Joe Glenn can’t prove it, but he knows Marty English was behind the cover-up. He always was.
Sioux Falls, S.D. September 1997. Glenn, then the head coach of the Division II national champion Northern Colorado Bears, gave his team a 10 p.m. curfew the night before their game at Augustana and warned players he’d be doing bed checks.
Ten o’clock strikes and like clockwork, Glenn is walking the hotel hallway. With every knock, a door opens and the coach is greeted by a face ready to crash for the night — until he reached the room of linebacker Scott Zimmerman.
Knock.
No answer.
Knock, knock.
Still no answer.
The knocks turned to pounds. “Open up in there!”
Finally, the door opened.
“Oh, sorry, coach. We didn’t hear you,” Zimmerman, a former wrestler at Standley Lake High School, said short on breath. “We were — uh — wrestling.”
Twenty years later, telling the story with a hint of laughter, Glenn has never forgotten that lie.
“I’ll tell you what happened. Scott and his roommates were staying on the first floor and jimmied the window to sneak out. They were cruisin’ for a boozin’ and being dumb college kids and Marty found out and tried to get them back without me knowing. Knowing Marty, I can just picture him standing there in the parking lot shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ as they dove back through the window, one by one.”
Said Zimmerman: “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
In many ways, English, Colorado State’s defensive coordinator, is exactly what he appears to be – your middle school gym teacher reincarnate. A man in his mid-50s who wears a hat and a whistle with a physical build that intimidates even his most veteran players. When he stalks the sidelines, he doesn’t smile. He never pulls punches and rarely holds grudges. He tells you how he feels and moves on.
CSU safety Jake Schlager called him a “junkyard dog” and English wants his players to be the same.
“Coach’s whole approach is that every game is a street fight. He challenges us every game to have that fighter’s mentality and to invite the other team into the back alley with us,” CSU linebacker Evan Colorito said. “He gives us these intense pregame speeches — a lot of it you probably shouldn’t print — but it fires us up and everyone respects the hell out of him.”
But there really is more to him than that. It took more than his formulaic question of “are you tough?” during in-home visits with prospective student-athletes that built English a reputation among high school coaches in Colorado (nearly every one he knows by name) and had even the likes of legendary CSU coach Sonny Lubick afraid to cross him on the recruiting trail, noting that if English got to a kid first, there was no way the Rams would be able to sign him.
Some of it was built in the connections his father, Ron, a longtime prep coach in the Denver area, had, yes. But there was also a way he carried himself. A family man who was genuine when he told players he’d take care of them. Schlager, Colorito, lineman Jake Bennett and receiver Olabisi Johnson all said the moment English began recruiting them, they knew where they wanted to play college football.
“When I tell you Marty is a man’s man, a real tough guy, I mean that in every sense of what a man should be — someone who will take care of their family,” Glenn said. “When I left Northern Colorado to be the head coach at Montana, I tried to bring Marty with me. But his dad, a great friend of mine, was ill and Marty wanted to be with him.
“If there’s someone you should try to model yourself after, it’s Marty English. He’s one of the toughest SOBs I’ve ever known, but he loves his wife Suzie so much, he loves his kids and I’ve never seen anyone relate to players the way he can. I hate to see his career come to an end, but I can’t blame him. You have no idea how hard it is on a coach to be taken away from his family the way this job does. Sometimes, a family man needs to enjoy his family.”
English retired Saturday following the Rams’ 31-28 loss to Marshall in the New Mexico Bowl, ending a 30-year coaching career that never saw him leave the Front Range.
While most coaches are constantly moving their families across the country early in their careers, English has been at three schools: Northern Colorado, Wyoming and CSU.
He won’t lie and say his final season was near his greatest. His players admit it, too. The Rams ranked 91st nationally in total defense this fall by allowing 425.8 yards per game and 73rd in points allowed (27.5), a far cry from English’s nine years at Wyoming under Glenn and Dave Christensen when the Cowboys often ranked nationally in the top 10 in various defensive categories.
But not having English, the man, around the locker room next year is something nearly everyone at CSU, head coach Mike Bobo included, said they will miss.
“Right now, I hope he just enjoys his family,” Lubick said. “I don’t know how much of myself I see in Marty — he’s bigger and stronger than me and looks like he lifts a few more weights than I do — but walking away from the game for good is hard. I hope it’s not a full-time retirement, because he has so much to offer. He’s young. I have a feeling he’ll be back, because no one does it the way Marty does and takes care of kids the way Marty does.”
Sneaking them back through a hotel window, shouting “Go! Go! Go!”