USFL 2022: Larry Fedora ready for opportunity as Breakers coach
By RJ Young
FOX Sports Writer
In his first opportunity to act as a professional head football coach in the United States Football League, Larry Fedora is at the beginning of a learning curve almost as steep as that of the incoming freshmen he welcomed throughout his 30-year career in college football.
But instead of the 85 scholarship players he was used to having at stops that included Florida, Oklahoma State and Baylor as an offensive coordinator and Southern Miss and North Carolina as a head coach, he’ll have just 45 players on his New Orleans Breakers roster.
He’s used to having 50 players on each side of the ball and needing to use every inch of his practice field. The Breakers have just 21 players on each side of the ball. And in the USFL, he plans to use just half the field for the entire team and work smarter with professional players because he’s not going to have the kind of depth he’s used to having.
He has spent a lot of time on the phone with NFL coaches to try to be sure he uses his staff’s and players’ time responsibly.
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"That's been the greatest challenge for me at this point is learning how to do that," Fedora said.
Instead of 15 practice days in the spring and a full month of training camp in the summer, he has a little more than one month to prepare for his first game of the season. Instead of 10 on-the-field assistants and more than two-dozen support staffers, he’ll have just six assistants and two quality-control coaches at his disposal.
Instead of a full practice field on which he got to dictate when and where his teams in Hattiesburg and Chapel Hill would practice, he’s sharing a practice site and alternating between morning and afternoon practices with another USFL team as he prepares for the Breakers’ first game of the season against the Philadelphia Stars.
"You’re going to see three to four days of install from us," he said. "We will probably put in 95 percent of the scheme, offensively and defensively and with special teams, in those first four days. We're gonna throw it all at them."
From a hotel room at the Sheraton in Birmingham, Alabama, Fedora told me he’s embracing each of those changes as challenges for him and his team. He and the Breakers' staff began teaching the schemes over Zoom as soon as they knew what their team would look like.
But perhaps none will be more challenging than how his offense will walk up to the line of scrimmage.
The subject came up when he approached Breakers assistant Noel Mazzone about becoming New Orleans’ offensive coordinator. Fedora knew he and Mazzone shared a familiarity and affinity for single-back spread offenses, but that’s all he knew of him — and all Mazzone knew of Fedora, apart from the success each experienced over the course of their careers.
"Well, let’s talk about the basics, a huddle," Mazzone told Fedora.
Fedora was taken aback.
"Well, I haven't been in a huddle since 1996," Fedora said. "I really haven't. I mean, other than a short-yardage or a goal-line situation. I didn't even know how to put a huddle together. So, that's gonna be interesting."
But Mazzone wanted a huddle, and Fedora wanted Mazzone to be his offensive coordinator. So while he'll incorporate some staples of the kind of spread offense Fedora has run for the better part of two-and-a-half decades — running plays out of a shotgun formation, for example — he said they’ll be in a huddle and under center, too.
"We want to be able to bounce in and out of multiple things, trying to keep the defense off-balance," Fedora said.
Larry Fedora reminisces about Air Force and Conference USA coaching days
His player selection is indicative of how versatile and fast he wants the Breakers to be, too. Among the more eye-popping draft selections Fedora made are running backs Larry Rose and T.J. Logan and wide receivers Jay Adams and Johnnie Dixon.
Adams, a former Arkansas State wideout, could be one of the best receivers in this league. He enjoyed an outstanding 2020 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with 79 catches for 1,111 yards and 12 TDs.
Fedora credited his receivers coach, Pat Washington, with identifying Adams in the draft pool of nearly 600 eligible to play in the USFL. He also had a contact to ask about what Adams was like in a locker room and with teammates.
Blake Anderson was head coach at A-State when Adams was there, and Anderson had been Fedora’s offensive coordinator at USM.
"And so, I called Blake," Fedora said, "And he was like, he's like, 'Dude, if you can get Jay Adams, you need to get him.’ He's a freak. He’s got a 40-inch vertical. He's an 11-foot broad jumper and all these different things. And so, we put him as one of the top receivers on our list, and we were able to get him."
Dixon won a national championship at Ohio State in 2014. In 2018, he was voted a team captain and finished with 42 catches for 669 yards with eight TDs as a senior.
In 2019, Dixon ran 4.41 seconds in the 40-yard dash at the NFL’s Scouting Combine.
"I mean, everybody knows what Johnnie Dixon did at Ohio State," Fedora said. "He's another one with unbelievable skill, a 4.3 [40-yard dash] guy. He just got to the NFL and ran into a lot of injuries. And so that's kept him from being the guy is. He's healthy now. He's excited. He can't wait to get on the field."
Rose was named to the AP All-America Third Team after a phenomenal 2015 season at New Mexico State after rushing for 1,651 yards on 240 rushes with 14 TDs. He was selected as the Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year the same year.
But Fedora wouldn’t have been able to pick Rose out of a lineup until he put on the film.
"I didn't know anything about Larry Rose until I started evaluating players that were going to be available in this draft," Fedora said.
It didn’t take Fedora long before he’d seen enough. But he needed to know more about him from someone he could trust.
Scouting the Breakers backfield
Fedora looked up where Rose went to high school and saw he played ball at Fairfield High School in Fairfield, Texas. Rose had rolled over competition in Texas high school 3A competition, with more than 2,200 rushing yards and 49 TDs as a senior in 2013.
One of the teams he ran through was the Navasota Rattlers. The Rattlers were riding a 20-game winning streak when Rose led Fairfield to a resounding 44-24 victory with 238 rushing yards against what was one of the most dominant high school teams in the state.
And the Rattlers were coached by Fedora’s brother, Lee Fedora.
"And so, he started telling me about this kid," Larry Fedora said, "and he's a grown man now. But when I found out about his personality and his smile and his competitiveness and his skill set, it was a no-brainer for me."
Logan is a high school football legend in North Carolina and was a tremendous player for Fedora’s Tar Heels. In a game for the state title, he led the Northern Guilford Nighthawks to a 64-26 victory over Charlotte Catholic with 510 rushing yards and eight touchdowns. He rushed for 3,146 yards and 47 TDs as a prep senior.
At UNC, he notched 1,584 all-purpose yards as a senior and threw down the fastest 40-yard dash time (4.37) by a running back at the 2017 NFL Scouting Combine.
"He returned multiple kickoffs for us for touchdowns," Fedora said of Logan at UNC. "He scored a lot of touchdowns from a running back position. You could move him out, and he could catch balls from the receiver position. Just a very, very skilled guy."
Logan also possesses not just a knowledge of what Fedora wants the offense to be capable of but also knowledge of the coach himself. In a season where training camp began last Tuesday and kickoff is fewer than three weeks, Fedora will rely on Logan to help acclimate the team to his style and communicate his coaching to the team.
Now that they’re off and practicing, Fedora plans to have a ball.
"To have the opportunity to be on the ground floor of a professional football league was just too hard to pass up," he said.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.
