CONWAY, S.C. -- The new boss opens the door of his office, where the walls are still bare, and walks into the adjacent conference room. When he sits at the head of the table, his employees get quiet. Then Joe Moglia begins talking about how his new team will sell their new product.
This is a familiar scene for Moglia, the 61-year-old Fortune 500 CEO-turned-football coach: Uniting a team under a big-picture vision while obsessing over details. Details like getting Equal instead of Splenda for the coffee room. Or using a bigger font for the list of recruits. Or that it's of utmost importance to pronounce a recruit's name correctly -- to know Octavius goes by "Tae" -- because that makes a kid feel special.
But at this coaches' meeting just weeks before signing day, it's not Moglia's obsessing over small details that defines him. Instead, it's the inspirational qualities we all want in our football coaches that captures the room.
Moglia starts riffing to his staff on what to say during a meeting with a recruit, and it's clear he's selling more than football.
"'You think you may have an opportunity to play in the NFL?'" Moglia says. "'We very well could help you with that, but that's not what we're about. Because at some point in time, your career comes to an end … The decision you're really making at this point in your life is this: Where am I going to go that's going to give me the best chance to make it as a man, as a leader, as a father, as a husband?'"
The stuff of a head coach -- the delegating, the analyzing problems and making decisions on the fly, the projecting an aura of decisiveness from the head of the room: it's old hat to this man. He rose through Merrill Lynch until he was in charge of all investment products for private clients. He became CEO of Ameritrade Holding Corp., and he increased the company's market capitalization from $700 million to $12 billion.
But the most striking difference on this sunny morning near Myrtle Beach? The surroundings. Right now, outside Moglia's conference room window aren't the high-rises of Manhattan or the TD Ameritrade campus in Omaha but instead the quaint football stadium at Coastal Carolina University, a low-level Division 1 school where Moglia was hired last month.
Right now, it seems, Joe Moglia is the least likely head coach in all of college football.
The challenge of Coastal Carolina's new CEO of football will be twofold: To sell Coastal Carolina. And to sell himself as a real football coach, not just some rich man who wants a new hobby.
All around him are signs of the school's aspirations. Enrollment has more than doubled since 2003, when the football program started. On campus, where Spanish moss hangs from trees and patches of sandy real estate nod toward the nearby beaches, that exciting scent of growth makes the place feel like a startup company: new dorms, new academic buildings, a soon-to-break-ground $10 million baseball and softball facility, a new basketball arena.
Yet selling himself, a man who was away from football for 25 years after turning down an assistant coach offer from the University of Miami? That's Moglia's bigger challenge. Again and again, sitting at his desk well into the night, Moglia calls parents and coaches and the recruits themselves, reassuring them and repeating the "Life After Football" mantra that will guide his program:
Stand on your own two feet. Accept responsibility. Be a man.
Yes, it can sound like coachspeak, inspirational words lacking in substance. But it's not. For Moglia, these words mean something. They're a testament to the life he's lived. Because once upon a time, football saved Joe Moglia's life. Then life got in the way, and Joe Moglia turned away from football.
And right now it's time to go back and chase down that dream.
Admit it: You're skeptical.
More than skeptical. You flat-out don't believe it. Don't believe a businessman out of football nearly three decades deserves this job more than the scores of college coaches grinding it out for years. Don't believe a man who was an unpaid volunteer assistant for Nebraska a year ago before coaching last season in the United Football League should replace the only coach Coastal Carolina has ever had, David Bennett, a man who won three conference championships and who put the school on the map with his "We want dogs!" rant that went viral. Don't believe Moglia got this gig on merit but instead through the influence of his powerful friends, an impressive list that includes Warren Buffet.
Of course you don't believe it. This is America, where presidencies seem bought and where the almighty dollar rules. Depending how you look at it, Joe Moglia is either the most overqualified head coach in the country, a millionaire dozens of times over -- or the least qualified man who'll stalk the sideline this fall.
But what's easy to forget in our deeply ingrained cynicism are two valuable insights about Coastal Carolina's new coach:
1. Being a CEO and being a head football coach are closer than you'd think. You make smart hires then delegate. You motivate and unite. You operate under pressure. You bring together a team under one strategic vision, and you look for competitive advantages over opponents. "People have this kind of mystical vision of a head coach, that he does all these things," said Brandon Noble, a former NFL player who is one of Moglia's coaches, "but what a coach does is the same as a CEO: delegate, deal with the press, sell your company, all those things that ride in big-time college football."
