Levi Edwards
Over the following few weeks, Raiders.com is publishing a sequence of Q&As with the Silver and Black’s place coaches.
Next up is quarterback coach Mike Sullivan. The former defensive again at Army is getting into his twenty first season of teaching within the NFL. His prior stops included the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Denver Broncos, Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants. He gained two Super Bowls (XLII, XLVI) with the Giants, the primary as their broad receivers coach and the second as their quarterbacks coach.
Read via to study extra about Sullivan’s transition from the army to the NFL and the way he stays centered in life.
Levi Edwards: As somebody who performed at West Point (Army), how does your army background form you as a person and a coach?
Mike Sullivan:“There’s so much discipline and structure and you learn early on that in order to be successful it takes collaboration. It takes teamwork in different capacities. What are the ways in which you can be successful in terms of leadership? That’s really what the design of the school is. I served in the Army after graduation and was an infantry platoon leader and Airborne Ranger, all that fun stuff.
“You have a cross part of troops which are from all walks of life, all completely different backgrounds, ethnicities. And within the infantry notably, it is very bodily, emotionally, mentally demanding, and everybody has to work collectively. You should discover a strategy to attain these guys in order that they understand they’re solely going to achieve success if they arrive collectively. I believe having that as a background, it was actually a pure transition into teaching.”
LE: What made you want to pursue coaching?
MS:“I obtained out of the Army and there is this void. I believed the closest factor to that was soccer. I keep in mind having performed at Army for Jim Young and Bob Sutton, who had a protracted profession the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs as a coordinator. I reached out to all of the coaches that had been there making an attempt to get my begin and I truly obtained my begin at a faculty that not has a soccer staff, Humboldt State University in California. I used to be teaching, I used to be taking courses, I used to be educating courses, I used to be maintaining scores of basketball video games. I doing all of it but it surely was good to get into that occupation.”
LE: Who are some of the players that you believe pushed you the most as a coach?
MS:“From a quarterback perspective, I labored with Eli Manning all these years. He was a man that was such a gradual and constant performer and by no means obtained caught up within the exterior noise. Never obtained distracted. This was a man who was at his finest when his finest was wanted. You’re going to stroll right into a quarterback assembly room and I keep in mind taking further time ensuring all my I’s dotted and T’s crossed as a result of he’ll be on it. He was going to ask a query and I higher know the reply.
“I think working with Ben Roethlisberger, just for one year in Pittsburgh, Ben was such a supreme competitor. The mental and physical toughness, the competitiveness he showed, that’s something that stayed with me.”
LE: Growing up in Santa Maria, California, how a lot of an impression did it have on you as a person of Hispanic descent to see Tom Flores and Jim Plunkett characterize the Raiders?
MS:“My grandparents were both born in Mexico and immigrated here. Mexican culture has been a big part of my life growing up. There’s not a large number of Latinos or Mexicans playing or coaching in the NFL, but something about the uniform and John Madden, who at one point coached at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, I became a fan. And then all of a sudden, wow, there’s Tom Flores. There’s a Mexican American. There’s Jim Plunkett and his story. You naturally gravitate towards that because you see someone that comes from a similar background and it made it even more of an incentive to want to root for that team.”
LE: Off the sphere, you follow Japanese jiu-jitsu. How did that come about?
MS:“I started probably about 15 years ago. I had always been drawn to the martial arts and I like the old samurai virtues of Bushid. I did some research and found out the hand to hand combat form of the samurai was traditional Japanese jiu-jitsu. I got to that point in my 40s and I was like, ‘I already jumped out of planes, I don’t want to ride a motorcycle.’ So I said, ‘You know what? Let me do it.'”
LE: Do you’re feeling there’s any correlation between jiu-jitsu and soccer?
MS:“What I found was two things. One, we always talk about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. And putting myself in that position has really helped me try to convey that to players. … It definitely helps from a coaching standpoint because things can be chaotic, things can be uncomfortable, things can look bad but there’s an always an escape. There’s always a counter, there’s always a way if you just relax and breathe and you don’t let your emotions take control. We’ve talked a lot about the translation and that in coaching, you say trust your training. And that’s where I see the parallel. That’s where there’s crossover that I think helps me as a person, keeps me in shape. Secondly, the parallel between finding a solution and getting the job done even when it doesn’t look good that’s jiu-jitsu, that’s football.”
LE: How excited are you to work with this Raiders quarterback room?
MS:“The four of them are all pros. Even though obviously Kirk [Cousins] has the most experience and has been in the most number of games, in terms of their approach, all of them are just focused on getting better. They all just want, fundamentally, no detail to be to small for them to try and master and get better at. They are all trying to help each other out, but they are all open minded and receptive to all the details, all the fundamentals, all the instruction that we have for them to try to have that position be the best it can possibly be. To see that level of commitment and that professionalism, just very gratifying. Makes it a joy to come to work every day.”