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By Bill Koch
GoBEARCATS.com
WEST HARRISON, Ind. - The prevailing story line surrounding the University of Cincinnati football team this summer can be summed up in two sentences: The offense is going to be great. The defense needs to get better.
Offensive coordinator Eddie Gran is aware of the expectations. More importantly, he knows that his players know about them. That's why he's determined to keep them focused on the work at hand, even though they're constantly being told how good they should be.
"You try to get everybody on offense not to buy into all that stuff," Gran said Thursday at the Higher Ground Retreat Center, "because football is a funny sport. You have to earn it."
Gran, 50, is in his third season as UC's offensive coordinator, having left a job coaching running backs and special teams at Florida State to be reunited with UC coach Tommy Tuberville, who helped Gran land a job as a graduate assistant in the early days of Gran's coaching career. Tuberville was an assistant at Miami (Fla.) at the time and the Hurricanes were fresh off the 1989 national championship when he was approached by Gran at the coaches' convention in San Francisco.
"There's this young kid there who looks like he's 12 years old," Tuberville said. "He walks up to me and goes, 'Hey, my name's Eddie Gran. I want to be a football coach at Miami.' I said, 'When can you start?' He said, 'When do you want me?' I said, 'Well, let's see, this is Monday. Be in Miami on Friday.' So he drove for three days all the way down to Miami and met us down there. That's how he got hired as a GA.
"He worked for a couple years there and then I got him a job here at Cincinnati and then he went out to Idaho State when (Tim) Murphy went to Harvard. When I took the job (as the head coach) at Ole Miss he was the first guy I hired."
Gran spent 1992 and 1993 at UC as the wide receivers coach under Murphy, back when the program was just beginning to recover from the devastation left behind by the NCAA prohibition that occurred under Dave Currey.
Murphy had been hired from Maine to set the program on the right path under very difficult circumstances. After going 9-34-2 from 1989 to 1992, the Bearcats broke through with an 8-3 record in 1993. Murphy then left for Harvard, where he remains today, and Gran went to Idaho State to continue his coaching odyssey.
Gran remembers the limitations the UC program operated under in those days. But he has monitored UC's progress from afar as his coaching career has unfolded, so that when Tuberville called and asked him three years ago if he'd like to work for him as UC's offensive coordinator, he hesitated only briefly and that was because he was on his way to interview for a head coaching job.
"I said Coach, 'I want this job, but if I don't get the job, I'll be there," Gran said. "It wasn't even a question. I wanted to get back with Coach Tuberville. I know what he's thinking. He knows he can trust me. I've been loyal and vice versa. He's one of the best I've ever been around."
In addition to working with Tuberville for two years at Miami, Gran worked with him for four years at Ole Miss and for 10 years at Auburn. As he moved around, he began to hear about the progress that was being made at UC under Mark Dantonio, Brian Kelly and Butch Jones.
nAfter he accepted Tuberville's offer, Gran was curious to see for himself how far the program had come since his first stint as a UC assistant. He wasn't disappointed.
"I remember getting off the plane and I was shocked when I saw the Lindner Center," he said. "Back in '89, when I was at East Carolina we played at Cincinnati (in Murphy's first year). I remember being up in the press box and I remember looking down and seeing straight down. It was like the place was going to be condemned (which it eventually was). It was nuts. When I saw the new facilities, it was exciting. I was fired up."
Gran does not try to downplay the talent that UC has on offense, nor does he shy away from the expectations. But like Tuberville he believes the key to getting the most from that talent is to develop a reliable running game.
"We've got a lot of explosive people," Gran said. "You've got your quarterback coming back. You've six or seven guys at receiver that can vertically run and when they catch the ball, they can score. That doesn't happen very often, where you can get yourself in a bind, maybe you're third-and-12 and all of a sudden, one play and you go 60. That's kind of fun."
During training camp, Gran is taking advantage of every chance he gets to let his players know that they still have a lot of work to do before they can start taking bows. He laid into them at the Sheakley Athletics Center after day two of training camp last Friday and feels no qualms about doing it every time he believes it's merited.
"I try to tell them how bad they are on the days that they're bad," Gran said, "that they wouldn't be able to beat the Sisters of the Poor. We had one of those practices on day two. It just wasn't good enough."
Bill Koch covered UC Athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBEARCATS.com in January, 2015 as featured columnist. Follow him on Twitter @bkoch.