Meet the Staff: Erik Link

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In a series of stories over the next few weeks, PowerMizzou is going in-depth with Missouri's assistant coaches to give Tiger fans a better idea of who the coaches are and what led them to this point. You can find our most recent Q&A, with running backs coach Curtis Luper, right here.

EL: "I've been a football fanatic probably since I can remember, about five years old. That was about the time when the 1985 Chicago Bears were a thing. Growing up in the state of Iowa there aren't any pro sports so your affiliation is either Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City or Minnesota and during that time, it was the 85 Bears, it was Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and so I quickly worked towards kind of growing up a Chicago fan. It's probably not good for this story, but it is what it is. I've been a fanatic of football I guess since then, but didn't start playing organized football until my freshman year in high school. That was really more of a medical deal. I had the same hip disease that Bo Jackson had and was diagnosed in first grade with that. I was an extremely mobile kid, was multi-sport, loved baseball, basketball, football. Anything I could get my hands on, I loved to do, but that put me out of contact sports until I was fully cleared and it just so happened to be that my ninth grade year I was able to start playing contact sports again. So that was the first year that I played football and then I fell in love with the game at that point. Loved to play it. Definitely grew up I would say, probably had more of a love for basketball and baseball."

EL: "For (Bo), they didn't obviously catch his until he got his hip displaced with that injury when he was playing with the Raiders. But for me, it was more, you have a ball in the socket of your hip. For me, it was more of a growth thing. I was having some pain, didn't know what it was, it was weird because usually as a kid, if you have a pain there's usually something visual you can see. Something's swollen, it's bruised, it's broke, it's cut, whatever. There wasn't any of that. We finally got referred to an orthopedic specialist and they're the ones that caught it early. Basically that ball wasn't growing how it was supposed to and so my hip was kind of moving around, which was creating some of that pain and discomfort. I remember it like it was yesterday, my first grade year for probably about three months I was on crutches and basically my leg was in a sling. After that they built like a custom brace for me which was very similar to what you see in like Forrest Gump and the braces that he had to wear as a kid. I had to wear one of those on my right leg. To answer your question, I was in that brace for like a year and I still played tee ball, baseball and all that stuff but just did it with that brace on. What that allowed me to do is basically it took the pressure off that hip and allowed that ball to grow back and form like it was supposed to. Once they cleared me out of that brace, then it was just a matter of okay, we don't want to have you take any unnecessary contact. They cleared me for basketball and baseball and full running and all that stuff. I just had to do kind of periodic checkups. It is a degenerative thing, but for me they caught it early enough where it was able to back into place. Basically all they told me was you're probably going to have to have a hip replacement at some point later on in life. Fortunately it hasn't happened yet."

EL: "I definitely felt like I studied the game. Matter of fact, my first love was sports journalism because of that. i was a fanatic, I followed statistics and could name random college football players and pro players. Definitely followed it and was an avid reader in elementary and junior high of the sports page. Watched SportsCenter religiously. All those things, I was definitely a fan, but also I had a notebook of teams and top players. Definitely studied the game from that standpoint and personnel and all of those things. I was probably more of a cross, now looking back, I kind of always wanted to be a sportswriter and reporter, but looking back it was probably more of a personnel or scouting fascination than it was the sports reporting. Then once I got to high school, developed a really close relationship with my high school head football coach. He really took me under his wing and by the time I left high school, that's really when I knew I wanted to be a teacher, I want to be a coach, I want to impact lives. That's really how that formed."

EL: "Yes to both. Not too many people obviously leave Drake with NFL aspirations or true opportunities, but when I was there playing, the guy a year ahead of me was a kicker, Billy Cundiff, that was my claim to fame of getting on SportsCenter as a player. He made a 62-yard field goal and it made it all the way to SportsCenter. So a number of scouts came through the following year and looked at him and watched him in spring football and fall camp and all that. I was not a great player by any means, but was good enough to start and play and so got on some lists I think. After my career was done, had a couple workouts. Our center and myself were both the two linemen, and we had a good tight end who was from the St. Louis area and a quarterback--we were really good on offense, not so hot on defense--so we had a number of offensive players, or a handful of us, I should say, that had some workouts. Really after those workouts, that's when the realization set in that let's start focusing on the next chapter which was, for me, coaching and teaching. After my senior year, that winter, had some workouts and then I was still taking classes and then I started going to coaching clinics and going to observe and meet and interview local high school coaches and spent a lot of time with my college coaches because I knew that was the avenue that I wanted to pursue."

