Restic Assures Novelty, If Nothing Else

WHEN the search for a new Harvard football coach began in earnest last Fall, one member of the selection committee paused to consider the candidates before the committee and dead-panned, "I can tell you one thing, we're going to break the John Yovicsin mold."

What he referred to was not so much the type of man being sought for the position Yovicsin vacated in November after 14 years at Harvard; the desired change more concerned the type of football mind, the type of football strategist who would succeed Yovicsin.

If indeed the aim of the selection committee was to get away from the conservative, almost static, meticulously controlled game of football Yovicsin developed during his tenure here, its efforts can be safely prejudged as successful.

Joe Restic, 40, head coach of the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Canadian Football League until last January 5, is a daring strategist who plays wide open offense and makes calculated gambles on defense, a coach who depends on confusing his opponents both to score points and to control the ball. He is also Harvard's new head football coach.

In appearance, Joe Restic is very much akin to Yovicsin. He is tall and lean, his black hair is close-cropped and carefully placed. One veteran player-who found the Yovicsin style repugnant-shuddered when he first met Restic, viewed his conservative dress and eyed his thin tie settled on a white shirt.

It didn't take him long to discern important differences in the low-key, but joyfully enthusiastic Restic manner;-it is impossible to talk to Joe Restic without being infected by the sheer force of his football imagination.

This imagination, coupled with a willingness to try just about anything, is Restic's forte. One of his former bosses, Alva Kelly at Brown, even went so far as to tell Harvard officials that Restic "has the best football mind in North America."

Be that as it may, Restic realizes the necessity of tempering daring with equal doses of moderation and caution. His cautiousness is founded primarily in planning: like Yovicsin, and perhaps even more so because of his professional background, Restic charts and evaluates every aspect of his personnel. This way, each gamble he takes is calculated well in advance.

TILL, Restic vows that once the game begins, it will be the quarter back on offense and a single man on defense who will call the shots. This, he says, extends to a multitude of variations of the basic sets he will install when the team arrives for fall practice in August.

The end result will startle more than a few opponents next season. Restic sets up his offense in the tight "T," the spread, the single wing, and the "I"; he splits both ends, uses double slots, and there are times when the fullback is the only man in the backfield. Yes, the quarterback goes in motion too.

This plethora of formations works off of relatively orthodox blocking patterns, though, and indeed, the entire offense is mapped out on 56 pages, not an unusually long playbook by college standards.

On defense, Restic uses both odd and even man fronts, and he' rolls his defense to adjust to pre-determined weak spots. "We know in advance where the weak spot is on any given defensive formation," Restic said last week. "So when the other team begins to go to that spot, we can adjust immediately and they have to begin probing for the new weak point.

"You see, our success will depend on making it impossible for the opposition to know what we are going to do from week to week, and even from one series to the next. Both on offense and defense, our game is styled to confuse the other defense or the other quarterback; that way we have the advantage because we hopefully will know what we are doing."

Restic maintains that his system is simple at its core. but he gleefully admits that each basic formation, both on offense and defense, has five or six variations. This necessarily makes for complication.

One of Restic's first tasks is to find the one man on defense and the quarterback on offense who can "assimilate" the system. The quarterback has to be the man calling the signals in Restic's view, but the man on defense, even perhaps a down lineman, who best understands the defensive strategy will call the defensive sets.

"The only possible limitation for this team coming up is mental," Restic. "If the attitude is right, if the players want to make the system work, it will. I have complete faith in this system."

HE SHOULD know best. At Hamilton last year, Restic won the Eastern Division championship of the CFL, and over a three-year period he posted a 22-17-3 record using this very approach.

The Restic system is designed to appeal to the players who carry it out, and the response from Harvard's returning lettermen has been generally more than favorable.

At the team's one (and only) day of spring practice with the new coaches in May, there was a feeling of quiet enthusiasm, a desire to test out both Restic and his system. Restic himself noticed a "positive, working type attitude" that day.

"I want to give a maximum number of players a chance to play," Restic says, "The game has to be fun or else there's no point to it. Of course, this doesn't mean that winning is not our primary goal. It is now and always will be."

Restic is fully aware that he faces an overload of personnel at several positions, which lends itself to unhappy benchwarming. The foremost case of unhappiness last Fall involved quarterbacking, where Rod Foster and Eric Crone traded the job every five minutes for five games, and Rex Blankenship got left somewhere in the shadows.

"I don't anticipate any problems there," Restic grinned last week. "Our design is to project players into the overall picture, and to capitalize on the strengths of each one. These guys-meaning the whole team-are mature enough to realize their individual roles in the program, and I know they will."

Another potential, but unlikely, problem Restic may have to contend with is that of racial dissension. Tension between the team's black players and the coaching staff grew during Yovicsin's last years, and it reached a peak after the Dartmouth game last Fall.

It was that the squad's five blacks boycotted practice for two days and confronted Yovicsin with charges of racism and discrimination against several of his assistant coaches.

Not surprisingly, one of Restic's first moves was to hire Ralph Goldston, a former all-star back in the CFL, as a defensive coach. Goldston, who played under Restic for two seasons, was the first black to play for the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL.

RESTIC has recruited three other assistants-two from his staff at Hamilton-and will add another toward the end of this month. Two of the new coaches. Al Bruno and Carl Schuette, are former pros, and George Karras was head coach at Witchita State before moving on to UMass as a defensive coach five years ago.

Restic likes what he sees at Harvard. The players impress him with their enthusiasm; the Athletic Department suits him perfectly, he says. But mostly, he is glad to back at a college.

"The pros are like a business," he explained. "There football becomes a way of life. In college, it is completely the opposite-football is entirely voluntary, people are involved because they are motivated."

Restic has been away for almost ten years. After graduating from Villanova in 1952, he played two seasons as a pass receiver and defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles (where he first met Goldston). His coaching career began the next year, 1954, at the high school level.

From 1956 to 1958, Restic served as an assistant coach at Brown, then he moved on to Colgate for two years. During his last year at Colgate, the Red Raiders beat Harvard, Yale and Princeton on consecutive weekends.

Restic went to Hamilton in 1962 and became head coach in 1968 after five seasons as first assistant and offensive coordinator.

Now Restic is back to a campus, and there are no regrets. "The experience in the pros enable me to see the total spectrum much better now," he says. "In this way, I can help people to act on the basis of broad experience."

Harvard coaches traditionally are chosen with long tenures in mind. Certainly Restic has the ideal squad to begin a winning career with-next year's Crimson squad, if not the Ivy League favorite, is the prime contender for Dartmouth's title.

Restic knew this, and he plans full well to make the best of it. Indeed, his drive for success is harnessed only by his desire for everyone-coaches, players and spectators-to enjoy the game of football as he does.