Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Once he gets going, the stories and names pour from Russ Callaway's memory cloud. The 35-year-old Callaway, Florida's new tight ends coach, is probably as close as one can be to being born a college football coach.

Callaway never imagined it any other way.

"That hunger was in me from an early age,'' Callaway said.

In tracing Callaway's path to his office inside UF's Heavener Football Training Center, you quickly realize this orange did not fall far from the tree. Callaway is the son of Neil Callaway, a veteran Southeastern Conference assistant coach and former head coach at UAB. Like his father, Russ shares stories with a Southern drawl and down-home appeal.

Neil Callaway played college football for legendary coach Bear Bryant at Alabama. He started his coaching career as an assistant for future Auburn head coach Pat Dye – who recruited Callaway as a player to Alabama – when Dye left Bryant's staff to become a head coach for the first time at East Carolina.

Russ Callaway was nowhere to be found in the playbook in those years, but when he arrived amid his father's decade-long run as Dye's offensive line coach at Auburn in the mid-1980s, he savored the life his father's career offered he, his older brother Clay, and their sister Kate, who is now the director of performance nutrition for the NFL's Carolina Panthers.

"People ask me where I'm from, and I usually tell them the SEC,'' Callaway said.

He could write a book about the players and coaches he met growing up.

Russ remembers being in the Auburn locker room when Bo Jackson returned to campus at the height of his "Bo Knows" years and sang the alma mater following a big win. When Neil took a job at Alabama, Russ recalls sweaty days helping longtime Crimson Tide equipment manager Tank Conerly with chores. He would get a prize at the end of the day. He remembers his dad taking the boys with him on drives around south Georgia to recruit, sometimes dropping them off with George Bobo, father of former Georgia quarterback Mike Bobo and a close friend, while Neil visited a player.

That was part of his father's plan.

"I don't think you have to neglect your family, but I think you have to include your family in the process,'' Neil Callaway said. "There's a lot of good memories." Neil recalls a Sugar Bowl trip when he wondered if he had another son because Russ and Bulldogs running back Musa Smith were hanging out so much. In Russ' formative years, while his father was offensive coordinator at Georgia under Mark Richt, Russ remembers Neil bringing Mike Bobo and another young Georgia assistant named Kirby Smart to watch him play baseball as they returned to town from a recruiting visit.

So many memories and connections. Neil Callaway had recruited Bobo and Smart as players from his south Georgia territory.

"Kirby and Mike probably didn't want to do it, but they did it anyway because they were good soldiers,'' Callaway said jokingly. "We kind of developed a relationship that way from me just coming to the office. For as long as I can remember, I was at the office crawling around, chasing somebody."

The teenaged Callaway got to know Smart when Smart served as Georgia's running backs coach in 2005 between stints on Nick Saban's staff at LSU in 2004 and with the Miami Dolphins in 2006. By the time Callaway finished his playing career as a quarterback at Valdosta State, Smart knew he had planned to enter coaching and offered Callaway a defensive analyst position at Alabama in 2011. Meanwhile, by then Bobo was Georgia's offensive coordinator and offered Callaway a graduate assistant position on offense.

A tough decision, but Callaway packed for Tuscaloosa around the time the Crimson Tide began to assert their dominance over the next decade.

"The way I looked at it, I knew Coach Bobo already. I knew Coach Richt,'' Callaway said. "I kind of wanted to branch off and just meet new people. And dad always told me, being an offensive line coach, that as a young coach in your career, if you can either be on defense or the offensive line, that will help you. How I view the game now is so different. It opened me up to things I would never have thought about. It's helped me a ton."

The coach's life tugged at Russ Callaway constantly, but he often received fatherly advice when he began to consider the career seriously.

Not that it mattered much what Neil Callaway told his son.

"I'll be honest, I tried to talk him out of it,'' said his father. "I kind of told him what Coach Bryant told me, which was, 'if you can live without it, you need to do something else.' I love it, but if you're not all in, it will eat you up.

"He was stubborn and hardheaded. So naturally, I did everything I could to try and help him. He's very passionate about it. He's done well. I'm very happy for him and proud of him."

Callaway discovered success quickly. At the end of that first season at Alabama, Callaway celebrated with Gators head coach Billy Napier, offensive line coach Rob Sale, and strength coach Mark Hocke when the Crimson Tide won the national championship.

"I've still got pictures of us when we won the natty,'' Callaway said.

Callaway spent another season as an Alabama analyst helping Smart with the inside linebackers before he started to climb the coaching ladder, including as an offensive coordinator at Samford. He reunited with Sale with the New York Giants in 2021 and spent last season as a quality control analyst at Florida.

When William Peagler left to join the Arizona Cardinals last month, Callaway took over as tight ends coach, a move officially announced last week.

"We're built to handle the attrition to some degree," Napier said. "We've been able to manage it. If we have the person in place we think is capable, we make those moves quickly. He was a play-caller and a really good FCS-level coordinator at Samford. He is a really good young coach."

Callaway grew up around the game and some of the marquee programs in the SEC. This is his first stint with the Gators, but the familiar faces make it seem he has been here before.

If there is one thing Callaway knows for sure, it's that he was born to coach.

"People sometimes say they grew up in football and were raised in the football office,'' Callaway said. "I literally was. We have so many memories. It was a great way to grow up."
 

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RUSS CALLAWAY Q&A

Q: Growing up the son of a coach, where do you call home?
A: I usually say Athens because I went to middle school and high school there, and my telephone number is still 706.

Q: What's the perfect meal for you?
A: Steak, mashed potatoes with bacon and cheese and sour cream, and a salad with ranch dressing.

Q: What's the best day you have had in football?
A: That's tough. I would say probably the day the quarterback I coached at Samford, [Devlin Hodges], broke the all-time leading passer record in FCS history. He broke Steve McNair's record. I look back at that, and the more people I'm around, that was a big deal to that kid, and it should have been that day at East Tennessee State when he got the game ball and came up to hug me. And we had a pretty good year.

Q: Probably an easy one, but who has significantly influenced your career?
A: It's dad, for sure. Without him, I wouldn't be where I'm at and probably wouldn't be what I'm doing. I think the biggest thing he did, and I didn't realize this until I grew up, but he knew he would always be busy a lot, and he was, but he was always there. He was very particular about who he would put us around. They were a great influence on our life. People I still talk to today.

Q: If you have to listen to three musical artists for the rest of your life, who are they?
A: Number one is Luke Bryan. And then I would say, Jason Aldean. And then I would say, I would probably say Biggie. I'm very well-versed. I'd probably throw some Luke Bryan, for sure, then some sort of rock, and then Biggie. I like all of them.