EL: "Yeah, when I was student teaching, my high school coach asked me to come back and help out and I certainly did that. I actually started coaching baseball. The state of Iowa I think is still one of two states in the United States that has summer sanctioned baseball and softball. So that was my summer job. I was the sophomore baseball coach. I worked out and trained in the morning, then I'd go coach baseball for a summer job my last two years. That was kind of my first taste of coaching and then obviously the fall of 2003, I had to do my student teaching to complete my degree and so I started coaching football that fall. We were not very good and it was a quick dose of the challenges and the hardships associated with coaching, but it also kind of lit that fire of you truly can impact kids and develop relationships and so that's kind of when it all took off from there."

EL: "It's kind of crazy. People ask me all the time, they want to get into college coaching specifically and what's the route, coach, what do I need to do to get there? I always tell them there is no cookie cutter answer to that. There is no specific route. Everybody's route is different and everybody's path is different. For me, kind of one opportunity led to another. When I started out, I just wanted to be a high school coach and teacher. Really had no aspirations of coaching at the college level. After that fall of 2003, going into that spring, I was trying to get a teaching job, a coaching job, kind of late into that summer my college coach called me and offered me a graduate assistant position. It was one of those deals where you go to school, you're a GA, but you're coaching your own position, you have your own recruiting area, you're doing all the things that college coaches do and to me, I took the job thinking hey I'm going to get great football experience to improve myself as a coach, but also get my Master's and any coach out there knows, any teaching job, the more education you've got, the higher up on the totem pole you go. That's really what it was for me and I had a great experience. That first year we won the conference championship and kind of got promoted the next year to a restricted earnings position and after that I had an opportunity to go to Iowa State under Dan McCarney.

I was the ninth consecutive graduate assistant under Dan McCarney to come from Drake University. It was kind of a crazy line of coaches from Drake. Drake's one of those schools that it's kind of an unusual deal. There's a ton of guys from Drake in college football that are coaching. There's guys who have been head coaches. And they all were kind of under that Bob Ash tree, who was my college head coach and was the head coach at Drake for a number of years and went out to Montana State and has had tremendous success and is now retired from coaching. There's a number of us that are all kind of in that network. Most of us stay in contact at least occasionally and try to stay up with one another. There is no direct path. I do feel like every opportunity that I've head, I learned a tremendous amount from and I think more than anything has given me some exposure to some great coaches,. some great players. Have had the opportunity to coach in national championships and conference championships and be a part of great success, but also guys that have taken over programs.

The year I was a graduate assistant for Dan McCarney, that's when I first started learning special teams. We had a guy named Brian Schneider who was with us and he was our special teams coordinator. He was coming from UCLA to Iowa State and is now the special teams coordinator for the Seattle Seahawks. But when I was there as graduate assistant, I was an offensive graduate assistant. Back in those days there were two GAs. There was one on offense, one on defense, but we all had to help on special teams. So that's really when I first started learning it. Brian is a tremendous coach and teacher of the game especially with special teams and that's when I really first started to take an interest in it and really tried to absorb as much as I could from him.

Then Gene Chizik came in, I was there with him the whole time he was there in more of an operations and recruiting and high school relations role, which was extremely valuable because I was kind of his right hand man and worked with the administration and saw kind of the other side of recruiting and coaching and the administrative side, but also was very connected with our personnel and evaluation and player development and all of those things, which has been extremely valuable.

Then Paul Rhoads came in, so I worked with three different staffs, three different head coaches, in three-and-a-half years at Iowa State. And so it was a whirlwind, it was crazy, I was young, but it was invaluable experience from the standpoint of working with a bunch of different people in a short period of time and kind of learning different styles and took something from everybody. My path definitely wasn't, I guess, normal or traditional by any means. But I've been blessed, man, to be around some really good people and kind of learn the profession and improve everywhere I've been."

