HAILSTATEBEAT: Q&A With New Football Strength Coach Anthony Piroli

Last week, Bob Carskadon from the HailStateBEAT sat down with Mississippi State football's new strength and conditioning coach Anthony Piroli. Hired by first-year head coach Joe Moorhead, Piroli was an assistant on MSU's strength staff during the 2014 season and spent the last three years as an assistant under the legendary Buddy Morris with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals.

The following is the full question and answer session from that interview.

Bob Carskadon: Let's start by talking about the players. Those who know college football know how important your position is and how much time you spend with the team even when other coaches aren't around. What's your big picture approach, style and philosophy in working with your players?

Anthony Piroli: First and foremost, coming from an NFL background, one of the things that I guess you could say I missed, was the collegiate setting. You really do get a lot more time and a lot more opportunities to develop these players through the years that you know you're going to have them. If you do the right things in those time periods, you can get the most of out of your players. It's really about maximizing their potential. Those are essentially the things were' trying to do here – maximize their potential.

In a nutshell, we're just looking to make better football players out of everyone here. We're not necessarily trying to make a guy look good in a mirror, or make a guy bench press or squat something that he can do in a competition. At the end of the day, are we making them a better football player? Or at least helping bridge the gap between the weight room and the field for the position coaches so that they can then do their job. That's the most generic sense of it, but that's how we look at it from the base level.

BC: As you mentioned, you were in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals the last several years. What were some of the things you learned there that you can apply at this level at MSU?

AP: The greatest thing I saw there was that even at the most elite level, when you're really putting the best product out there on the floor – and what I mean by that is the training program itself is as individualized as possible – and the players actually start to see the benefits on the field, then they're willing to do anything for you. It really doesn't take that much twisting of the arm at that point in time because at the end of the day, all these athletes want to be better at their sport. If they're starting to see those results happen faster and faster, that's pretty much taking care of all the other things that you would normally have to see.

BC: As we've mentioned before, you were at Mississippi State back in 2014 for one of the best seasons in program history, and it was after that year that you went to Arizona to join the staff of the Cardinals. What a lot of people don't know is that through all of that, Joe Moorhead has actually been tracking your career this whole time, and in fact, he wanted to hire you as the head strength coach at Fordham when he was named the head coach there. You of course had a great opportunity in Arizona and went to work with your mentor Buddy Morris, but now that you guys are together, what makes him the kind of coach you want to work for?

AP: Having some common people in the field that we're both close with, whatever he heard about me was obviously positive if he was following that far back. Those are all things that played into this. Coach Joe and I are kind of cut from the same cloth, just hard-working, blue-collar type guys from the same area. Probably the same type of upbringing in our family situation.

I told him right after he got this job that one of the things he would like the most about the players I know in this program is that's exactly who they are. I know it might be the south and people might not see similarities between steel country up north and down here, but that's what I've seen in these players when I was hear last and I already see it now. One thing you don't have to teach Mississippi State football players is effort and how to work hard, because these guys go a million miles an hour all the time. Any strength and conditioning coach or head football coach that could walk into that situation is blessed.

BC: What was it like when you got the call from Moorhead asking you to come work for him and come back to Mississippi State?

AP: Obviously, you never know when it's really going to happen, when the time is going to come, when you're going to get that call. I had a little bit of a hint that the possibility may have existed. I was at home and we had just got done winning a game. It was late for us in Arizona, so I've got to imagine it was really late here. My wife woke me up letting me know my phone was ringing and it was him. He basically just started to talk to me about the program and I was taken aback like, whoa, do I have the job? That was essentially it. At that point in time, I kind of figured out that he was pretty much a straight shooter and we were just going to hit the ground running.

Once we got going it was awesome. Just knowing the type of person that I was going to get to work for, knowing the young guys on this roster when I left were going to be the upperclassmen and the leaders on this team, that was I was going to see out the same guys I saw came in. Just the familiarity, I was really excited about that. I don't think my first head job could have been laid out any better for me.

BC: Speaking of the players, I wanted to ask you about the spring "draft" you had with them. I've seen the video of the draft itself and it looks like it's going to be entertaining. What's the backstory on that?

AP: It's nothing new to college football, but making a team of teams within the program is essentially what we're doing. We kind of let the players themselves have full ownership of it. We've got captains across the entire team picked based on position group and they're essentially the head coach and GM all in one. We had everything broken down for them in the war room based on each player's past performance whether it be classroom related, field related or weight room related so that they can essentially have a statistical breakdown of every player in the draft.

The guys had a lot of fun with it. It's just a good way to allow these captains, per se, to grow into better leaders and that's really what we want across any team we're coaching, to have guys that can lead and players that are going to elevate their play based on that. Everything is scored in our program – in the weight room, academically, recovery-wise. Beyond that, people will also compete with their teams once we get to a team competition phase in late February. Twice a week, they'll be with their teams competing against all the other teams for the duration of the spring.

BC: As we mentioned, you were here in 2014 for an incredibly special season and MSU's rise to No. 1. What are some of your memories of that season?

AP: From the moment that I stepped on campus here and we started to train the guys, it was my first SEC team, I was just wondering, is this how it is everywhere? The amount of talent that I was seeing in the weight room and on the field, through all the competitions that we did then. Obviously, once the season began, it didn't take long to see how special we were. I believe it was week four, we were down in Baton Rouge playing, and we were going into halftime up a couple touchdowns against LSU. You've never heard 100,000-plus people so quiet in your life. I think it was kind of that moment that it clicked that the team was really special.

I think what set that team apart from many others is the leadership that it had. And it wasn't just one person, but it was really across the board. A lot of the upperclassmen on that team were phenomenal leaders on and off the field. They backed it up with their play and they backed it up with their preparation, as well. That team was definitely really special, and luckily for me, I got to stay in touch with quite a few of those guys when they made it to the next level. When I was in Arizona, I got to see them whenever we would play their teams, and they were definitely bonds that we'll keep with us forever.

BC: So, going forward, this is obviously a very important time for a program before spring ball starts. What are some of the things you want to accomplish between now and then with the guys?

AP: We just finished our period of assessing all the players individually, seeing what their strengths and weaknesses are. Our job as a strength staff, as a sports med staff, as a football coaching staff, is to sit at the table and come up with the single best solution for every player on the team so that we can maximize their potential. Doing that allows us to figure out where and how many times we have to break down the program across the board into little individual categories for the players so we're making sure over these next couple weeks that they're not just beating a dead horse, but finding out what things we need to do for them to continue to be good at their strengths and what things we need to do to lift up their weaknesses.

A lot of the things that we're already adopting, that we think are going to benefit the team across the board, are a style of conditioning and speed work and mobility work that we're doing with them. I think the players as a whole are really enjoying that already. It's really just getting started. We're at the base level of that. We plan on continuing to roll that out in spring ball. Once we get into summer training, we'll take that up again.

Mississippi State University Athletics

HAILSTATEBEAT: Q&A With New Football Strength Coach Anthony Piroli

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