Happy Hour with John Gaskins
Former SDSU coach Mike Daly's football life (full chat)
Beskrivelse
The man who changed the face of South Dakota State football isn't John Stiegelmeier. It was the head coach who preceded Stig: Mike Daly. At least, that is what Stig said in his recently-released biography book Stig & The Rise of South Dakota State Football. Daly hired Stig twice. First, as a volunteer student assistant when Daly was the Jackrabbits defensive coordinator in 1977. Fourteen years later, when Daly was hired as head coach after a decade away, he elevated Stig from defensive backs coach and recruiting coordinator to defensive coordinator. After six winning seasons — SDSU won six or seven games every year, was 40-24 overall and 31-22 in the North Central Conference — Daly walked away from the school and from coaching for the rest of his life. He was just 46 years old and had 20 good coaching years left in him. Instead, Stig took over. Solid but not elite level football continued until administration and boosters got serious in 2003 and decided to make the leap to Div. I. The rest is history. SDSU became a powerhouse and eventually a national champion under Stig. Does Daly regret walking away so soon? Why did he do it in the first place? What kind of pride does he take in Stig crediting him for laying the championship foundation? More importantly, how did Daly do it? Before Daly arrived as head coach in 1991, SDSU was usually an afterthought in North Central Conference football, regularly smothered by titans like North Dakota State and North Dakota. Even arch rival South Dakota reached the national semifinals twice in a row in the 1980's. The Jackrabbit awakening all started with a TV show — The Mike Daly Show — and an absolute conviction that football should be taken seriously by players and coaches, even if the administration wouldn't. The stories of the turnaround in Brookings are just a fraction of Daly's rich football life. There was growing up in Fairmont, Minnesota, without his father — a World War II Presidential Unit Citation honoree who died of polio when Mike was a year old. There were his college days and early coaching days at Augustana, where he met and enjoyed the beer-tapped refrigerator of fellow assistant Don Morton. There were a few years in the 1970's as an assistant at SDSU, where Daly hired Stig, before Morton became NDSU head coach and whisked Daly away. In the next decade, with Daly as Morton's defensive coordinator, the Bison would win a Div. II national title, Div. I Tulsa would have one of its best teams in school history, and Wisconsin would give the duo a Big Ten opportunity of a lifetime. The Badgers were not a football-first institution. Morton went 6-27 in three years and was fired after the 1988 season. Daly was left unemployed until a chance encounter at a grocery store during a summer fishing trip changed everything. Now 76, Daly describes all this on a lazy Tuesday afternoon in Gateway Lounge — one of his regular Sioux Falls haunts — in the affable ease that made him a popular coach. Come for the story about meeting Richard Nixon at a high-end restaurant in Miami the night before Tulsa played the No. 1 ranked Miami Hurricanes in 1986. Stay for the emotional story about how the Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers may have saved the life of his only child, who is now the CEO of a hospital in Wisconsin. Enjoy the revival of The Mike Daly Show. It's must-see TV... and must-listen podcast.
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