Who is Rich Scangarello? Past QBs open up about UK’s new offensive coordinator.
Garrett Pinciotti was ready to throw in the towel on his football career following a freshman season in which he didn’t see the field for Millsaps College, and after which the staff experienced a shake-up when head coach Mike DuBose left to become an assistant at Memphis.
Pinciotti wanted to focus on an engineering degree and dedicate himself to the Air Force ROTC program. Incoming head coach Aaron Pelch had a mind-changing sit-down with him.
“He said, ‘The OC looked at your film that you submitted as a high school recruit and saw some film from scrimmages that we did. He wants you to at least come try,’” Pinciotti said. “He was like, ‘Just come to spring and see what happens.’”
The offensive coordinator was Rich Scangarello, the man now charged with keeping Kentucky’s offense on the right track a season after Liam Coen steadied the train. He had come to Millsaps, located in Jackson, Miss., with Pelch from the Oakland Raiders’ staff. Scangarello was also associate head coach and quarterbacks coach for the Majors.
His hunch about Pinciotti from a few old tapes turned out correct. Pinciotti started eight of 10 games as a sophomore and seven of nine in an injury-plagued junior season before starting all 10 games his senior campaign in 2012, by which Scangarello had moved on. By the end of his junior season, however, he was on the verge of toppling several Millsaps career passing records. He was efficient, too; in one game his sophomore season, he completed 82.6 percent of his pass attempts, five of them for touchdowns.
Pinciotti, who enlisted in the Army after college, said Scangarello’s approach to coaching quarterbacks required a time commitment he’d never made before and, he said, he’d never been taught how to make before. Some of that, he figures, is because he was playing for a Division III college. He quickly learned to value the way Scangarello went about his instruction.
“He had such high energy and high expectations, that it kind of embedded in me that cerebral preparation for every practice,” Pinciotti said. “Not even every game, but every day needed that level of prep. … As a D-III athlete that was just there playing ball at a brilliant academic school and enjoying it, he brought that mentality to us. And I think we excelled because of it.”
Energy
In 2017, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo was one of the most outspoken players about Scangarello’s impact for the team. That was Scangarello’s first season of two as the 49ers’ quarterbacks coach before being named offensive coordinator of the Denver Broncos. Garoppolo was acquired midseason and led the 49ers to five straight wins to close the year.
“There’s a lot of moving pieces, but Rich has been with me since I first got here. Literally the first day I walked in here we were going over stuff after I did all the interviews and whatnot,” Garoppolo said in an ESPN article. “… We only had a couple of receivers here so we got to know each other pretty well. He’s a smart coach and he makes it a lot easier for me to go through my reads when he explains things how I understand them.”
It’s one thing to have success with NFL-level quarterbacks — outside of Garoppolo, Scangarello oversaw Nick Mullens and Drew Lock through the best stretches of their professional careers — but maximizing guys like Pinciotti, a no-star quarterback out of high school, speaks to Scangarello’s strengths as a communicator. He had similar results out of Cary Grossart in the one year he got to coach him at Northern Arizona; Grossart was a reserve his first three seasons before Scangarello arrived his senior season, 2012. The Lumberjacks averaged 31.6 points per game and Grossart set a school record for completion percentage (66.3%).
Grossart, now an official within the NFL Players Association’s organization, was familiar with Scangarello prior to his arrival in Flagstaff, Ariz. His dad, Kyle, helped Rich run quarterback camps in Sacramento, Calif., while Rich was on the staff at UC Davis in the 2000s. Upon his hire, Rich called Grossart, let him know that piece of trivia and immediately dove into the thinking behind how he coaches football.
“Rich, he has this great conviction in his offense and his philosophy,” Grossart said. “He’s got great energy and this optimistic, really positive view about the way that things are gonna go. My interaction with him on that phone call, he instilled confidence right away.”
He’s happy to hand the reins over to the guy under center. After he felt like Pinciotti had a great handle on the offense, he was calling a lot plays from the huddle. Gaining that license required not just mastering his role in the offense, but understanding the schemes of the guys blocking in front of him.
“Whoever’s the quarterback, you better be good at protection,” Pinciotti said. “He’s gonna coach you up on that. He gave me a lot of freedom. I’m very appreciative of that, because I definitely grew from it, especially the mistakes I made.”
Being a strong voice in the huddle, and understanding where everyone in it needs to be, were the first traits Grossart named when asked what makes for a successful quarterback in Scangarello’s offense. Game management is a big priority, but the guy back there — Will Levis, presumably, for Kentucky this fall — needs to be fearless when opportunities present themselves to make a big play.
“He loved to throw spacing routes and getting us to manageable third downs,” Grossart said. “It’s really being able to understand the situation and how to operate the offense.”
Scangarello is a “no-nonsense” type of guy but has a “goofy” side, Pinciotti said. UK’s new offensive coordinator has always had an exuberance that rubs off on the guys he coaches; the word “energy” came up frequently in conversations with Grossart and Pinciotti. Scangarello will turn 50 in April, but he looks at least a decade younger than his age because he takes care of himself as if he were still playing football, not coaching it.
“We’d show up at practice and you could tell he’d just got out of the shower, his hair was wet or whatever and he’s got a towel around his neck,” Pinciotti said. “We’re like, ‘What have you been doing, Coach?’ He’s like, ‘I just got done with an 8-mile run.’ I’m just like, ‘God, I ain’t running 8 miles, don’t expect me to do that.’”
Scangarello’s list of previous stops is one of the most eclectic in high-level college football. He’s never coached at the FBS level but has spent time in the NFL on three separate occasions. His most recent stint in the league was the longest — five straight years in various roles with the 49ers (2017-18, 21), Denver Broncos (2019) and Philadelphia Eagles (2020) — but, based on his track record, it’d be foolish to say it’ll be his last. If he generates the results Kentucky hopes this fall, he could be a one-and-done coordinator like Coen.
If he has that kind of success, it won’t surprise those he’s coached over the last decade.
“It didn’t matter if he was at NAU or at Millsaps, his philosophy didn’t change and he was always going to coach anybody hard and the same way,” Grossart said. “I don’t care if it was me or Jimmy Garoppolo or the next guy up at Kentucky. He’s so, so steady. That’s what I really enjoyed about him.”
