By Pete Williams

Congrats to my alma mater, the University of Virginia, for hiring the right guy as football coach. Mike London is the best choice for any number of reasons.

There’s a tendency of some to wonder if London will be an Al Groh disciple, yet another micromanaging, just-coach-the-team, control freak to fall from the Parcells/Belichick coaching tree.

That’s a ridiculous notion. Not just because London in his introductory remarks in Charlottesville said he’ll allow assistant coaches to speak to the media. Not because he has no use for the spread offense or Groh’s beloved 3-4 defense. Not because, unlike Groh, he knows his way around the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Nope, it’s because London is more than a football coach, as detailed in this Washington Post story last August. He’s a father of seven who early in his career spent three years as a cop in Richmond chasing drug dealers.

You get the impression London will prepare players for the NFL, if they’re so qualified, but won’t construct his program like an NFL prep school as Groh did. You get the impression the ex-cop will have zero tolerance for the knuckleheads and miscreants that were so much a part of Groh’s tenure.

You get the impression London knows every nook and cranny of football talent in the state, but will bring in only players who will fit the school in terms of character and academics, guys like native Virginians Chris Slade, Chris Long, Terry Kirby, Tiki and Ronde Barber, Herman Moore, Shawn Moore, and Heath Miller.

You get the impression London will be more of a speak-softly, tough-love kind of guy like Tony Dungy. Perhaps it’s appropriate London became Virginia’s coach less than 24 hours after Dungy ripped the NCAA for its lack of African-American head coaches.

I’ve been around a lot of coaches and managers in my 22-year sports writing career and the two I’ve been most impressed with are Dungy and Terry Holland, the last guy to have any long-term success as Virginia’s basketball coach. Both inspired calm and confidence in their teams. Both are level-headed and even-keeled. Both seem like boring guys during interviews, but then you replay the tape and hear something profound and insightful. Both lack that raging ego gene that’s so prevalent among modern coaches and managers. That’s probably why Holland and Dungy retired from coaching at a young age.

Mike London reminds me of those two guys, though he’s clearly his own man.

He seems exactly the man for the job.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Sports Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.