Q&A with Rohrk Cutchlow
We talked to Mizzou football Director of Athletic Performance Rohrk Cutchlow for more than half an hour Tuesday morning. Here is our entire conversation.
We haven't had a chance to talk to you really since you took the job last year. So when you got here, before the first season, what did you immediately have to do upon getting the job to install your program?
RC: "I think it's dictated from of course the head coach and then also the coordinators off that. It's a completely different offensive scheme than what they were doing in the past, which meant that defensively, how do I put it? We're going and going and going so fast, so it's a different sort of training stimulus. Whether it's when we're rolling from station to station, doing it in a hurry, with a sense of urgency. Defensively, that means the same thing. Offensively, the goal is either to score as fast as possible or punt as fast as possible, which means a lot of people are like 'Your offense has to be in really good shape.' No, defense has to be in even better shape because offensively he's trying to hit home runs. From a training stimulus standpoint, that means that we're going to condition significantly more than what they had done. So not only selling that philosophy to the guys, hey what we're doing is different and we're going to train differently. For some guys, that's an easy pickup. For others, it's like, 'Oh, hey, why? Man, we're going too fast.' Those sort of things. And when you cheat somebody on rest time and when you move quickly, a guy that can normally let's say do 300 pounds on something with a significant amount of rest can only do 250 pounds when you cheated them on rest. So in their head, they're like 'Hey, I'm stronger than this.' Well, absolutely, but you're not in the constraints of the program that we're doing if that makes sense."
So in your job, the scheme that they run on Saturdays has a big impact on what you do here in the weight room?
RC: "Oh absolutely. What we do is train for what we're doing out on the field. And it's not just when we're conditioning. It's also when we're doing our strength work as well. I want to watch how I say it, but I think practices may be a little bit more violent because of what it is that we're doing. You can't make somebody bulletproof. Bulletproof's between them and God. Bullet resistant is a function of a number of things. Rex (Sharp) does an outstanding job in the athletic training room, but a big part of that too is doing things that will help make a guy bullet resistant as much as possible. Implementing some of those things in there that they hadn't done before to help handle that punishment of more physical practices, your slots are going all of the time and they have to be able to be ready for those repeat battles. Injuries occur for a number of reasons, but part of them come from fatigue and so hey, we're gonna work on that posterior chain a little bit more than you had been. Doesn't mean you were weak, but it means that you're not going to be able to withstand the punishment over the course of the most violent physical conference in the country on top of violent practices, things like that. That dictates how we train and what we do in here."
I know you've worked with Barry (Odom) before, but was that an adjustment for your staff based on the offense Josh Heupel is running?
RC: "There were some similarities between what we were running at Tulsa and what we were running at the last place (Memphis). Tulsa was, the head coach that was there, coach (Bill) Blankenship, had been there, he worked for Todd Graham, but Todd Graham's OC was Gus Malzahn and then when Gus left then his OC was Chad Morris. Those dudes...When Blankenship came in, it wasn't slowing it down, no, it was read, it was go, go, go, go, go. Especially because of the personnel there, that dictated that sort of offense. At the last place we were running quite a bit as well."
When a new staff comes in, there are always guys who have been here two or three years who aren't used to the way things are done. Did you feel over the course of the year those guys were pretty open to what you wanted to do?
