"He's one of the smartest people I know and he's got the great ability to translate it to us lesser-minded folk," Mangold said. " . . . And his precision, the way he'll get on you if you are not taking the right step, if you're not putting your hand in the right place . . . It's a great discipline and a great way to coach us."
Fullback Tony Richardson said: "The way that he can explain things and teach the concepts, I think that's really what gives us the confidence to go out and get the job done."
Said reserve lineman Wayne Hunter: "There's a lot of coaches out there that just tell you to go block this guy and don't tell you how to do it. He's a real technical teacher. I'd say he's perfected our techniques since the day he got here."
Said Gruden: "There's nobody that works harder than this guy. I took a lot of pride getting to the office at 3 o'clock and working. This guy sets the tone in terms of work ethic. He looks at it, he studies it. He's detailed in a freakish manner . . . He's into 6-inch steps, brace your steps, hand placement, backside blocking, pad level. This guy is amazing in terms of fundamentals."
That's Callahan's staple. He records each individual drill in practice and shows it the next day in meetings, his way of honing the basics.
Turner said: "When stuff starts moving and stuff starts flying around and it's live bullets flying, you fall back to your fundamentals."
Still, Callahan doesn't run a dictatorship. He has no qualms about tweaking his scheme - as he did this season on some of the stunt blocking - and actually asks his players for input.
"A lot of coaches have too much pride to even do that," Hunter said. "Without any hesitation, he'll come to us and say, 'You know what? What I learned from Alan [Faneca] is this. We should do it this way. What I learned from Meat [Brandon Moore] is this and we should do it this way.' That's a real big thing about a coach."
Callahan typically is in the office by 5:30 a.m. and is one of the last to call it a night. He and Ryan work well together and Ryan lets Callahan mostly do his own thing without much intrusion.
http://www.newsday.com/sports/footb...oach-callahan-an-ultimate-linemaker-1.2395263
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