Bryan Nardo Follow-Up: "You Better Be a Good Teacher"

STILLWATER – You can see the complete interview with new Oklahoma State defensive coordinator Bryan Nardo at OSU Max. Senior associate athletic director Kevin Klintworth did the questions and OSU Max general manager Jason Carroll post produced the production. It is an excellent introduction for Oklahoma State football fans to the new man in charge of the Pokes defense. 

OSU Max

Klintworth interviews Nardo on OSU Max.

There is not a ton of X-and-O’s but more philosophy and history of how a young man from Ohio that did not play college football but loved the game so much as a youngster and a high school player that he found a way to continue to be a part, coach, and make football his career. He was a student coach and graduate assistant at Ohio University and just kept moving up from there. 

Missouri S&T University moved him to a Division II powerhouse at Emporia State and then on to Youngstown State before goving back to being a defensive coordinator at Division II Gannon University in the Pennsylvania College Athletic Conference. His defenses excelled at a high level and he was an eager student of the game that devoured defensive concepts like the one Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy was admiring at Big 12 rival Iowa State. 

In the interview Klintworth asks Nardo to lead him through his career, why he ended up coaching defense, how his entire family became football coaches, coaching defense at Emporia State with his brother eventually joining him there as the offensive coordinator. Plenty of interesting stories, but substance too.

Robert Allen - Pokes Report

Nardo teaching Lyrik Rawls (middle) and Kendal Daniels.

Like the advice Nardo said he got at his first job after leaving Ohio University from his boss, the head coach at Missouri S&T.

“David Brown told me, ‘if a kid can’t spell C-A-T and you yell at him, then he still can’t spell cat and you had better learn to be a good teacher,’” Nardo relayed in the interview as something that a coach told him and it stuck with him. He (Brown) wasn’t a yeller and he wasn’t a cusser, so I developed a lot of that from him.”

He also took the advice to heart and became not just a coach, but a coach that could teach and find ways to teach all kinds of players. 

“I remember getting mad at my first job and everybody gets mad,” Nardo said of the frustration when a player makes a mistake in a drill or blows an assignment on a play. “I was thinking why doesn’t he do this or do this right? David (Coach Brown) said, ‘you’d better teach him.’ You have to look in the mirror and make sure you’re teaching it the right way.”

That shows when I’ve watched Coach Nardo instructing early on at Oklahoma State. In the offseason on the Tuesday walk-thrus or the Wednesday drills before the coaches have to leave when the footballs come out for seven-on-seven. Nardo takes his time, teaches it completely, then works back over it again. Time is precious, but time spent without making the material understood is wasted. You take the time it needs to get the points across.

Nardo is a good student too. He explained in the video to Klintworth and the camera and you the audience that at Emporia State despite loads of success they lost a lot of good players and discovered they needed to make a change on defense. That conference, the Midwest Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the MIAA, is known as the SEC of Division II. Northeast Missouri was the power and had won multiple NCAA Division II Championships.  He and his boss, Emporia head coach Garin Higgins agreed they needed to change defenses.

Emporia State University

Nardo as defensive coordinator at Emporia State.

“I remember being at my wife’s family’s house over Christmas (2017) downloading films of people, loading it on Hudl, breaking it down, looking at different people and seeing how I could fit it up,” explained Nardo. “We switched to a three-man front in 2018 because we needed to do something different. The other reason was we couldn’t beat Northeast Missouri, even in the years we were good. We were a 4-3 (defense), they were a 4-3. They knew what we were doing and how to beat it. They had better players. They had players at positions that we couldn’t cover up. How can we be different from them in order to separate ourselves.”

What does that mean. To me it means that Nardo is a coach that has tasted a lot of success, but he has also been there at the point where you can keep doing what you are doing. You can be stubborn and repeat what you are doing and have done. Then again, you can be bold enough to change and take a step forward. Change and get better, it is a valuable lesson in football and life.