ALLIANCE, Ohio — Long before Nick Sirianni was swearing and posing in front of the TV cameras during a playoff win as the head coach of the 15-win Philadelphia Eagles, he was a 23-year-old defensive backs coach at his alma mater.
Larry Kehres was running a championship factory at Mount Union, not a clinic for aspiring coaches. That one became a byproduct of the other was more than coincidence, but it was never the intended result. Standards were high, and even offseason brainstorming sessions turned competitive. If you know that Kehres compiled a record of 332-24-3 and won 11 NCAA Division III national championships in his time as Mount Union’s head coach, none of that is surprising.
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If you guessed that Sirianni carried himself with a certain level of self-confidence back then, too, you’d also be correct.
“Sirianni gets up in front of the room and starts saying that we play our cornerbacks way too far off of the opposing receivers,” said Vince Kehres, Larry’s son and the current co-defensive coordinator at the University of Toledo. “He runs through this list of things we should be doing differently and why we’re giving up too many big plays. We had been a top-10 defense in the country, probably gave up 10 touchdowns the whole (previous) season, and now it’s mid-January. This guy who’s coached two years is up there laying out things he thinks I did wrong.
“Looking back now, my dad was giving us the platform. We’d have these meetings and give the presentations as his way of coaching the coaches and kind of prepping for future opportunities without ever saying that’s what it was. This one was right after my first year as defensive coordinator and we had just won the national championship, so obviously I’m thinking I’m a genius.
“Then Nick gets up and starts challenging me. I remember sitting there with my notebook thinking, ‘I’m gonna kill this kid.'”
Sirianni survived the presentation and the aftermath. Before last weekend’s divisional-round game at Lincoln Financial Field, Vince Kehres and Jason Candle — then Mount Union’s wide receivers coach and now Vince’s boss at the University of Toledo — were on the Eagles’ sideline as Sirianni’s invited guests.
In 2005, the 20-somethings working under Larry Kehres for salaries in the neighborhood of $20,000 per year were trying to help their alma mater win, which at Mount Union had long been the only intended — and acceptable — result.
There were other perks to working under the elder Kehres, who’s now a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. The discount pass from nearby Tannehauf Golf Club was a really nice one, even if time to play was limited once football season began. On-the-job tutoring from Kehres was a longer-lasting perk.
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“We were all trained well,” Sirianni said. “Sometimes coaching just takes opportunities given. We got breaks, but we were coached — coached as players and coached to coach — by the guy who, in my opinion, could be the best coach in the history of football. I’m not shy to say that. The more and more I learn about coaching, I have more and more respect for the man.
“I think we lost one game when I was coaching at Mount Union, and it just felt like the biggest failure. I don’t know if that explains what it’s like there to an outsider, but in a way it does.”
Siranni is trying to become the first to win the Super Bowl as a head coach while representing a Mount Union program that’s won 13 Division III national titles and has developed a coaching tree that’s long been expanding. Siranni is the most famous of the bunch right now, but he was the fifth assistant from the 2005 Mount Union coaching staff to become a head coach, following Matt Campbell (Iowa State), Candle (Toledo), Vince Kehres (succeeded his father at Mount Union) and Zac Bruney, the head coach at Div. II Wheeling (W.Va.) University.
“Those guys were so young then (in 2005) that I don’t think becoming (head coaches) is something we talked about very often,” Larry Kehres said. “But collectively they were a bright group — and they were all very intense. Nobody was afraid to speak up. Looking back now, it makes sense that a number of them rose quickly and had the makeup you need to have to be the guy to lead a program and be in the front of the room.
“When I think of that time and that staff in particular, I think of things like competitiveness, presence and having a lot of ideas. Believe me, they challenged me — and they challenged each other. And I think kind of combining that mindset with traits of creativity and attention to detail, those are things really good coaches tend to have.”
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All of them have taken different paths, though there have been multiple intersections involving various Mount Union alums. When Campbell left Toledo for Iowa State in Dec. 2015, Candle was promoted from offensive coordinator to replace him. When Larry Kehres retired in 2013, Vince Kehres replaced his father as Mount Union head coach. Under Vince Kehres, Mount Union went 95-6 and won two national championships in seven years before Vince was hired by Candle to be Toledo’s co-defensive coordinator and linebackers coach. Replacing Vince as Mount Union’s head coach was Geoff Dartt, a former Mount Union player, Vince’s brother-in-law and Larry Kehres’s son-in-law.
