Ex-CEO Moglia tackles coaching

LINCOLN — Joe Moglia wrapped up his eight-year stint as a corporate CEO last year.

Now he wants to be a college football coach.

A head coach.

At a Division I school.

Next year.

Even after achieving business success that most people can only fantasize about, Joe Moglia, 60, still has an unfulfilled dream.

Since July, he has been spending about 70 hours a week as an unpaid volunteer with the University of Nebraska Athletic Department, providing career and life skills advice to young athletes while soaking up as much information as he can about football and coaching today.

He abandoned coaching 25 years ago, when family circumstances led him to Wall Street. Moglia had spent 16 years as a high school and college football coach, including two assistant coaching stints at Division I colleges, before taking a job with Merrill Lynch in 1984.

The chairman and former chief executive officer of TD Ameritrade, Moglia recognizes it will take an unconventional thinker to give him another shot at coaching, especially when he's been out of the game so long.

The traditional apprenticeship as an assistant coach before moving into the top job is not an option, Moglia said. Today, there are people who are far better qualified than he to serve in specialized positions such as defensive coordinator or offensive coordinator.

His expertise, he said, comes in managing large groups of people in high-stakes ventures. Those are the skills Moglia believes would make him a good head coach.

“I'm at a point right now where I could do a lot of different things with my life,” Moglia said. “One thing I think I would be most effective at, and get the greatest satisfaction from, would be coaching football again.”

Although he has powerful allies in his huddle — Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne and Husker coach Bo Pelini — he's still an underdog in this game.

Moglia has been an impressively successful businessman, but it will be tough for him to break into big-time college coaching, said Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association in Waco, Texas.

Teaff has met Moglia and said his talent and passion for football are obvious.

But university presidents and athletic directors at top football schools are under great pressure to keep their programs successful, and they're reluctant to take a risk on an unknown coach.

“Athletic directors and presidents are looking as much as they can for proven coaches. There's a lot at stake for the university and other programs,” Teaff said.

Osborne set up Moglia with the ultimate job-shadow opportunity, while Pelini agreed to allow Moglia to observe the football team and sit in on coaches' meetings.

In return, Moglia serves as a “life skills consultant,” working with athletes from all 23 NU sports. He attends team meetings and seminars and counsels individual athletes about career planning and money management.

With the exception of a Thursday evening dinner date with his wife, Amy, most of his week is spent with the football team and the coaches, including the 14-hour game reviews and prep sessions each Sunday.

Coaches and Athletic Department officials have turned to Moglia for management and leadership advice. Students have sought him out as a mentor. He has helped sell Nebraska to potential recruits and their families.

Baseball coach Mike Anderson enlisted Moglia to teach players how to pick stocks as they play a simulated investment game.

Moglia wowed 600 Nebraska athletes when he spoke to them during the annual departmentwide meeting in September, said Keith Zimmer, assistant athletic director in charge of life skills.

Loosely patterned after “The Pursuit of Happyness” movie in which actor Will Smith portrays Chris Gardner, a San Francisco Bay Area man who went from being homeless to a stockbroker, Moglia's presentation featured his own story about growing up on the streets of New York City and his quest to find personal fulfillment.

Assistant Athletic Director Jeff Jamrog, in charge of football operations, said the arrangement is mutually beneficial.

“He'll be better prepared if he gets a head coaching job because of his experience with us,” Jamrog said. “Certainly we're a better program because of some of the things he's shared with us.”

Moglia was on the career path toward a Division I head coaching job when he ended his coaching career in early 1984. He was in his third year as defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, having helped coach the Big Green to back-to-back Ivy League championships.

He got a call from Tom Olivadotti, then defensive coordinator for Howard Schnellenberger's Miami Hurricanes, who had just upset Nebraska for the national championship.

Olivadotti suggested that Moglia apply for a staff position with the Hurricanes and asked him to meet with Schnellenberger. Moglia said that post could have eventually led to a head coaching job.

But Moglia was a newly divorced father. Moving to Miami would have meant hundreds of miles of separation from his four children, then ages 14 to 6.

At Dartmouth, he had lived for two years in an unheated storage loft above the football office because he couldn't afford to maintain two households on an assistant coach's salary.

So Moglia turned down the Miami offer and instead took a job with Merrill Lynch.

“It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made in my life, to say I couldn't consider the Miami job because it didn't solve my problems with my children and family,” he said.

It wasn't the first time Moglia had to deal with challenging circumstances.