EL: "I ended up leaving Iowa State to go to Keller High School just north of Fort Worth because specifically I wanted to get back on the field and coach. I was kind of more on the administrative track with operations and when Paul Rhoads came in, he was like, 'Erik, you need to be coaching.' As he was building his staff, he sent me on the road to recruit. As he was filling out his staff, I don't think he hired his last coach until like April so it was really late and I was heavily involved from the coaching side with the offseason program and doing all those things and he kind of told me 'You should be coaching, this is what your passion is. You've done a great job. Not that I don't appreciate what you're doing but I just don't have a spot for you right now.'

And he was right. My passion was coaching, my passion was teaching, my passion was impacting guys lives. Sometimes on the administrative side in operations you just don't get that same experience. I told my wife, I said I want to go this route and explore this option. It was a little bit of a risk, but I've never made any decision thinking it was going to be the end all. I never made decisions based on thinking that I'm taking this job to lead to another job. Every decision I've made, I'm going to go here, I'm going to do the best job I can. I know it sounds like coachspeak, but it's just the truth, man. I'm not in it for any other reason other than I love coaching, I love the game of football and I love impacting lives. That's why when those opportunities presented themselves, I did it. That's why I tell coaches when they ask me, 'Hey, how do you get to coaching college? How do you get to the Power Five level?' And I always tell them there's no way. I took high school jobs and people told me I was crazy and I'd never get back to college and that's just not the truth. It's about, are you good at what you do, first and foremost? Do you have a skillset that people want? And then, number two, a lot about who you know. If you know the right people and you're fortunate and blessed. Look, there's a ton of qualified coaches out there that never get the opportunity to coach at this level. The reality is it's not because they're a bad coach. It's maybe because they didn't get that break or didn't know the right person or didn't have the right experience or whatever. I've never prescribed to you have to do this to do this."

EL: "That is a great question. So it was really kind of a bizarre situation. When the NCAA passed the tenth assistant position for football. That really opened the door, I think, specifically for guys who can coach special teams. I think a fair amount, not all, but a fair amount, of college head coaches, said I'm going to use this tenth assistant, I'm going to make this guy in charge of special teams. They either did that or they added a guy on the defensive side because most college staffs when it was nine, they had five on offense, four on defense. It was kind of how the majority worked unless that head coach was an offensive guy and heavily involved. That was kind of how most staffs were structured. So they either made that tenth position adding a position on defense or they added a person who was in charge of special teams.

When that all unfolded, I was coaching high school. I had a couple people reach out to me kind of gauging interest, but the opportunities weren't the right opportunities. What happened was Louisiana Tech, this is exactly the story, Skip Holtz went to media days in July, Conference USA media days and he got asked the question 'Why are you the only Division One school in America that hasn't hired a tenth assistant coach?' And Skip said something along the lines of 'That's a great question, you have to ask our administration.' Basically by the time he got back to Ruston, the AD called him in and said, 'go hire a tenth assistant' which of course at that time it's not exactly peak hiring season for football coaches.

I got a call from a good friend in the business asking if I'd have interest in Louisiana Tech and I said yeah I would, at least be interested in talking with them. It's not a good time because at the time I'm a varsity head coach getting ready to ramp up our season. Certainly was not a good time for that, but he said they're hiring a special teams coordinator and I've given them your name. I don't know Skip Holtz from anybody and I looked at their staff and it was kind of a small world. Their offensive line coach I had worked with previously, their offensive coordinator I had worked with previously, they had a graduate assistant that I had worked with previously and their assistant head coach was a guy that I hadn't worked with but knew pretty well. So I texted those guys and was like, 'are you guys really hiring a special teams coordinator?' They all said, 'yep, and you're one of two guys we're considering.' I was like, 'okay, maybe this is real.' That's kind of how that unfolded. Had conversations with Skip and then they hired me and offered me the position and we kind of went off running from there."

