Tom Osborne, the legendary Nebraska football coach turned athletic director, was skeptical when a wealthy businessman in his late 50s invited him to lunch four years ago to discuss a position on the Cornhuskers coaching staff.
"I thought this was probably a little bit of a passing fancy and he'll get over it," Osborne recalls thinking.
Osborne soon realized he had misjudged the man, who had recently resigned from his post as CEO of a successful online brokerage and began showing up to every practice. He sat in on every staff meeting, taking copious notes. Weary from an hour commute, he moved his personal effects into a hotel room near campus.
This was no fleeting fantasy, no means to scribbling a check mark next to an entry on a bucket list. Joe Moglia, who cashed zero paychecks in his role as executive advisor to Cornhuskers coach Bo Pelini, was determined to apply the principles he culled from laboring nearly 30 years in the business sector to engineering his own Division I program.
"I knew he was serious," Osborne said this week by phone.
The University of Toledo's Glass Bowl, where first-year Coastal Carolina coach Moglia will lead his Chanticleers today for a 7 p.m. tilt against the Rockets, is 565 miles and 10 driving hours away from Wall Street in New York.
It was there, in 1984, where Moglia made the most difficult decision of his life and exchanged his coaching career to enter a training program with Merrill Lynch.
Sixteen years of toiling in the coaching profession, the last two as the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, netted menial income. Going through a divorce and with four children, the then 34-year-old Moglia chose to chase a lucrative windfall over chasing his dream.
Within four years he was the company's top institutional sales person, displaying a penchant for closing deals transferable now to luring players and assistant coaches to the Football Championship Subdivision school in Conway, S.C. From 2001 to 2008, Moglia served as CEO of what is now TD Ameritrade, in Omaha.
When he started the company had a market cap of $700 million, according to Sports Illustrated. By 2008, it was $10 billion.
Moglia, who maintains an influence at TD Ameritrade as chairman of the board, raked in an annual compensation averaging more than $14 million. Moglia has not indicated his intention to splurge on upgraded facilities at Coastal Carolina, said athletic director Hunter Yurachek.
"I have not asked coach Moglia for a dime of his money."
Moglia's new gig pays him relative couch change -- $175,000 -- but it enables him to fill a void he left unattended when he traded his coaching whistle for designer suits. The itch was first scratched last year when he was head coach and president of the Omaha Nighthawks of the United Football League, leading the team to one win in four contests.
"I've always believed I was a much better business guy because of the 16 years I spent coaching football, and frankly I'm a better football coach now because of my experience in business," said Moglia, whose 2-1 team is a decided underdog today.
"There are tremendous parallels. They don't necessarily take place on the field, but they take place in terms of your organization and your priorities. That translates to what happens on the field."
The unconventionality of his hiring matches his noncomformist approach to overseeing a program. Moglia, 62, took six months to finalize his staff, concerned more with identifying the right blend of assistants than salvaging a recruiting class that ultimately included just 11 signees.
He is low-key at practice and evaluates his assistants as much as he does his players. According to a piece by the online sports publication Grantland, Moglia in the preseason lamented the overuse of the word "OK?" by his coaches.
Said Yurachek, whose reputation might hinge on the result of this out-of-the-box hire, "One thing I have noticed more than anything is he truly runs it like he's running a business."
School president David DeCenzo met informally with Moglia last December, days before dismissing David Bennett, the only coach the program had known.
Yurachek expressed concerns. Was Moglia versed in NCAA compliance? Had the game passed him by? His preference for other candidates changed when Moglia interviewed better than any of them.
Like the guy in Nebraska years earlier, he had convinced an athletic director to take him seriously.
"He has quite a bit to draw on," Osborne said. "A lot of being a good football coach is being a good administrator."
Contact Ryan Autullo at: rautullo@theblade.com, 419-724-6160 or on Twitter @AutulloBlade.
First Published September 22, 2012, 4:37 a.m.
