Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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where have you gone? South Bend. "Having the fifth year and deciding on what to do with it from an academic and an athletic perspective was essential," said Spruell, who now oversees 14,000 employees as a vice chairman for Deloitte, an international accounting and business consulting firm. "It couldn't have worked better to have an additional year for pursuing my academic interests and then the special year that we had to continue the momentum of building a strong program on the football field." This summer the Northeast Ohio native continued his upward climb at Deloitte. He returned to the Midwest to manage the massive company's central division and its hub in Chicago. The move felt like a homecoming. "As I told people, if I haven't lived in a city in the Midwest or worked in one on a project, I probably played in a football game there," Spruell said. Spruell and his family spent the last five years in New York, where he was the global managing director of the firm's financial advisory division. He traveled to every continent but Australia in that role. He also served as the chief of staff for Barry Salzberg, who was the company's national chief executive at the time. Spruell said his relationship with Salzberg and other mentors within the company have made a major impact on his rise to a position of leadership. The two first met when Spruell was working in Houston — he's been with the company for 17 years — and was urged by a colleague to do a better job of networking with people in management. The colleague gave Spruell a list of five higher-ups he should try to meet. That's when his football training kicked in. "I'm a very coachable person, and that goes back to the history of playing sports," he said. "Barry Salzberg happened to be one of the five people on the list. He was from North Carolina, so we had some common interest connecting from traditional schools. The rest of the story has been magic." Called To Captaincy The beginning of Spruell's story, his first chance to the feel the pressure of leadership, starts on an airplane somewhere about the western half of the United States. The Irish were busy celebrating one of their first monumental wins under first-year head coach Lou Holtz in 1986. Notre Dame upset rival USC earlier that day in a 38-37 come-from-behind victory. The Irish offensive line paved the way for 208 rushing yards, and the offense scored three times in the fourth quarter to beat the 17th-ranked Trojans. The win put a positive spin on a 5-6 record for the year, Notre Dame's second consecutive losing season. The coaching staff pulled Spruell, the starting right tackle, and Lanza aside on the plane and let them know they had been selected as the team's captains for the following season. Spruell was one of the quieter upperclassmen on the team and said he was a little surprised when he first heard about his new job. His lead-by-example mentality ended up meshing well