2. Moglia isn't just some businessman dilettante taking on football as his hobby. Because deep down he's always been a football coach who just happened to become a successful businessman, and who late in life is going back to that dream deferred.
That dream had formed decades ago on the streets of New York. Moglia was the oldest of five, the son of an Italian immigrant who didn't finish eighth grade and had fruit and vegetable stores in tough parts of Washington Heights and the Bronx. The Catholic family jammed into a tiny two-bedroom apartment, and it was always assumed that the oldest boy would take over his father's store.
In middle school, Moglia seemed headed toward a life of running the streets. He started drinking at 11. He got in fights. He hung with two older boys, thieving from stores and getting in trouble.
Except one thing made Moglia different than his two friends: His love of sports. He started taking the city bus to a private school where he played baseball and football. His dad didn't understand why he loved sports -- a waste of time, his dad said -- but he did understand sports kept his son off the streets.
And Moglia himself began to understand powerful life lessons when he was still a teenager: One of those two friends died from a drug overdose. The other was shot and killed by police when he was robbing a liquor store. Moglia knew that could have been him. Football had saved his life.
And so as he worked his way through college -- 50-some hours a week in his dad's store, driving a cab on the side, supporting his growing family that began when he married his pregnant girlfriend at 19 -- Moglia decided he would become a football coach. He worked his way up, from a 22-year-old high school head coach in Delaware all the way to the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth. But his career path was altered when he and his wife divorced. That's when everything changed.
Mind you, Moglia tried to keep coaching. He lived for free in an unheated loft in the football storage facility so he could still support his four children, still chase that dream. Then he was offered an assistant coaching job for the University of Miami after the Hurricanes' national championship in 1983. His big break.
And Moglia confronted a stark choice: He could chase his dream, hop-scotch the country from coaching job to coaching job, become an absentee father as he climbed the coaching ladder. Or he could stand on his own two feet. He could accept responsibility for the people who depended on him.
He could be a man.
And this is when Joe Moglia's dream was deferred.
On a winter evening after the first day of classes of the new semester, the Coastal Carolina football team files into the football facility to meet their new coach. The athletic director introduces Moglia, then the athletic director leaves. This is a private moment, the new coach meeting his new players, captured on video but only meant for Moglia and these young men.
It's been a wild, unexpected ride for Moglia since he turned down the Miami job in order to be a man. He talked his way into a training program for Merrill Lynch: "25 MBAs from Ivy League schools and one football coach," Moglia said. "Nobody thought I would make it there. A few years later those guys were working for me."
He shot up at Merrill Lynch, and after 17 years he was on the company's executive committees for institutional business and retail. He was named CEO at Ameritrade Holding Corp., now known as TD Ameritrade, and had six years in a row of record earnings even as the market tanked.
By 2008, Moglia was ready to move on. He didn't know what was next: Another CEO job? His own financial television show? Anything was possible, even the NFL commissioner job he once was contacted about. But after a group of Yale alums approached him about coaching their team, he couldn't get football off of his brain. He filled five legal pads with pros and cons about trying to become a head coach. It was, he knew, something that had never been done before.
And now, after two years as an assistant under Bo Pelini at Nebraska and one as a UFL head coach alongside former NFL coaches like Marty Schottenheimer and Dennis Green, Moglia stands at the front of a college auditorium, his first time meeting these young men.
"I want everything out there in the open tonight," Moglia begins. "That's the way we're going to operate as we go forward. There's going to be no question that's silly. There's going to be no question that doesn't make sense. There's going to be no situation that's out of line."
In his New York accent, Moglia relates his improbable rags-to-riches story, hoping it speaks to players from rough backgrounds. He talks about the importance of conditioning. He speaks of building on the previous coach's tradition but talks of doing things differently. He sets their goal as winning an FCS national championship.
"My head's here, my heart's here, everything about what I want to do with my life is here," Moglia tells them. "It's here, it's in this room, it's with you guys."
Then his voice quiets. This is the most important thing he can tell these young men, yet it has nothing to do with football. It's about life.
"This is about standing on your own two feet and accepting responsibility for yourself," he says. "It's understanding you gotta live with the consequences of your actions. It's about being a man!"
"You're here to get an education," he continues. "If you're good enough to get to the NFL, we got a million contacts to the NFL, we're going to help you get there. But if you're not good enough to get to the NFL, we want you to be the best player you can. But it's far more important that you're the best man you can be."
And as he says this, one more truth becomes clear: This is the exact place where Joe Moglia should be.
You can follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave, become a fan on Facebook or email him at reidforgrave@gmail.com.