He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, the eldest of five children of immigrant parents, neither of whom attended high school.

Moglia said that he was part of a gang while growing up and that two of his best friends died in high school — one from a drug overdose and the other after being shot by police during a liquor store robbery.

To help keep him out of trouble, his parents enrolled him at Fordham Prep, an all-boys Jesuit high school affiliated with Fordham University.

An athlete in high school, he had hoped to go away to college and play football and baseball, but his father became seriously ill during Moglia's senior year and he needed to stay closer to home.

After his 1967 graduation, he enrolled at Fordham University, paying for his freshman year by driving a taxicab and a truck for the post office and working in his father's fruit store.

His father recovered, and Moglia hoped to resume his athletic career in his sophomore year, but he married at 19 after he and his girlfriend learned they were going to have a baby.

While studying for his bachelor's degree in economics at Fordham, he worked as a coach at Fordham Prep. After getting his degree, he took a head coaching job at Archmere Academy in Delaware at age 22.

He later coached at Penncrest High School in Media, Pa., and as an assistant at Lafayette College, a Division I school in Easton, Pa.

Then Wall Street beckoned. Moglia spent 17 years at Merrill Lynch, serving on the company's executive committee for both institutional and private client business.

In 2001, as Omaha-based Ameritrade and the rest of the technology sector struggled in the wake of the dot-com bubble, he was chosen as the company's new CEO after a nationwide search.

Ameritrade grew exponentially during his eight years at the helm, increasing its market capitalization from about $700 million to nearly $11 billion.

In 2008, Ameritrade was thriving while other Wall Street firms were struggling in the economic downturn. Moglia, who collected $21 million that year, decided it was time to step aside as CEO.

People began approaching him with new career opportunities. Moglia got calls from Wall Street and offers from the financial media. He pondered writing a book on leadership — he'd previously authored one on coaching and one on investing.

Then, in late summer 2008, someone called to ask whether he would be interested in the Yale University football coaching job if it should come open.

“I didn't lose one second of sleep thinking about the business or media opportunities,'' he said, “but I couldn't stop thinking about the football.”

Moglia, a donor to Husker athletics, sought advice from Osborne. He eventually applied for the Yale job, but it went to a more traditional candidate. Osborne arranged for Moglia to speak with an official about the University of Massachusetts coaching job, which went to an internal candidate.

Moglia decided he needed to brush up his résumé.

“There are no examples of someone who's been away from coaching for 20 years who actually came back to it,” he said.

“I had to work to develop more of a network, more of a base, so that people in the athletic community and athletic directors around the country would become more familiar with my story. And I needed an opportunity to learn how much the game has changed from when I coached.”

Moglia is grateful that Osborne and Pelini allowed him to observe Nebraska athletics and the football program. His participation will continue until after this season ends and recruiting efforts slow — likely in late January.

Former Husker linebacker Blake Lawrence is among the students who have sought Moglia's counsel.

After suffering his fourth concussion in 18 months, Lawrence, 20, faced the end of his career earlier than many college athletes.

“It was always in my mind that I would just play football until I couldn't anymore,” Lawrence said. “That day came sooner than I thought.”

Thanks to college credits he earned while still in high school, Lawrence is on track to get his bachelor's degree in marketing next month, after 2½ years at Nebraska. He'll enter a master's of business administration program in January, using the remaining 2½ years of his football scholarship to pursue an advanced degree on the Lincoln campus.

Lawrence has been interested in business since he was in high school and has his own Ameritrade investing account. He quickly made Moglia's acquaintance and refers to him fondly as “Coach Joe.”

As he transitions out of his athletic career, he said, it has helped him to watch the older man's ability to shift career goals and to pursue a new dream at this stage of his life.

“I believe Coach Joe loved business and loved what he did, but his true passion is football — and to see him get back into it is inspiring,” Lawrence said.

Osborne, who has known Moglia for several years, believes Moglia stands a good chance of landing a desirable coaching job.

“Joe is organized, systematic and has the ability to get things done,” Osborne said in a statement about Moglia's role with the Athletic Department.

Moglia said it's too early to say where he might end up. He said he actually knows more about football now than he did about online trading and computer technology when he took the job with TD Ameritrade.

“Everything Bo does in his program is centered around accountability and a boy becoming a man,” he said. “To me, that's what it's all about. … The impact I think I can have on a 20- or 21- year-old is something that gives me phenomenal satisfaction.”

Contact the writer:

402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com

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