Jordan makes coaches jobs easier
As the Jayhawks Director of Personnel Jeff Jordan explains it, David Beaty made the right choice going down the path of football.
Jordan first met Beaty back in 1988 at Garland High School. Jordan was the freshman football coach and soccer coach. Jordan described Beaty as a good athlete who could have had a future playing soccer or football. As the story goes Beaty would go onto to be a college football player and now the head coach at Kansas.
Beaty spent four years as an assistant on Jordan’s staff at Garland before taking the head coaching job at North Dallas. Over the years Beaty always returned to Garland to visit.
“He would come back and we would visit and talk,” Jordan said. “We had talked over the years and he would always come in and say when I get a head coaching job I’m going to ask you to come on my staff. You hear that from a bunch of guys but then last spring it came up and happened.”
After Beaty took the job at KU he reached out to Jordan about a position on staff. He wanted to tap into Jordan’s unique background of having experience at the high school level and professional ranks.
Jordan was the head coach at Garland for 28 years where he is the winningest coach in the school’s history. He served as the co-director of the Dallas/Fort Worth Coaches Clinic, the largest high school coaches clinic in the country.
During that time span he also spent 28 years in the Dallas Cowboys organization as a scout. He held that job for 28 years and was part of three Super Bowl champions. He was with the Cowboys when Jerry Jones bought the team.
“We (KU) use some of the same philosophies and film breakdown that we did with the Cowboys,” Jordan said.
Jordan helps oversee a staff that has grown in numbers under Beaty. Catherine Carmichael, Tyler Olker, and Wayd Thomas are some of the people that make up the group who handles recruiting and behind-the-scenes jobs that you don’t read about often.
“Our number one job is to make things easier for the coaches,” Jordan said. “We want to be a self-sufficient unit that can come in and operate so the coaches don’t have to worry about any of the little details other than recruiting and coaching their guys. That’s what we’re working really hard to get to. It has been fun. They are young, excited, and full of energy. I can kind of give them a little bit of an experienced hand.”
Many college programs have grown their quality control staffs over the years. Beaty has been given the resources to do the same. Jordan and the group spend time going over recruits and the roster.
Jordan and his staff spend countless hours breaking down film to help find recruits the Kansas coaches might be interested in.
Jordan referred to a recent statistic there wasn’t one five-star recruit that started in the Super Bowl two years ago.
“All of those ratings can be over-rated,” he said. “We’re just trying to make sure that we’re making good decisions on our recruits. Where we are as a program right now we have to be realistic. Some of those five-star guys we could spend nine months recruiting and in the end, right now, we’re probably not going to get them. One thing we have really worked on is trying to help identify the guys we legitimately can get on, who are good football players.”