It started out as something to pass the time with on an off day.

Bob Wylie, then an offensive line coach for the New York Jets, stumbled upon a magic store in St. Louis and saw a clerk doing a few card tricks. He needed an activity to entertain kids at the hospital he visited, so Wylie bought a few books and began studying. He spent the rest of that afternoon in St. Louis practicing.

Fifteen years later, an autographed picture of the magician David Copperfield sits in Wylie’s office. He has a library of books and videos on tricks he’ll often study at night or on a plane ride. And everyday, Wylie pulls the same deck of cards out of his back pocket, ready for a new target.

Taking the job as Syracuse’s offensive line coach not only offered the NFL-experienced Wylie a chance to rebuild a college program, it also gave him a new team and coaching staff to showcase his card skills to.

‘He keeps a deck of cards no matter where he is,’ offensive guard Steve Franklin said. ‘Unbelievable man. Ask him, ‘Do you have a deck of cards?’, and he’ll put them out and just start shuffling.’

When the team gathered for its first meeting and dinner under new head coach Greg Robinson last winter, Wylie pulled out the deck and started doing tricks. A group of players encircled him, trying to get a good look.

‘It’s amazing,’ quarterbacks coach Major Applewhite said. ‘It’s not like he knows one or two tricks. At that point I was still formulating an opinion on who is this guy.’

Wylie has spent the last 14 years as a line coach in the NFL, serving stints with the Jets, the Chicago Bears, the Detroit Lions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and until midway through last season, the Arizona Cardinals.

Offensive line coaches are – often by their own admission – deemed a different breed.

Wylie heads the Mushroom Society, an exclusive club of former and current NFL-line coaches. Every year the group gathers in Cincinnati for a coaching clinic that Wylie organizes. More than 500 college and high school coaches attended last year to learn from some of the best line coaches in the country.

‘Offensive line coaches are mushrooms because we’re always in the dark and they feed us crap,’ Wylie jokes.

When an offensive line recruit visits SU, Wylie shows them his professional manual with hundreds of pages of blocking schemes and strategies. Wylie then asks the recruit what other schools he is visiting.

‘They say they’re going to these other universities like Notre Dame or Boston College,’ Wylie said. ‘Well a lot of those line coaches learned from me. So when the recruit tells me, ‘I’m going to see this guy,’ I laugh because I kind of taught that guy how to coach.’

Wylie coached several Pro Bowl linemen in the NFL, including Bears center Olin Kreutz for five seasons. When he was with Cincinnati in the college ranks in 1996, he oversaw Jason Fabini’s development, now a starting tackle with the Jets.

Midway through last year – his first with Arizona – Cardinals head coach Dennis Green, re-assigned and essentially fired Wylie. Arizona’s line play was spotty and some reports said Wylie and Green disagreed with how a cut involving a lineman was handled (Wylie reportedly wasn’t informed of the decision and grew upset).

If you win, Wylie said, you’ll probably be with one team for five years at the most because another will offer more money. If you lose, you’ll get fired and go someplace anyways. The latter happened to Wylie last October.

‘You can’t be an insecure person and be a coach; it’s an adventure,’ Wylie said. ‘You’re going to go to different places. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been all over the place (44 out of 50 states) because of coaching.’

The latest stop landed Wylie in Syracuse under Robinson, an old friend from the Jets coaching staff in the early 1990s.

It hasn’t been easy for Wylie to adjust to life back in college. He sometimes forgets the NCAA caps instruction time every week, so he has to grade every play of every practice and game and prepare notes the players can review on their own time.

Wylie often checks with other SU coaches about NCAA regulations just to be safe. He checked with Applewhite to see if he could invite his linemen to dinner earlier this season.

Recruiting is a lot different, too. He can’t ask the general manager to spend $2 million on a guard. Instead, he has to convince recruits Syracuse is the right place to learn and the best chance to get to the NFL. He has to tell them the techniques he teaches and the tools he uses are just like the NFL. Offensive linemen at Syracuse, Wylie says, study film like the Bears.

‘When we’re practicing, he’ll let us know when he was with the Bears how they did something or with the Buccaneers,’ senior right tackle Quinn Ojinnaka said. ‘We look up to those guys that he coached. We try to emulate what they’ve done.’

‘He really cares for his players,’ Applewhite said. ‘He loves his players. He’s always asking because he always wants to do something.’

He often considers the linemen he’s coached as adopted sons and treats them as such. He’s unsure how long he’ll stay in Syracuse, but he jokes that it’ll be until he’s old and gray.

For now it’s a nice fit, located an equal five hours from his only child, Jennifer, and his mother. The job at SU requires more coaching (Wylie says he’s never coached more) but he believes it’s the place for him.

‘I like teaching,’ said Wylie, who taught before becoming a coach. ‘Coaching is a form of teaching. You watch these kids grow up and become young men.’

When Wylie’s not reviewing film in the office or yelling at his linemen, he dabbles in music. A few times a year he pilots a small Cessna, a skill he learned in his 20s after he saw planes taking off at a nearby airport and thought it was interesting.

It’s the cards, though, that in his words have become a ‘monster.’ He always carries them, waiting for the right time. Sometimes Wylie surprises a stranger with a trick. Most of the time he waits for someone to ask the question that makes him smile: ‘Do you have a deck of cards?’

Published on October 25, 2005 at 12:00 pm