RC: "Absolutely. It's a leading by guiding rather than ruling philosophy that we've got. You're not going to do it because we told you so. First of all, that's not fair. Second of all, that's not the way kids are wired now. It's a constant sell job. The staff that we've got here are all real dudes. I was able to steal some of them from places that I know those coaches and I've had a relationship with these guys. Everybody's got their lane. We've all got a tremendous amount of overlap, but one guy's outstanding on the GPS stuff, another guy's outstanding on the speed work. So these players are just like if you're going out on a date with somebody, most likely you're going to Google them and you're going to troll a little bit and find out things. So when they hit dudes up, it's an easy sell for Dustyn Baethke to talk about rehabbing a guy and working on his speed because he trained John Ross. 'You had John Ross?' 'Yeah, I had the fastest guy in combine history and by the way I had him all through his rehab after he blew his ACL.' Now, boom, there's credibility. It makes it easier to go ahead and make that lock step. You know, Charles (Harris) was coming off of double shoulder surgery when we got here. He'd blown out both of his labrums. And I can't say enough good things about Charles, but he was ready to bench press the day after surgery. But he wasn't. And so it was, 'No, you're not doing this.' Imagine telling that guy when you are just trying to develop a relationship, 'No, that's not what we're doing.' Selling and selling, not only selling what we're doing, but selling us first and foremost. That's the biggest part of it. You can use the cliche they don't care what you know until they know that you care, but on a daily basis we're selling who we are and what we're about. Whether it's how consistent we are--the nomenclature that we use is the same as the coaches upstairs. You can't bullshit guys. You can for a certain amount of time, but at some point in time they see through it. If they look better in the mirror, if they're moving faster. There's a number of things in this world that don't lie and one's the stopwatch, another one's the bar, another one's the scale, another one's the film. Guys see that improvement, feel that improvement, then they're more likely to go to a place you're asking them to go they haven't been to before. Physically speaking at least."
I know last year didn't go the way any of you wanted it to, but physically, the best half of the season might have been the very last half. Were you happy with how guys held up and how much after year one do you look back and say we've got to change this, we've got to do this better so we're better in week ten?
RC: "I'd be hard pressed to think that I'd ever use the words happy or satisfied. And I'm not digging you. A part of bullet resistant is luck and a big part of it is Rex as well. Rex and his crew, they push people. Being able to withstand that, I think some of the things that we do are geared towards that. Again, this is the most violence in collegiate football day in and day out, Saturday to Saturday. If your best player's out, he's not your best player anymore. He's just like you. The offense will continue to go faster as these guys get it down more and more and more and more. Which means that our training stimulus is going to have to go faster and faster and faster as well. So there are a number of things that if we had a positive and negative chart on, we would put in the positive. There were a number of things that we've got to look back and either revamp or tweak a little bit. I would say the third category is we know it's necessary, but they're not ready for it yet. Now we can take some of the things off of that third run and throw them back into the first one because they do have another offseason under their belt, they do have another real spring of going faster underneath their belt. We do have a number of guys that were nicked up when we got here or got nicked up through the course of the season that are now starting to come back and now we've got an opportunity to help push those guys forward."
Some coaches, if you ask about one player they talk about everybody else because they don't like singling guys out. But were there guys you've got coming back this year that have really become leaders for you in the weight room?
RC: "I'll probably defer to where you tried to head me off there. What I've seen is that senior leadership starting to gravitate towards putting their money where their mouth is. Coming in here extra, asking for more and more work, self-policing a little bit better. Not that the group last year was poor on it. I'm not saying that at all or even intimating that at all. But just, I can't put my finger on it, but it feels a little bit different of sheer numbers gravitating over towards there. Guys just acting hungry for success not only on the field, but in here as well. That makes it easier to go ahead and help push guys."
About ten days you get a whole new crop of kids in here. Over the course of your career, 15 to 20 years, are kids much more ready for a college weight program than they used to be?
RC: "It depends on the guy. Now they have much more access to the information and to different styles of training. A guy that does it wrong or does it in a way that we feel is not optimal, and who's continued to do that, now you've got to re-educate and re-pattern all those things they were doing poorly in the past. It's a whole lot easier for a guy that's starting at level zero than it is a guy that's starting at negative ten. In some areas, he's a rock star, but he's been doing some things wrong, and you're like, 'Oh, we've got to get this corrected.' And it's especially hard if you've had a tremendous amount of success at the high school level, to try to explain to that person we've got some areas that you're really deficient in that are going to catch up with you sooner or later and those are some of the things that we need to work on. It comes down to us guiding and educating and coaching. ABC, always be coaching. That's what we're doing all the time. I don't know if that answers the question, but it's different for a lot of these guys."
You mentioned something about GPS earlier. The most open-ended way I can ask this is tell me about some of the toys and technology you have access to over here.