“I don’t know that any of us ever set a specific goal to become a head coach at the Division I level or certainly not in the NFL, but at Mount Union, we all got good training,” Candle said. “I think through the years and specifically in those years when we were just starting out and coaching together at Mount, we had conversations about what it might be like if we all worked together down the road or if one of us became a head coach.
“But I think it was probably buddies talking more than it was like, ‘OK, here are the steps you have to take if someday you’re going to be the head coach at a big program.’ You’re not going to start climbing the ladder and just magically end up at a well-oiled machine like Mount Union, but the training we had under Coach Kehres gave us all the confidence to believe that when we did take those next steps, we knew what it was going to take to win.”
Another coach from that 2005 Mount Union staff, Matt Caponi, was just hired as defensive coordinator at North Texas after serving as Campbell’s cornerbacks coach at Iowa State. Caponi’s first coaching job was at Mount Union; his second was under Siranni’s brother, Mike, at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. Nick was the third Sirianni brother to play for Larry Kehres at Mount Union.
“All three Sirianni brothers were tall, lean and could grow a beard in 15 minutes,” Larry Kehres said. “A wonderful family, and all of them are good football coaches.”
Last August, Nick Sirianni’s Eagles spent four days in Northeast Ohio for joint practices and a preseason game against the Browns. On the day before the preseason game, Mike Sirianni’s W&J team scrimmaged at Mount Union. Nick Sirianni was able to attend the scrimmage, but in his current job, he was not required to make a presentation on what he saw.
“I love to tell that story, but it was actually a good report he gave that day,” Vince Kehres said. “Nick was a good coach from the first day he ever picked up a whistle. He was raised in football and he wasn’t just football-smart. He loved the work and hated losing, which is a pretty good combo.”
Something strange had happened at Mount Union in 2003 and 2004, Nick Sirianni’s last year as a Mount Union wide receiver and first as an assistant coach.
The Purple Raiders had fallen short of winning a national title, losing in the national championship game in 2003 and in the national semifinal the following season. Before losing to St. John’s (Minn.) in 2003, Mount Union had won six national titles in seven years.
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After two consecutive seasons without adding a Stagg Bowl trophy to the case, Larry Kehres made changes. Campbell, a three-time national champion as a Mount Union defensive end, returned from two years as a graduate assistant at Bowling Green and became the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach. Vince Kehres was promoted to defensive coordinator.
“Two years, now that’s a serious drought at Mount Union,” Campbell said. “So that was the big challenge, and given that we had all played there, it’s one we took personally and seriously. I think we all had goals and we definitely had our own ideas, but the first thing was right in front of us: winning. Every single day, trying to win in practice came first.
“We were challenged every day by Coach (Larry) Kehres. He was on a mission. At Mount Union, good is never good enough. Did Coach Kehres ever sit me down and say ‘do this or remember this for when you become a head coach?’ Not exactly. But I know every day I felt the responsibility of upholding the standard and representing every player and every coach who came before us, and just reaching that standard made us all better.”
Vince Kehres said the daily practice plan would be passed from the desk of the head coach to Campbell to fill in the offense’s plays for starters-vs.-starters periods, then passed to the defensive staff for the defensive calls before it would be finalized and hit the laminator.
“One day my dad calls and starts chewing my ass, screaming at me because he should have had the final practice plan an hour (earlier),” Vince Kehres said. “And I had been done for two hours, so I was confused. That’s when I figured out that Matt was taking it back after I put on the defenses and the defensive calls, then changing the plays for the offense based on what the defense was going to do. How many times he did it, I don’t know. But it was somewhere between blatant cheating and just trying to make me look bad, so I was fired up.”
Said Campbell: “There’s probably a lot of truth in that story. I’m not going to come out and plead guilty, but I wasn’t going to let the defense win.”
Larry Kehres preferred to limit full-speed tackling in practice, and though he said he was “all for the competition,” he warned his young coaches about getting overzealous and risking injury.
“I liked a little conflict,” he said. “I trusted that these guys could stop short of actually killing each other.”
Siranni said he sometimes still hears Larry Kehres in his head in various ways as he goes through a practice week. And he thinks his players hear Kehres’ voice in his own, too, even if they don’t know it.
“Coach Kehres always said it’s about players and putting them in position to succeed,” Sirianni said in 2020 when he was offensive coordinator of the Colts. “It’s not about plays or how cool your plays are. It’s, ‘Hey, let’s put the players in the best position and let’s get them as good as we can fundamentally so they can rise to whatever their ceilings may be.’ That always stuck with me. How are we getting guys better fundamentally? I think that’s one of my strengths as a coach, always stressing that.
