David Cutcliffe’s lifetime in coaching started earlier than most.
Though he played football as a young man, including at Birmingham’s Banks High School, Cutcliffe knew from an early age his future was wearing a whistle and headset rather than a helmet. And like many of his generation who grew up in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s, he idolized legendary Crimson Tide coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.
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“My nickname in high school was ‘Coach,’” Cutcliffe said in an interview last week with Mobile’s Sports Talk 99.5 FM. “I knew I was going to coach then. I’m a child who was influenced by Coach Bryant. No matter how much we would be outside playing (on Sunday) my mother knew to holler at me at 3:55, because at 4 o’clock Coach Bryant’s TV show came on. I would run in and watch it every week, religiously, in the fall. Even if I was running for a touchdown in the pasture, if I heard my mother call, I’d turn around like Forrest Gump, just keep running all the way to the house.”
“Coach Cut” will be in Mobile Thursday as part of the 28th Annual DEX Imaging L’Arche Football Preview, which returns this year as an in-person event after two years as a virtual event due to COVID. Also scheduled to appear are Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin, Alabama offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien, South Alabama offensive coordinator Major Applewhite, Baylor head coach Dave Aranda and Louisville offensive coordinator Lance Taylor, among others.
Cutcliffe recently retired after nearly five decades on the sideline, first rising to prominence during his 19 seasons as an assistant at Tennessee, and also serving as head coach at Banks and at Ole Miss and Duke. He was hired by the SEC earlier this year as a special assistant for football relations under commissioner Greg Sankey.
“It’s been kind of a learning curve,” Cutcliffe said. “After 46 years of coaching, getting on the administrative side is a little bit of a shock. It’s been fun and I’m always up for learning something new. It’s been really exciting working with a great staff at the Southeastern Conference.”
Though he had opportunities to play football on the small-college level at places such as Livingston (now West Alabama) and Florence State (now North Alabama), Cutcliffe’s dream was to walk on at Alabama so that he could learn from Bryant. His father had died in a car accident when Cutcliffe was 15, so his family did not have the financial resources for him to pay his own way to school in Tuscaloosa.
So he spent his first year out of high school coaching the freshman team at Banks, with the intention of enrolling at Alabama the following fall. Family friend Jack Rutledge — a long-time Crimson Tide aide who ran the school’s athletic dormitory, Bryant Hall — helped Cutcliffe get a job as a student assistant.
Cutcliffe said he did “anything and everything” during his days at Alabama, most notably serving as Rutledge’s No. 2 man at Bryant Hall. That led to some interesting run-ins with players, including one memorable encounter with a prominent (but unnamed) offensive lineman.
“My job was to make sure things went well,” Cutcliffe said. “I’m younger than a lot of them, and this was a guy older than me. He had gone hunting night hunting and had shot, a raccoon and a possum. And he was carrying them around in the dorm, bleeding them out up and down the halls with the gun still hanging under his arm. And I go up to him and say, ‘Hey, man, this isn’t cool.’ I don’t know if he had been under the influence or not. But some way I made him decide that he was either going to have to shoot me or help me clean that mess up. He helped me clean the mess up. So I knew I could coach that day.”
When he wasn’t putting out fires at the dorm, Cutcliffe spent his down time soaking up as much as he could from Bryant and his staff. He said would sit-in during film sessions — at first uninvited —with Crimson Tide assistants Ken Donahue and Mal Moore.
Upon graduation from Alabama in 1976, Cutcliffe went back to Banks as an assistant (ironically after his high school coach, Shorty White, had left for a job at Alabama), before taking over as head coach in 1980. He said he was “as happy as I could be” coaching on the high school level and had no plans of making the leap to college, at least until a chance meeting with Tennessee head coach Johnny Majors.
“(Majors) was supposed to watch one of our players for 15 minutes and he stayed the whole practice,” Cutcliffe recalled. “He said ‘how’d you learn to run a practice like that?’ I said ‘Alabama, for the most part, but also right here at Banks High School. Shorty White knew how to get his teams ready to play.’ He said ‘I’m going to hire you after the season.’ I’m like ‘yeah, OK.’