RC: "This is a game breakdown. Different players that have on the Catapult GPS system. We've got high-speed yardage, we've got mid-speed yardage, we've got low-speed yardage, we've got change of direction, we've got player load, which is a quantifiable number that comes off of speed, distance, change of direction, all of these sort of things."
This is all set up by you attach something to their bodies while they're in here?
RC: "We don't use it when we're lifting, but when we're doing our conditioning or we're doing skills and drills, they're running their seven-on-seven drills on their won, we'll put them in a man bra...This is a compression shirt. This (a computer processor) fits in here. If they've got the bra on, fits in there the same. We've got an area where we hook them right into their shoulder pads for practices as well as for game day. Now, we can't use the real-time data on a game day. It's an NCAA rule because this is not unique, there are a lot of people out there that have this."
Every player every day is hooked up to that?
RC: "Not every player. We've got 50 units. So we put them on 50 guys. There are certain guys that are never going to have them on. I'm not really interested in the holder's data, you know what I mean? But the way that we look at the data is a little bit different than the way that some people look at the data. I'm not going to tell you exactly how, but it helps us. The main thing we have to be ready for is camp and for practice and for looking at different guys that let's say their player load is really, really high. And we're like, 'We're not telling you what to do here coordinator or position coach, but Gabe is at the top end of where he has been at. His high speed, he's been good to go. I would back down a little bit today and probably tomorrow.' Where it really helps is for a guy that's a linebacker that he's running all around for you, but he's also your special teams nightmare guy. It's all that hidden yardage that he's going and it's top speed yardage too. The plays away from him, he can shut it down now. He's going."
When you say player load, is that like percentage of maximum effort?
RC: "That is all of those measures, high-speed yardage, change of direction, violent cuts. Part of that can come from a dude getting blasted by another dude. There are a number of times where we've looked at the data and don't know what to do and then had to go back and figured out that when we got done conditioning and we brought the guys up to break them down, a couple of dudes had basically taken off the bra and were standing there twirling it around. You're looking at it and you're like, 'We just killed that guy.' And you're looking at it and, no, he was twirling his bra."
So this is a learning on the fly process for all of you guys too because this stuff wasn't around 15 years ago, 10 years ago.
RC: "Absolutely. You're going to continue to do those sort of things. They had this unit here before we got here. They didn't use it to the extent we use it. So when we're looking at some of their older data, we can't really use that data because, again, we're going, it's exponentially more yardage, it's exponentially faster, those sort of things where you're like, 'That's nice, we know where they were, but that's not where we're going.' Part of it's just sort of feeling around for finding what works. And having a relationship with the players where 'Hey, listen, you're not going to do this today.' And that's a hard sell for say a guy like Charles Harris where all he knows how to do is red-line something. Or Michael Scherer was another hard one where we had to back him down. Good luck trying to tell a pit bull not to (attack). That's the deal."
One individual I wanted to ask about. Obviously Terry Beckner had the knee injury. Is he where you'd like him to be starting the summer?
RC: "He'll be there. In the areas that he's not been limited in, and a big part of that too now is the shoulder's up. I wasn't here for the first ACL, I wasn't here for the rehab. We got in on some of the tail end of him trying to come back from that. Apparently it's a different level of focus on the rehab than before. I think it didn't hurt that Michael Scherer and him were rehabbing together. To his credit, there are a lot of areas where we've seen significant improvement not just physically, but mentally as well. I don't mean to put any undue pressure on him, but he's what I would consider a dude. Some of the things that he can do, guys will come and ask what we did to help with that. I'd be the first one to tell you all we did was unlock the doors and turn the lights on. There are some things that he does that we're just happy to be able to be around and see."
I think the guys come back on June 3rd. So what's the schedule? What do you do with these guys up until camp starts?