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“He never let us be comfortable. No matter how many we won by, he always pushed us. When you continue to go deep in the year, you need that. He just had a way of making every week a challenge and building guys up. Early in the week, it was like, ‘You can’t do anything right. You’re terrible.’ And right about the time we as players were thinking, ‘I hate this guy,’ all of a sudden he’d say we were looking better. Then Thursday or Friday would roll around and he’d have us thinking we might be really good.
“By the time we ran out of that tunnel on Saturday at Mount Union, we believed we were the best team in the world and couldn’t be stopped. I’ve tried to implement that into an NFL schedule with kind of the same approach. When we start the week we stink, and I tell the guys we stink so we’d better work really hard on Wednesday and Thursday. But we get that buildup going, and we start getting everybody to believe, and by Sunday I want our players to run out there thinking we’ve done all the work. Then, it’s time to just go play and win.”
In Sirianni’s final year as a Mount Union player, he caught a touchdown pass and hugged his brother who was watching from the end zone. He was flagged for a personal foul.
“(Twenty years later), I will say it was kind of a cheap one as far as personal fouls go,” Larry Kehres said. “I let him have it anyway.”
Mount Union won that game at Wilmington, 58-0. Sirianni’s touchdown late in the first quarter made it 21-0, but he still incurred the wrath of an angry head coach.
“I come off the field and coach is telling me I embarrassed him,” Sirianni said. “He was telling me he had friends at the game who were high school coaches and he couldn’t tell them that he preached discipline and attention to detail if I was going to be running around getting 15-yard penalties.
“I disappointed Coach Kehres, so all these years later I’m honestly telling you I’m still disappointed I allowed that to happen. It’s a story I’ve told my players often because it really is a great example that details matter, poise matters. Don’t do something stupid because that becomes a habit — and 15, 20 years later you might still be thinking about it.”
What’s now an all-star staff of fast risers and a potential Super Bowl winner was once a bunch of college buddies taking on the real world in hats and headsets, one fall Saturday at a time.
“A combination of young guys really honing in on making this their craft and some real meathead activities,” Campbell said. “Probably the line between the two was sometimes blurred.”
Candle had grown up on a golf course, so he generally won the golf games. Vince Kehres said he used to beat Sirianni in golf until Sirianni “spent an entire summer trying to beat me, and he’s talked about beating me for 15-plus years.” There were wing nights, video game nights and lunchtime basketball games — some to 21, some called at a certain number of bruises and bruised egos.
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“Anyone who thinks Matt Campbell is this reserved, stoic guy never saw him freak out on game point at lunchtime basketball,” Vince Kehres said. “He would lie, cheat and steal to win a pickup basketball game.”
After two years coaching at Mount Union, Sirianni moved on to Div. II Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he coached wide receivers for three years before breaking into the NFL as a quality control coach with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2009. From there, he coached quarterbacks and wide receivers with the San Diego (and Los Angeles) Chargers before becoming offensive coordinator with the Indianapolis Colts in 2018. In 2021, the Eagles hired Sirianni as their head coach.
“When I think back to those early days at Mount Union, I had no idea what was in front of me,” Sirianni said. “I thought coaching was for me, but I was probably too young at the time to say I was definitely going to do it. I remember thinking Matt Campbell was this incredible, dynamic leader. I remember I learned so much from Matt Caponi about coaching. Being around the Kehreses and just in that grind … I guess I thought I’d probably (pursue coaching) but I’d never be as good as those guys. At the time I just had no idea.”
Most of the rest of the group went the college route. Campbell has held summer satellite camps at Mount Union since taking the Iowa State job and still talks frequently — almost daily — to Larry Kehres. Candle’s Toledo team won the Mid-American Conference and Boca Raton Bowl in 2022. When the opportunity to visit Philadelphia last week presented itself, Candle and Vince Kehres shifted their recruiting schedule to be able to go see Sirianni.
“It’s kind of surreal to think Nick’s team is two wins from (winning) the Super Bowl,” Candle said. “And when you think like a coach — as we all do — it’s a great lesson to never put limits on yourself. Just work your butt off and you never know how far you can go.”
If the Eagles go to the Super Bowl, lots more plans will likely be shifted. And when time permits later this spring and summer, the old crew is already texting about a remake of the old cut-throat golf matches — just at a fancier course.
“We’ll let Nick handle that,” Candle said. “Hopefully he’s busy for a few more weeks.”
(Top photo of Nick Sirianni (back row center with towel over shoulder) with the 2005 team courtesy of Mount Union Athletics)