EL: "I think that's probably true to a certain extent certainly to the average fan. I think one of the biggest misnomers with special teams is everybody says it's a third of the game, it's a third of the game, it's a third of the game. That's not really true. When you break down the total number of plays, special teams and the kicking game are only, I think it's 13% of the plays. But it is actually over a third of the yards in a game. So when you break down the yardage, and that's why field position and hidden yardage are so critical when you're looking at special teams and that's really how they impact a game is the yardage in the game. I think it's like 37% of the total yards that happen in a game. That's where it really, I think, rears its head and shows its value.

Exactly what you're talking about, to me the average fan is going to notice special teams if something goes wrong, or if there's a huge momentum play. Because when you think about it, a crowd gets extremely loud or really changes, college football especially, there's such a momentum pendulum that happens within the course of a game. It can happen, obviously, with an offensive or defensive play, but nothing really juices up a sideline and gets a crowd to go from zero to 100 like a huge play in the kicking game, whether it's a blocked punt or a kickoff return for a touchdown or a game winning field goal or a clutch field goal at the end or a fake punt that reignites a sideline. You as a reporter, as you look back and you're trying to analyze games, you're trying to figure out, okay, what was the point that they were down for the first three quarters and then something happened that switched the momentum. So many times that's a special teams play. So when we measure our success, and this is exactly how I sell it to our kids and our coaches, and I'm a big believer in this, you have to educate your team and your program exactly how special teams impacts games. So we talk about field position just like everybody else does, but we break it down specifically with the hidden yardage in a game. There's specific ways that we measure that and we analyze that. We do that every Sunday after every game. It's easy for guys to see exactly how that correlates with winning and losing.

The second thing we measure is momentum plays. We have a specific criteria for it for each kicking phase. Some of them are obvious like I just said, a blocked kick, a blocked punt, scoring points, creating touchdowns. We make a big deal out of that. At the end of the day, those are the things we're looking at. There's a number of statistics we can look at that everybody looks at, that everybody analyzes, but those two specific areas are how we measure our success in the kicking game from week to week."

EL: "First and foremost I would tell you look for that to be a little bit different moving forward. At least here. Not to say we won't have fourth stringers or walk ons in the kicking game. That's the beauty of it. There's a role for just about everybody on the football team, just about every position on the football team. In terms of specifically when you're talking about starters, some of it's common sense. Is a Nick Bolton going to start on all four units? Probably not because his role on defense is huge and for a number of reasons. Not just his athletic ability or his production. But will have a role in the kicking game? Absolutely. Same thing with Larry Rountree. That's just one name. Obviously he's going to have a role on offense at the running back position. All of those roles are to be determined as we move forward, but that's a guy that maybe he won't start on all four, but he's going to have a role within the kicking game. The best guys that are going to give us a chance to win and have success are going to have a role in the kicking game. And that starts at the top. That's not coachspeak. That's coach Drinkwitz's values. That's what he puts importance on. He clearly communicates that to our players and to our staff and that's just the reality of it.

It doesn't necessarily mean a guy that's an offensive or a defensive starter is going to start on all four units, but they're going to have a role and they're going to learn it. Back to Nick Bolton. He's, for the first three practices that we had in spring ball, he's going to rep on every unit. He might be a two or a three on some units, but he's going to rep it, he's going to practice it, especially in spring football and in fall camp in a normal situation. He's going to do that. That way you continue to build those skills so when you do get in a situation where maybe, hey, this one kickoff, whatever happens, we've got to tackle them, we can't let a big play happen and we probably win the game, that's when those type of guys that banked a number of reps, maybe that's where they get inserted and hey, we need you for this play.

But the bottom line is the best guys, we're not ever going to put out, it's not like this is our punt return team, who's left. It's we've identified specific guys through hours of evaluation and drill work and meetings and the entire process that you go through and those are the guys that we're going to put on the field because of what I just said. It can win or lose football games and it directly impacts winning and losing. That's why it's important."

