Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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and we'll enjoy that same kind of rela- tionship here at Notre Dame." When asked about his coaching phi- losophy, VanGorder provided little detail. While getting acquainted with Notre Dame's personnel, he said he bases his defensive approach on the type of players a unit offers. "I've got those things that kind of hold my philosophy together, but I think that my experience tells me to always do a good job evaluating the current talent, the current players and then make deci- sions that best play to their strengths," VanGorder said. "So that's the process that we'll be in right now. I think that no matter what you run schematically, the idea of our players' enthusiasm for what they're doing and their standards and expectations are relative to whatever we do, whether it's 4-3, 3-4, all those kinds of things that we like to talk about. "I'm built to stop the run." VanGorder's coaching career spans 25 years, with most of the past decade spent in the SEC (Georgia and Auburn) and the NFL (Jacksonville Jaguars, At- lanta Falcons and New York Jets). Twice he has served as head coach: at his alma mater, Wayne State, from 1992-94 and most recently at Georgia Southern in 2006. He said each of those experiences — and the figures he encountered along the way — have helped mold him into the defensive coordinator Kelly hired. "It was a blast, and you had to learn how to really manage a game," Van- Gorder said of coaching at Wayne State with 11 scholarships to offer and no full-time assistant coaches. "Games for the most part, you were mismatched in terms of personnel, and you had to re- ally build a certain pride about who we were and what we represented to over- achieve, and we were able to do that at Wayne State. "Georgia Southern was a completely different deal, and I gained a total re- spect for the idea of really what it takes [to build a program]. … It was a triple- VanGorder worked with head coach Brian Kelly from 1989-91 at Grand Valley State and boasts more than 30 years of coaching experience. PHOTO BY JOE RAYMOND