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Q&A with albany head coach
greg gattuso BY BRIAN MCLAUGHLIN
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lbany head football coach Greg Gattuso is heading into his eighth season at the helm with the
Great Danes. He led Albany to its first FCS playoff win and a nine-win season in 2019, and in 2016 he led the program to its first win over an FBS opponent (Buffalo). When he took over in 2014, the program had a six-win turnaround the first year, going from one to seven wins. Gattuso was a finalist for the Eddie Robinson Award in 2019, given to the top FCS head coach in the country, and he won CAA Coach of the Year honors. His freshman quarterback in 2019, Jeff Undercuffler, took home CAA Offensive Rookie of the Year and returns this fall as a very experienced sophomore and one of the nation’s leading passers. Gattuso, 59, was a starter on the defensive line for Penn State under Joe Paterno in the early 1980s, playing on the 1982 national championship team. He later went into coaching and won several league titles with Duquesne, sporting a 97-32 record in 12 seasons with eight conference championships before becoming an assistant coach at Pitt under Dave Wannstedt. He later coached at Maryland under Randy Edsall. He was the primary recruiter of a then three-star Pitt signee Aaron Donald, who has gone on to much success in the NFL. A native of Pittsburgh, the coach and his wife Colleen have two daughters, Jacqueline and Kaitlin.
ff Alright, coach, my first question for you is vitally important to ask: Since you’re the head coach of the Albany Great Danes, do you actually have Great Danes as canine pets? Yes, actually we do. We have two -- Blitz and Bruno Sammartino. Bruno is named after a legend in professional wrestling who was from Pittsburgh and one of my heroes when I was a kid. My wife had always wanted a Great Dane, actually. So, when we were on my second interview at Albany, we were driving around, and my wife Colleen said that if I got this job, I’d
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have to get her a Great Dane now. Blitz is a Harlequin Great Dane (the largest breed), and Blitz ran in front of the team when we came out onto the field the first year. We also have two Maine Coons (large cats), a horse, and a Llama. We love animals, as you can tell.
ff When you played at Penn State for coach Joe Paterno in the early 1980s, how would you sum up that experience? I had a fabulous experience at Penn State, and coach Paterno was a huge influence. You know, back then, you didn’t see as many 80,000-seat stadiums with that massive amount of people. Then you go somewhere like Penn State and see that stadium. Wow. It was an incredible experience, and we were ranked in the top 10 pretty much the whole time I was there. I played against Dan Marino and Marcus Allen, and we beat six top-20
teams the year we won the national championship (in 1982).
ff The teams and the coaches you played against form like a Who’s Who of College Football, don’t they? Alabama, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Miami, Southern Cal … and Bear Bryant, Tom Osborne, Howard Schnellenberger, you name it. Did being around Paterno and facing iconic figures like this impact your desire to be a coach one day? You know, not as much as you’d think. I was a policeman for four years after college, and I wanted to be an FBI agent or chief of police. It never dawned on me to play in the NFL, and I wouldn’t say being around the big-name coaches caused me to go into coaching. I got to know Johnny Majors and Jimmy Johnson during recruiting, too, and many others. But if anybody did get me inspired to be a coach, it was my high school coach, Tom Donahoe. He went on to be a general manager in the NFL (Pittsburgh, Buffalo). He was my mentor, and he still keeps in touch with me.
ff Does recruiting drive you nuts, or do you truly enjoy the ins and outs of it? You’ll hear a lot of people complain about recruiting, but I love when I get to meet families and see a young man in his environment. We don’t often get that pick-of-the-litter kid. We may get more of the pick of the litter now that we’re having some success as we’ve grown, and I’ve always tried to recruit guys like that, but also we look for the underrated guys. When I was at Pitt, Aaron Donald was a hidden gem (signing class of 2010). We love to find guys like Aaron. When someone loves a kid, whether it’s
