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Paul Johnson has been in the game a long time. Speaking before close to 4,000 coaches at last week’s AFCA Convention, Johnson talked about his decision to jump into coaching college football, and how close it came to not happening.
After graduating from Western Carolina in 1979, Johnson took a job as a coach and assistant athletics director at Avery County High School in North Carolina. Johnson said Erk Russell wanted to hire him as an assistant on his Georgia Southern staff, and he was interested. Problem was, Johnson was making $38,000 a year as a high school coach, and the job on Russell’s staff paid a third of that. As her husband hemmed and hawed, Susan Johnson urged Paul to take Russell up on the offer, saying she’d get a job, and if it didn’t work out he could always return to North Carolina. Johnson agreed, saying he’d give it until he was 30.
He was the offensive coordinator at Hawaii by age 30. Needless to say, he never returned to North Carolina as a high school coach.
Thirty-plus years in the college game – 17 as a head coach – allowed Johnson to develop what he calls 12 Foundation Pillars of his program.
1) Surround yourself with great people and define their role in the program.“Everybody wants to be the head coach at Ohio State,” Johnson said. “It a’int gonna work like that.” Johnson stressed that assistants and staff members must check their ego at the door and know that opportunity will be there if they do a good job.
2) Be demanding and hold people accountable while giving them the opportunity to do their job. Treat them the way you would want to be treated if you had their job. Johnson hired an offensive coordinator during his time as Georgia Southern’s head coach and let him call the plays. Then, in his head, he second-guessed every call. He didn’t do this with the defensive coordinator, just the offensive coordinator. The he realized it wasn’t fair to his offensive coordinator to hire a coach to do a job and not let him do it his way. (Keep in mind, Johnson was 63-10 with two Division I-AA national championships at Georgia Southern.)
Flexbone Association 
That was really good, Thanks