Eagles O-line coach accentuates positive

JEFF STOUTLAND is the Eagles' offensive line coach. He grew up in New York. There is a street smartness about him that becomes obvious in about 30 seconds. He says he looks at players in his business but he also looks at people.

"Your demeanor and how you go about every day is just huge, it's huge," Stoutland said. This is a man who says he prefers to coach physically, demonstrating techniques at the front of the meeting room where players put their hands on him and vice versa. He pegs the classroom-lecture attention span of the average player at about 10 minutes. Almost none of that time is spent drawing X's and O's on a whiteboard. As Stoutland said, "A player does not look like a circle, does he?"

But this was a conversation about demeanor. He talks about the technical perfection of Jason Peters, and the gym rat he sees in Jason Kelce, and the assertive personality of Todd Herremans. But to demonstrate the point completely, he talks about . . . restaurant servers.

"Let's just go down the street to a diner or whatever," Stoutland said. "You get a waiter or waitress who comes up and they're like, 'Hey, how are you today?' I like that. I'd like to be around that person. I'm just saying, I like to be around that person. I'll hang out there another 10 minutes just to be around that kind of person.

"I call the other people the 'Fellowship of the Miserable.' I'll walk on the other side of the street to avoid that person because I don't want that in my life. I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to be negative. I don't live like that."

Stoutland has been coaching college players since the mid-1980s. Philadelphia is his first professional stop. When he tells you the story of how he started, it is not hard to see where that worldview was shaped.

As a kid, he did all kinds of jobs - building fences, acid-washing swimming pools, delivering newspapers.

"I delivered the Staten Island Advance since I was 9 or 10 years old - 110 customers, collecting on Thursday nights," he said. "Getting the money. Nowadays they don't collect - you have to send your money in. But I go to this one lady's house, she was an airline stewardess, she must have owed me 2 years . . . "

He interrupts the story, reminded of something else, off to the next topic. I still don't know if he collected the money - but that is how the interview goes. After high school, he ended up playing linebacker at Southern Connecticut State. His head coach was Kevin Gilbride, now the Giants' offensive coordinator. Back then, though, Gilbride was a defensive guy and, on a small staff, also coached the linebackers.

Through college, Stoutland suffered a series a pinched nerves that would leave his one arm hanging, his "whole side atrophied." It got to the point where the school required a legal waiver to allow him to continue playing, and he had to beg his parents to sign it.

It was 1984. Stoutland says he was one of the first players ever to wear one of those big blocks attached to the back of his helmet to protect his neck. But in the seventh game of the season, the thing snapped as Stoutland was being hit by a guy whose name he does not remember. A nerve in his neck was cut. His football career was over.

"I literally went into depression," he said. "Football was everything to me."

But Gilbride saw something, and offered an alternative. Four words: "You want to coach?"

Stoutland was skeptical. There were only four games left in the season, and the players were his peers. "These are my friends," he said. "They respect you," Gilbride said.

That is how it began. The switch to the offensive line came 2 years later when he went to Syracuse, when they decided at the last minute that they needed his help on the offensive line after hiring him to work with the linebackers. Stoutland remembered, "In my mind I was saying, 'You've got to be kidding me.' But you do what you're told to do."

And it became his professional life. Through a generation, he worked his way through the college ranks - from Southern Connecticut State to Alabama - and accumulated film of great NFL offensive linemen to teach his players. Hall of Fame tackle Anthony Munoz was one favorite. Another was Peters. Stoutland said, "I teach the left tackle off of what he was doing. So they would all joke with me when I was coming here. Cyrus Kouandjio at Alabama says, 'Hey, what are you going to do, show Jason Peters the Jason Peters film?' "

On the practice field, Stoutland has his loud moments. But he can be introspective when you ask him about any trepidation he might have had, coming to the NFL after all of these years.

He said, "I always wondered, 'What's it going to be like, coaching these guys?' It isn't any different. They have so much respect for their coaches and what they're learning . . . I'm like, holy cow. I don't know what I thought, but I know this much: It's fun and it's really exciting. And when you bring something to the table to a player, and they look at it and go, 'You know, this can help me to be a better player,' that's all they want."

And when you give it to them?

"Then you become valid," Jeff Stoutland said.

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