EL: "I absolutely think that's my job as a coach. We can impact the development of every player on the team. That's like saying since coach Drinkwitz didn't play college football that he can't coach a college football team."

EL: "No, but it's a valid point, it's a great point, but I absolutely think we can impact their development. It really comes down to coaching the finer details and the finer points. Am I going to go out there and say that I'm some sort of guru in the specific skill of kicking or punting or something like that. The reality is there's so many moving parts associated with special teams and usually what happens with a missed field goal or a shanked punt or something of that nature it usually starts with something else. Whether it's a snap, whether it's a hold, very rarely is it something specifically related to a guy completely messing up the execution of his skill if that makes sense. I think absolutely we can have an impact on that and we should have an impact on that.

With that being said, it's no different than quarterbacks. There's a bunch of quarterback gurus and quarterback trainers. It's no different than guys going to different specialists for different things. Kickers and punters are the same in that regard. Many of them that come to us have a guy that they've trained with throughout high school that they've worked with or feel comfortable with. It's like Tiger Woods having a swing coach, right? Tiger Woods is a great golfer and he already has an abundance of knowledge on his skillset, but that doesn't mean he's not going to go see a swing coach. But he might also have a mental toughness or a sports psychologist that's helping him with the mental side. There's a lot of different specialists out there in a lot of different areas, but in terms of coaching that specific skillset, I think it's no different than us coaching any other skillset that might impact the game."

EL: "Yeah. Absolutely. I definitely want to run my own program and become a head coach. It's interesting you say that. I think there's a lot of direct correlation, I think, with a special teams coordinator. If you're truly running every unit and you're in charge of it all, there's a lot of correlation with that and running a program. To me the only other person besides the strength coach and the head coach that's touching pretty much the entire football team is the special teams coordinator. You're constantly in front of the team, you're constantly teaching many different aspects and many different players on the team. I think there's a lot of value in that. You saw (Joe) Judge from New England get the Giants job. You're seeing it more and more and I do think there's a lot of correlation because there's a lot of moving parts. There's a ton of details, organization is a huge part. You typically have a short amount of time to get a lot done, whether it's in a meeting setting, whether it's on a practice field, so you get to be extremely meticulous with the details and the organization. You've got to manage the staff to get them to understand what they're doing, get everybody on the same page. Then obviously, like I said, you're dealing with at least 95% of the football team when it comes to special teams. Probably more than that. Probably closer to 98, 99%.

So, yeah, that's a goal. I can tell you that. But with that being said, I am absolutely ecstatic to be here at Mizzou and be with coach Drinkwitz and try to help this football program win and achieve great success. Certainly that's my focus right now and as long as they'll have me here."

EL: "I don't know that I can answer that question to be honest with you because it is unprecedented. We've never experienced this. At least in my career and I can probably say it's safe to say that for about every coach out there, whether they've been doing it for two years or 40 years. You try to really keep your routine. I think that's important. I think you try to focus on what's essential. I think coach Drink's done an excellent job with the team and with the staff of really trying to hone in our focus on what's really essential that we have to make sure we do a great job in right now? So whenever we do get back all together we're in the best position we can possibly be in to have success and hit the ground running. You're focused in on your players first and foremost, making sure that you're connecting with those guys and trying to do a great job of just helping them through this, navigate through this, finish strong academically, focus on what's important with that, then make sure they're safe, make sure their health and well-being are accounted for. Make sure their family's safe. Everybody's situation is different and so you're focused on that. Then obviously I would say probably the thing that's a little bit different, we're probably able to spend a little bit more time on recruiting than we normally would going through spring football. I mean, we're recruiting every day, but I might spend an hour or two hours on recruiting in a normal spring ball practice situation where now I can spend four hours, whether it's text messaging or making calls, getting on the phone with high school coaches, all those things. It's certainly been unique. I think it's been challenging. But like I said, I think what we've done a really good job of here is try to keep the main thing the main thing and focus on what's essential. I think it's very easy to get distracted. There's so much information out there and if you try to follow it I think you can easily get lost. Just try to take care of your family and take care of what's important and try to take care of your football team and do the best job with that. I think that's really the focus."