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With coaching experience gained from directing bowl-winning offenses,
Butch Jones tackles the head coaching job at Central Michigan University.
Blowing out your knee is not usually a good career move especially if you’re a quarterback.
For Butch Jones (B’90), however, an injury that ended his days as a player started him on a career path that took him to the Sugar Bowl and Gator Bowl as offensive coach for the West Virginia Mountaineers, and now to the head coaching position with Central Michigan University’s Chippewas.
From Bulldog to Buccaneer
As offensive coach at West Virginia, Jones helped the Mountaineers to victories in the Sugar Bowl and Gator Bowl. Photo by Pete Emerson, West Virginia University.
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As a freshman, Jones walked on the Bulldog squad having played quarterback at Saugatuck High School and lettered twice before getting injured. “When my playing career ended I started being a student-coach for Barry Fagan, who was offensive coordinator at the time,” says Jones from his new office near CMU’s Kelly/Shorts Stadium. “If he wouldn’t have hired me and given me the chance to come back to Ferris, I don’t know if any of the rest of my career would have happened. My Ferris roots helped put me where I am today.”
Jones harnessed the drive he learned on the field and applied it to his pursuit of coaching. A longtime Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, Jones contacted the team about becoming an intern. “I have an aunt and uncle down there who owned a business,” Jones explains. “I would go down there to visit and was persistent in calling. Then one summer they called and asked me to work training camp. I dropped what I was doing back home and went there. They kept giving me more and more jobs and more and more responsibility, so it just kind of took off from there.”
On Bulldog game days during his senior year, he would work as a student-coach then fly out to where the Buccaneers were playing. When Jones says, “It was a pretty neat experience,” that’s clearly an understatement.
From Buccaneer to Bulldog
In addition to gaining invaluable experience, Jones’ work with Tampa Bay also led to making an important contact.
He became close with the Buccaneers’ defensive coordinator at that time, fellow Michigan native Doug Graber. When Graber left the Bucs to become head coach at Rutgers University, he recruited Jones to be a part of his coaching staff.
Jones spent the 1990-91 season as a graduate assistant at Rutgers before becoming offensive coordinator at Wilkes University in 1992. At Wilkes, he directed an offense that led the Middle Atlantic Conference in both scoring offense and total offense in 1993, a season in which it won a conference title and qualified for the NCAA Division III Playoffs.
In 1995 Jones returned to Big Rapids when Coach Jeff Pierce tapped him to become the Bulldogs’ running backs coach before promoting him to offensive coordinator for the 1996 season. Jones continued to coach quarterbacks and wide receivers along with his new offensive coordinator duties. The Bulldogs’ league-leading offense helped the team to a second consecutive conference championship and advanced the squad to the NCAA Division II quarterfinals.
A People Business
Jones’ current position at CMU is not the first one he’s held there. He served in Mt. Pleasant in a variety of roles from 1998-2004, including being offensive coordinator from 2001-03. In 2000, before Jones’ arrival, the Chippewas averaged just 271.5 yards and 12.5 points per game; in 2001, Jones’ offense racked up 379.5 yards and 22.8 points per game.
More than skill and conditioning skills, watching game tapes or diagramming plays, Jones talks about the personal side of coaching and what it takes to put up those kind of impressive numbers.
“We’re in a people business. It’s all about building relationships; it’s all about trust,” he says. “When you have players’ trust, when they feel you have their best interests at heart, they’ll do anything for you. The big thing is setting a level of expectation that you’re committed to reaching, and then it’s getting to know each player individually.”
Jones may have gotten his appreciation for the personal touch from his parents.
“They were at all my games,” says Jones. “My dad was chief of police for 30-some-odd years in Saugatuck, and he was at every event. When I was at Ferris we played a JV game at Grand Rapids Community College. It was snowing, raining, windy, cold. There were probably 10 people in the stands two of them were my mom and dad. I’ve never forgotten that.”
This spring, Jones let fans at Central Michigan University choose plays during the Chippewas’ Spring Football Game. Photo by Robert Barclay, Central Michigan University.
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The Jones Era
Today, Jones faces the challenge of maintaining his own involvement with his family while running an NCAA Division I-A football program. The two are not necessarily incompatible even at times when the job demand is the greatest.
With Jones as offensive coach, the West Virginia Mountaineers played in the 2006 Sugar Bowl in Atlanta (which hosted the game due to Hurricane Katrina) and in the 2007 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla. The bowl-game experience is part reward for a season well-played, part stress at competing on a national stage, part media frenzy and good old-fashioned hoopla.
“It’s probably a better time for our families, because it’s a vacation for them. It’s a great thing for the kids to experience,” says Jones. “For the Sugar Bowl, we get off the plane in Atlanta, and there are six motor coaches all painted up with our team logos, and there are all these police escorts. But for me one of the biggest thrills was when I walked on the field and there’s Lynn Swan waiting to talk to me! I’m thinking, ‘Here’s a guy I remember seeing, number 88, running down the sidelines,’ and here I am speaking to him!”
In neither case did Jones’ offense disappoint. The Mountaineers bested the Georgia Bulldogs 38-35 in the 2006 Sugar Bowl in Atlanta and in the 2007 Gator Bowl topped the Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets in Jacksonville, Fla., also by a score of 38-35, after coming back from an 18-point deficit. “What I’ve experienced competing on the national level, especially the last two years at West Virginia, winning the Sugar Bowl and then winning the Gator Bowl, and being involved with a program that is one of the top 10 in the nation, has been a great experience for me. It’s helped prepare me for my new position.”
At Central, Jones says his goal is to build on the existing program and take it to the next level. “We want to compete year-in and year-out for the Mid-American Conference championship, and make sure we graduate our players and develop the complete student-athlete.” To do that, Jones will do more than prowl the sidelines during the game. In fact, he says that some of most difficult aspects of coaching are those parts the public rarely, if ever, sees.
“There’s the recruiting part of it, only being home on weekends from December through February,” says Jones. “There’s all the speaking engagements, fundraising, planning practices, reviewing what you did last season, the academic monitoring of your players and taking an interest in their lives outside of football. My goal is to give Central a product they can be very proud of, to get better every day and strive for excellence. What happens after that happens.”
The Jones era of Chippewa football begins on Sept. 1 with a road game against Kansas. CMU opens at home with a game against Toledo on Sept. 8.
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