What is it about Towson that produces so many NFL coaches?

Family on three.

That’s how Towson football breaks its huddles. It’s also a fitting description of the bond that has helped fuel the program’s growing coaching tree in the NFL.

Seven former Tigers hold positions on NFL coaching staffs:

• Brian Fleury (2002), offensive coordinator, Seattle Seahawks
• Grant Udinski (2019), offensive coordinator, Jacksonville Jaguars
• Brian Duker (2010), defensive coordinator, New York Jets
• Joe Vitt (1977), defensive assistant, Denver Broncos
• Jim O’Neil (2001), defensive assistant, Detroit Lions
• Collin Bauer (2013), defensive assistant, New York Jets
• Shawn Flaherty (2017), assistant offensive line coach, Ravens

It’s an impressive number for a midmajor program of Towson’s size and pedigree. In the Coastal Athletic Association, in which Towson competes, only the University of Maine comes close to having the same level of coaching representation in the NFL.

So what is it about Towson that has produced so many NFL coaches?

‘Students of the game’

When Gordy Combs joined the Towson coaching staff in 1973, the team wasn’t even playing Division III football yet.

More than five decades later, Combs has watched generations of players and coaches pass through the program. And he has noticed something about the people who eventually made their way into coaching.

“I just think that when they were all there, all the guys that were there, the ones that were players, they were all students of the game,” Combs said.

When Udinski transferred to Towson from Davidson, there wasn’t much that immediately stood out about him on film. In fact, former Towson head coach Rob Ambrose, who led the program from 2009-22, remembers him as one of the “least talented defensive ends” on the roster his senior year.

Yet Udinski finished that season with the second-most sacks on the team. His advantage was his ability to understand and read the game.

“He would pick up on the other team’s signals in the first series,” Ambrose said. “I’ve been doing this since I was 5 years old. I can’t even do that.”

Ambrose, the son of a legendary high school coach in Maryland, saw the same intelligence in another of his players, Flaherty. The offensive lineman was great when he was on the field but was often sidelined by knee problems.

For both players, their value extended beyond what they could contribute physically. They understood the game, asked questions and absorbed information — traits that would eventually serve them in coaching.

But not every future Towson coach learned the game by playing it.

Duker never played a snap at Towson. Instead, he was a student assistant from 2006-08 under Combs. When Ambrose took over as head coach in 2009, he retained Duker, who continued working as a student assistant through 2010.

Ambrose describes Duker’s role in the office as “basically the left hand of the head coach.” Duker used the opportunity to maximize the amount of information he was learning.

Duker wasn’t satisfied with simply knowing what to do. He wanted to understand why it worked.

“He just kept wanting to learn more, and he was always asking for the why,” Ambrose said. “Not what the answer was, just the why.”

That curiosity became a common thread among Towson’s future coaches. Whether they arrived as players like Udinski and Flaherty or entered the program through the coaching side like Duker, they approached the sport as something to be studied.

Ambrose encouraged that.

“When all these guys got hired, I said, ‘Look, here’s what I want you to do. This is FCS [Football Championship Subdivision] football. I want you to work really hard. I want you to learn as much as you can. I want you to coach these kids up,’” Ambrose said.

For Ambrose, though, there was a difference between being good at football and choosing to coach as a career. He believed coaching was an unforgiving profession that wasn’t meant for the normal person, and he did his best to steer some of his most intelligent players away from it.

He remembers telling Udinski, who graduated with a 3.94 undergraduate GPA and a 4.0 master’s GPA, that he should “go cure cancer and go make lots of money” when the defensive lineman told Ambrose about his ambitions.

“I’m gonna try and convince you until you convince me that you can’t live without it. And then I will do everything in my power to help you,” Ambrose, now a senior analyst at Duke, recalls telling Udinski.

Eventually, Ambrose realized there was no deterring him. And, once Udinski made that decision, Ambrose knew what came next.

Getting a ‘foot in the door’

Ambrose reached out to a friend of his, Matt Rhule, who was the head coach at Baylor at the time, and helped Udinski get a graduate assistant position.

There, Udinski excelled. In 2022, when Rhule was hired as the head coach of the Carolina Panthers, he called Ambrose about Udinski.

“Rhule goes, ‘I have no idea what Grant’s going to coach. But he’s gonna be my first hire,’” Ambrose said. “What a statement.”

Udinski’s intelligence may have made him an ideal coaching candidate, but Ambrose’s connection to Rhule gave him the opportunity to prove it. That kind of connection is often critical to climbing the coaching ladder.

“You have to know somebody [who] gets your foot in the door,” Combs said. “That’s the big thing.”

O’Neil knows that firsthand.

The NFL wasn’t always his goal. In 2005, while serving as Towson’s defensive coordinator, he developed a relationship with Ravens coaches Mike Pettine and Rex Ryan. While recruiting, he would stop by Ravens spring practices and spend time around the coaching staff.

When Ryan was hired as the New York Jets’ head coach in 2009, he offered O’Neil a position as a defensive quality control coach.

Taking the job meant turning down an offer from Ambrose, who had just taken over at Towson. Ambrose had planned for O’Neil and Fleury, two former Towson teammates and close friends, to be two of his first hires.

Fleury accepted the position as special teams coordinator and defensive backs coach. O’Neil, meanwhile, chose the NFL.

Even in the short time O’Neil spent around Towson after Ambrose took over, he developed another connection: Duker, who was working as a student assistant.

That relationship resurfaced years later.

When O’Neil became the defensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns in 2014, he hired Fleury as an assistant linebackers coach, later promoting him to outside linebackers coach. In 2015, he also brought Duker onto the staff as a defensive intern.

When O’Neil became the 49ers’ defensive coordinator in 2016, he brought Duker with him as a defensive analyst.

For O’Neil, those hires weren’t simply about familiarity. They were about trust.

“When I was in the position to hire people, I just wanted guys who were loyal and worked hard,” O’Neil said. “You can teach people what you want them to learn, but as long as you work hard, and you’re going to be loyal, that’s the two key ingredients to build my staff at this level.”

The connections don’t end when the coaches leave Towson, either. O’Neil, Fleury and Duker talk at least once a month, and their families have remained close.

But O’Neil believes the most important part of Towson’s coaching tree isn’t that former Tigers help one another get opportunities. It’s that each coach has to earn whatever comes next.

“I’m proud of how successful a lot of these guys have been in the league,” O’Neil said. “And I think that the thing that is special is every one of us has taken the long way and kind of climbed the ladder.”

“Nobody’s been given an easy pass,” he said. “They all had to earn it their own way and find their own path.”

A lot of that traces back to Vitt.

He was the first Towson product to coach in the NFL after playing linebacker for the Tigers from 1974-77. He spent decades in the league, including winning a Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints, but never lost his connection to Towson.

“He never, ever forgot where he came from, never forgot his roots, always came back,” Ambrose said. “By doing that, he let young coaches know that … if you work hard, you can grow and you can make it to the NFL.”

But Vitt’s influence wasn’t just in proving the path was possible. It was in showing younger coaches what it meant to stay connected to the program and to the game itself.

That starts with the coaches who taught them to love it.

“If you’re a player and you play for good football coaches, they make you fall in love with the game,” Flaherty said. “Then you want to give back to the game, and I think that’s what creates the coaching tree.”

“In the end, it’s a virus,” Ambrose said. “When we all play the game and we love the game, we all have it for a while. Some of us can get rid of it. Some of us can’t. And those of us that can’t go coach football.”