When Syracuse hosts North Carolina State at 3 p.m. Saturday, it’ll be a reunion of sorts for SU head coach Scott Shafer.

Dave Doeren, the Wolfpack’s head coach, held the same title from 2011-12 at Northern Illinois, which is “near and dear” to Shafer’s heart. He was the defensive coordinator there 1996-2003. Doeren’s coaching staff at N.C. State includes a number of Shafer’s former coworkers and players.

“I’ve got all the respect in the world for Dave,” Shafer said during the Atlantic Coast Conference coaches’ teleconference Wednesday morning. “So the familiar side of things, it’s like brothers playing brothers, to be honest with you.”

The Wolfpack’s offensive coordinator is Matt Canada — who Shafer, as a graduate assistant at Indiana, hired to be a student assistant. He later coached with Shafer at NIU. Shafer interviewed Mike Uremovich, NCSU’s offensive line coach, to be a video coordinator at Northern Illinois. Clayton White, N.C. State’s safeties coach and co-special teams coordinator, was Shafer’s secondary coach at Western Michigan and Stanford.

And Frisman Jackson, NCSU’s wide receivers coach, was personally recruited by Shafer to play at NIU.

“There’s a familiarity from not just our side, but his side,” Doeren said later in the ACC coaches’ teleconference. “(Shafer’s) a guy that I respect a lot — not just as a person, but professionally. The way he does his business and both of us being defensive coaches before we were head coaches.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations about defensive football before we got to these schools.”

Shafer was asked if he had any stories about Canada and said he’d be in trouble if he told all of them.

“We were young kids back then,” Shafer said.

The one story Shafer did share included Bill Mallory, then the head coach at Indiana, telling the graduate assistant to interview three students for a student assistant position and hire one of them.

Canada was by far the best, Shafer said.

And when Northern Illinois had an opening for an offensive position before the 1998 season, Shafer turned to then-head coach Joe Novak and said, “Hey, Matt Canada’s available. What do you think, give him a shot?” Without hesitation, Shafer said, Novak did.

Shafer and Canada worked together with the Huskies for four seasons before going their separate ways in 2003 and facing each other a year later when Shafer the defensive coordinator at Illinois and Canada as Indiana’s quarterbacks coach.

“He’s just a great coach, a great friend and one of my favorite people in the whole world,” Shafer said.

Doeren and Shafer have a coaching history as well. The two faced each other when Shafer was Michigan’s defensive coordinator and Doeren held the same title at Wisconsin.

Though Shafer and Doeren never coached together, there’s a sense of familiarity between the two, strengthened by the colleagues they have in common.

“We have a lot of similarities in what we believe football can do for young men,” Shafer said of Doeren, “and I always felt like Dave and that staff, they have a high sense of integrity and character for the business and doing it the right way without shortcuts and all that.

“I know he’ll have his team ready to play this Saturday.”

Published on October 29, 2014 at 9:14 pm

Contact Phil: pmdabbra@syr.edu | @PhilDAbb