“Sure enough after the season, he called me and offered me a job. I forgot to ask him how much he was going to pay me. And I probably wouldn’t have left if I’d known it was less than I was making at Banks.”
For a salary of $8,000, Cutcliffe took a job as an assistant at Tennessee in 1982. He was bumped up to tight ends coach in 1983 (getting a raise to $14,000), and later served as running backs before taking over coaching quarterbacks in 1990.
After offensive coordinator Phillip Fulmer replaced Majors in 1993, Cutcliffe was elevated to OC. It was the next year that Cutcliffe’s three-decade association began with the Manning family, when Peyton Manning signed with the Volunteers to play quarterback.
Cutcliffe helped turn Manning into one of the greatest quarterbacks in SEC history and helped direct the Volunteers to a national championship in 1998 (with Tee Martin at quarterback). Cutcliffe’s friendship with the Manning family played a huge role in his getting his first head-coaching job at Ole Miss — patriarch Archie Manning’s alma mater, and a program desperate to sign Peyton’s younger brother, Eli.
Cutcliffe coached the Rebels for six seasons, posting a 44-29 record and sharing in the SEC West championship in 2003. Eli Manning finished third in the Heisman Trophy balloting that season, after Peyton had been runner-up in 1997.
“Their willingness to work, their humility to learn was second to none,” Cutcliffe said. “Sometime nowadays we get hot shots, and they were as far from that as you can get. They were absolutely wanting to soak it all up. And then they also possess these minds that — I’m telling you, a football play may last 3.5 seconds, maybe five seconds. But when you talk to them about what went through their mind and why this decision, or why not this decision, it would take them 30 seconds to tell you what went through their mind. “They managed a game and the game of football better than anybody I’ve ever heard of. And when you add that talent, that dedication work ethic along with that kind of mind … I coached them in the (NFL) offseason. I mean, we would work hard. They loved coming back, because they knew I would coach them, not coddle them. We did that for 22 years with Peyton, and with Eli the entire time he played.”
Cutcliffe was fired after the Rebels slipped to 4-7 in 2004, and went back to Tennessee to serve as Fulmer’s offensive coordinator for two seasons. He then became head coach at Duke, posting a 77-97 record in 14 seasons that included 10 wins and an ACC Coastal Division championship in 2013.
Cutcliffe and Duke parted ways in November, meaning he was suddenly available just as Arch Manning — Archie’s grandson, Cooper’s son and Peyton and Eli’s nephew — was emerging as the next great quarterback prospect in his family. Now 67, Cutcliffe said he got several calls from schools looking to hire him so that they could have an “in” with Arch (there were rumors he was close to taking a job at Texas), but decided to stay above the fray this time.
“I wouldn’t touch that with the 10-foot pole,” Cutcliffe said. “I had a lot of offers to be on a staff here, a staff there. It was everybody recruiting Arch. ... When Arch was born, I was the head coach at Ole Miss. I had scholarship papers sent to him the day he was born, to Cooper. I’m the only one that did that. But I’ve worked with Arch, and he’s a sponge. I think his path has become more difficult because it’s just so public, with social media and the amount of media that we have compared to when Peyton and Eli came along. Cooper and I have talked about this, just staying grounded in understanding what wins games as a quarterback, which is put everybody else in the best position they can be to be successful. You don’t go out and try to win games yourself. … The deal is, if he needs me, call me, but I am not going to get involved with it. My relationship with the family’s far more important than trying to recruit Arch Manning anywhere.”
This year’s L’Arche event will not feature a dinner as in years past and will take place in the Barter Student Center at Spring Hill College, rather than at the Mitchell Center. For ticket information, click HERE.
L’Arche is an international organization in which people with and without intellectual disabilities live together in communities. For more information on L’Arche Mobile, visit larchemobile.org.
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