RC: "We're rolling five days a week. We have something five days a week. Of course, we're constrained by a certain number of hours. There are things that they can do on their own that we're able to manage to a certain extent. We've got lifting, we've got yoga, we've got conditioning, speed work, we have packages for mobility. When we were growing up, you weren't inside very often. And so, some of the deficiencies that we'll see now with kids coming in are not some of the ones that you see in kids that grew up climbing trees and throwing rocks and chasing each other all day. They come from, when you sit here and you start getting tight in certain areas. Let's say we've got a guy that's really really tight and the coaches say 'We've got this guy that's tight, he's just really, really stiff,' well he got stiff over 18 years. You know what I mean? You've got a small window to be able to help correct that if you're able to at all. It's going to take a tremendous amount of coaching and teaching and also output on their end to make that happen."
You have a hard time convincing a guy like Tyler Howell's size that yoga is something he needs to do?
RC: "For some of them, yes. But last summer when we did it, that was something that he embraced as well. When we talk about why we do what we do, and we talk about it all the time, we're not going to put anything in there that's not going to make you a better football player or reduce the likelihood of you getting injured out on the field. So if we have something that's offered up, you can rest assured that we feel like it's important for you. That's where it comes down to we're selling ourselves every day and we're developing that relationship and when a guy believes, 'Hey, if they give it to us, it's going to make me better and I find value in that,' it's a whole lot easier to go, 'Hey, we've got yoga at three o'clock this afternoon, I hope that you take advantage of that.' Again, that's one of those things that's a voluntary deal, but you'd be surprised the number of guys that I feel like will show up for that. We find it valuable which means that they find it valuable."
I'm going to give you a chance to be a salesman here. The new facility that's going up, Barry's talked a lot about how important that is. From your perspective, how important is upgrading facilities and is there anything specifically it will allow you to do?
RC: "I'd be hard pressed to think that I'd be able to explain how big I think that is. The facility we have now is a nice facility. The facility that we will have will be a great facility. There are a number of things that, when you've got a shared facility, you can't go 'I need this for football and it's going to take up a whole bunch of space that can't be utilized by other teams.' You've got to be able to play fair in the sandbox. Not only will the square footage be significantly more, but the ability to put in some things that will be specific to what we're doing with football. What I like, things that are specific to the football training stimulus, we can put those things in there."
I know the building has to actually go up, but will you be pretty involved in the process of what you need in there? Are they coming to you asking for your input?
RC: "Absolutely. And of course, I'm working off of what Coach Odom's talking about. Part of those things, he'll defer to me, 'Hey, Cutch, what do you want in this area?' But then there's some things that the overall vision and mission of what we're trying to accomplish here that need to be in that facility. From the way that it's laid out, you want it to flow well, you want to be able to get from here to the nutrition area, to be able to get to their locker room, to be able to get to their meeting rooms, to be able to get to their rec room. Also it's got to be an area, I don't want to say it's an arms race...
I did see this morning Georgia has a DJ in their locker room, so...
RC: "Again, you're selling 16, 17, 18 year olds to come to your campus. A&M, walked in there and they had a barber shop in there. I don't know how to put this, I don't think that's Mizzou. I think an efficiency is one of the things that we hang our hat on and more of a blue collar work ethic. That doesn't men you've got to wear socks with holes in them and weather-worn t-shirts, but I'd be hard-pressed to think that some of the amenities that some of the other places are offering up is anything that fits with the culture that not only has been established here, but that we're looking to continue to establish even more. This is a blue-collar place that has real dudes that if we do it the right way, we'll stomp. It's not for lack of amenities. The facility, when you walk in now, the way that I envision it, the way that I think some of the other people involved in the process envision it is it's a stunner when you walk in, but you didn't just make it rain just to make it rain. It'll be sexy, but not...
Not over the top? Is that fair?
RC: "There will be some things I think will be. But it's not like where you're like, 'Come on, man. Money went to that?' I don't think anybody could walk in there and be like, 'Come on man.' There are those places. And that's not who we are. It's just not. I'd like to think that the student-athletes and the players that we've got here are reflective of that. You look at some of the dudes that have rolled through here and will play at the next level and it's less of a 'look at me' and more of 'I'm really good because I've really worked hard. Nothing was ever given to me.' I think that's something that the community and the fans embrace of that's a hell of a football player, but it's also a likable individual.'