Sir Purr
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- Mar 16, 2019
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Whitaker wears athletic footwear on the fields for one very practical reason. He once fell flat on his assistant while making a point.
"At any moment, I could bust out in a full sprint, and I'd hate to be running and not having anything underneath me," he said with a laugh. "So I definitely wear them every day."
He said the spill in question came when he was coaching at Division-III Texas Lutheran, and he vowed that day: "This is never happening to me again."
Shortly after that, he fell into something even better.
While helping teach at a clinic in San Angelo, Tex., Whitaker met Rhule and defensive coordinator Phil Snow.
Weeks later, Whitaker applied to become a graduate assistant at Baylor, establishing the link that brought him to the Panthers staff.
The influence of Snow is obvious. After sprinting to coach his players, Whitaker runs back nearly as quickly to the veteran coordinator to get his own coaching — on how he's doing his new job.
"When you have a guy like Coach Snow in the building, it would be crazy not to want to be critiqued by him," Whitaker said. "I love when he's around me. When I finish coaching players, I ask him, 'How can I do better at this. How can I teach this better?' At the end of the day, I don't want to be a regular coach, I want to be an elite coach. I've got a few great examples right here.
"Basically, I have to have my mind where my feet are. It would be nice to be like Coach Rhule one day, but I know in order to get to that point, I have to be able to digest everything he's telling me and be process-oriented. Whatever job I have at that moment, be elite at that job right now."
Rhule can clearly provide a good role model in that regard.
He recalled his year as an assistant offensive line coach with the Giants. On that staff was new Panthers quarterbacks coach Sean Ryan, who worked his way up through quality control, offensive assistant, and receivers coach jobs before working with quarterbacks at multiple stops.
When Rhule looks at teams he admires, like the Patriots, he sees several home-grown coaches who worked their way from the grunt jobs into better ones.
And as Rhule grew into his job, he wants to make sure others have that chance as well.
"That's kind of our process, really," Rhule explained. "They learn from the ground up, they do the entry-level stuff, and then as they master that role, they take on more responsibility. That's the way we work. When you have a great leader like Phil, they learn the right way, learn how to do everything, and learn how to do it at a high level.
"That's the plan we have in place. We have these young coaches, we give them responsibilities, as they master them, we keep growing them. We don't want to always go out and hire outside coaches. We want guys to learn the Panther way and go from there."