hit five NFL OTAs in succession.

More often than not, Huff rode shotgun. At the wheel, Williams played the Johnny Cash role – i.e., “I’ve been everywhere, man.”

It was fact-finding tour for the two Penn State coaches who were hoping to cash in. And the fact of the matter, Penn State was anything but special on special teams in 2014. Outside of the foot of Sam Ficken, the Nittany Lions fared poorly in that phase of the game – 81st in punt returns, 60th in kickoff returns and 106th in net punting.

That’s why Huff and Williams, hired in the off-season as a special teams assistant charged with recruiting quality control, took to the highway. They were driven to pick the brains of some NFL special teams coordinators.

“Sam and I had a lot of time together in the car. We’d get in the car, drive three or four hours, turn the music on and talk special teams and football,” Huff said last week. “We’d talk about how you get so many ideas and they’re all really great that you really have to trim down what you’re going to actually use.”

ON THE ROAD

Williams came to Penn State from Rutgers. But he worked on Penn State head coach James Franklin’s staff at Vanderbilt in 2012, as well as several years prior to that at his alma mater, Shepard College in West Virginia. He rejoined Franklin’s staff in time to ride shotgun with Huff over the summer.

For his part, Huff worked with Franklin at both Maryland and Vandy, although he did spend the 2012 season with the Buffalo Bills in the NFL and the 2013 season with Western Michigan (where he was on staff with former Penn State offensive line coach Bill Kenney).

When you’re planning to teach new concepts to fairly new players – and when the old way wasn’t too successful — less sometimes can be more. Huff said he and Williams were like kids in a candy store. Or something like that.

“You don’t want to come back and completely cloud the mind of the players by throwing away all the old ideas,” Huff said. “So you build a little library of ideas and maybe use a new idea down the road. We have to piece together what fits us now. It’s like a kid going into a toy store – you have everything in there for an hour, but you can only take 15 pieces with you when you leave. You’re going to play with everything while you can.”

It wasn’t all fun games for the pair of coaches. In addition to the hundreds of miles  they put on a PSU fleet car while seeing OTAs, the two were looking for a fundamental change in Penn State’s kicking and return games.

 “We were look at what drills the NFL teams are doing to improve the fundamentals,” Huff said. “If you are going to ask the players to produce, you have to put them in a position to succeed, by breaking it all down – whole, part, whole – in drills. What tools can we give our players to better perform their tasks? We wanted to see what drills they were putting their players through — many of them were rookies or guys who may not make the team. So those players did drills in which their skills could be evaluated. And they put their veteran players through drills to improve their production.”

HARD KNOCKS

Over the summer, Huff also flew to New Orleans for a special teams coordinator session, hosted by the Saints. And Penn State brought in Mike Westhoff, a grizzled NFL special teams coordinator for two decades, most notably as a colorful and salty character during HBO’s “Hard Knocks” coverage of New York Jets in 2010.

“Mike has some family members who are connected to Penn State, so it was good for him to come up and spend some time with us,” Huff said. “He looked at our philosophy as a whole, not in terms of having us do this drill or run this drill. I asked him to evaluate me and my teaching skills – what I was saying, exactly what I was asking the players to do and was I doing it in a clear way.

“In his 20-plus years, Mike’s dealt with all kinds of players and learning styles. I knew him from when I coached with the Bills. He gave us everything, from his philosophy on special teams to what he did on field goals to what he said to his kickers the day before a game.”

Penn State’s new program consultant, former NFL head coach Jim Haslett, also gave Huff some input. In addition, Huff’s special teams were also the focus of some vigorous self-scouting by the Penn State coaching staff.

“As we evaluate the players, we ask other coaches and coaches on the staff to evaluate us,” Huff said. “One of the things Jim was able to do was look at our philosophy on special teams. Not running a specific play, but overall what are some the things we can improve on? Sometimes when you are inside the program you get blinded – the old adage, ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees. ‘You may think it looks one way from the inside, but from the outside you looks completely different. That has helped us get better tremendously.”

In New Orleans, Huff attended a two-day clinic put on by Saints special teams coordinator Greg McMahon, who has been with the NFL for a decade. Coaches from throughout college football also attended the session.

“Being around 15 other college special teams coordinators you hear a lot of opinions,” Huff said. “There were guys from the West Coast, from the SEC and the ACC. Some things we see every week they don’t see, and vice versa. We were able to bounce some ideas off of each other – how are you using time in practice, how are you using times in meetings, what are your priorities?”

For the Nittany Lions, recruiting scholarship kickers has been a main goal. Williams’ presence has helped Penn State get verbal commitments from the nation’s top high school place-kicker (Quinn Nordin, from Michigan) and top punter (Blake Gillikin, from Georgia).

Huff can’t mention the recruits by name until they officially signed in February, but he did say getting the best at those two spots was a Penn State priority by Franklin. “As the special teams coordinator, it’s always exciting when you can go out and recruit some of the top players in the country,” Huff said. “Coach Franklin is probably the best coach in the country in investing in special teams.”

OVERDRIVE

Experience and increased depth should help the Nittany Lions’ special teams this season.

“The players understand it better now and are able to give a little input, because they know what we’re trying to accomplish,” Huff said. “Last year, they had kind of a tunnel vision. Now their blinders are coming off, they can see a little more, they can say, ‘Hey, coach we’re comfortable doing this or did you mean that or what if this happened.’

“Last year we had really good players and those guys played extremely hard. This year we just have more of them. Last year, if someone got nicked and we had to bring in someone new, it was like robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

After – and maybe thanks to — a summer hitting the roads, Huff is now planning on shifting gears.

“Now,” he said, “we have some depth. We have some options.”