SEWANEE, Tenn. — From the beginning, Homer Smith knew. Never mind that 68 of the 70 college football programs Phil Savage had contacted about a job hadn’t even written back. Or that the other two said maybe. Or that whenever Smith talked up Savage to Alabama football coach Bill Curry, Curry would say, “Homer, Phil’s a nice kid, but he’s a baseball player from Sewanee.”
Or even that, in Curry’s words, “Phil looked about 10 years old back then.”
Smith was hearing none of it. He hadn’t become one of the most respected offensive minds in college football without recognizing talent when he saw it, whether on the field or in the coaching box.
There was something special about this Savage kid, even if he had played shortstop on the University of the South’s baseball team when he wasn’t playing quarterback for the Tigers.
So as Curry mulled over whether or not to bring back Savage for a second year as a graduate assistant, Smith — whom Curry had just hired as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator — told his new boss, “Phil’s brilliant. The game is like an instant replay to him. It’s like he’s seen each play before.”
That was in the spring of 1988. Twenty years later, Savage returned to Sewanee a week and a half ago as the general manager of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns.
“Phil Savage,” Smith said, “is an uncommon guy.”
It has certainly been an uncommon journey. A marginally talented high school player at Murphy High School in Mobile, Ala., Savage was being recruited by exactly no one when Sewanee assistant Yogi Anderson visited Mobile in the early 1980s looking for football players willing to pay their own way to a high-end liberal arts college in Tennessee.
“It was so foggy when we came up for my recruiting visit that you couldn’t find the gym,” Savage told a banquet hall full of Sewanee student-athletes. “When I got to the football offices, Yogi put in a projector tape of their games and it wound up on the floor. Right then I thought, ‘Man, I can play here.’”
As luck would have it, he was soon playing in a wide-open passing attack instituted by Dewey Warren, the former Tennessee quarterback known as the Swamp Rat. Savage didn’t realize it then, but that offense later became his lucky charm.
“It was a base version of the passing offense that BYU ran,” Savage said. “And it was very similar to what Homer Smith was going to put in at Alabama. That became my edge. I was the only coach on Bill Curry’s staff at Alabama who had ever worked with the offense Homer was bringing in. I picked up on it almost instantly.”
Smith disputes that, saying familiarity had nothing to do with it.
“Phil got it all through hard work,” said Smith, now semi-retired and running instructional camps for high school players in Georgia and Alabama.
“Sometimes guys from bigger schools take too much for granted and don’t do as good a job. Phil’s work was so impressive. He sat beside me every game in the press box at Alabama telling me what defense the other team was going to run before they were set. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but he was just amazing.”
His rise from graduate assistant to NFL GM has been more amazing. When Curry left the Capstone for Kentucky, Savage followed Smith to UCLA. That led to a one-month run as running backs/tight ends coach with the San Antonio Riders of the World League before Bill Belichick called to offer Savage a job on his first Cleveland Browns staff in 1991.
“If there were 15 coaches,” Savage said, “I was 15B.”
For three years Savage worked under then-defensive coordinator Nick Saban, helping the current Alabama head coach with defensive backs. He also analyzed opponent tapes, compiled scouting reports and conducted campus workouts for the college draft.
Still, by 1994 the son of the South longed to come home. Belichick suggested Savage might be more comfortable in player personnel. Savage asked if he had to live in Cleveland. Belichick told him he could live wherever he wanted to live.
Moving back to Alabama, Savage was given scouting responsibilities for all the predominantly black colleges east of the Mississippi.
“I called it the trail of tears,” he said.
When the franchise moved to Baltimore in 1996 and became the Ravens, Savage became director of college scouting. His first draft class included offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden and linebacker Ray Lewis, the cornerstones of the Ravens’ Super Bowl XXXV victory over the New York Giants.
By 2003 he was director of player personnel for Baltimore. In 2005 he became the general manager of the new Cleveland Browns. He was the first employee of the old Browns hired by the new Browns.
But why go back to the city he couldn’t wait to leave 11 years earlier?
“I just felt like they really wanted me,” Savage said.
Two weeks ago at Sewanee, his former Tigers coach, Anderson, wanted to remember the spot-on impressions Savage used to do of the coach and others.
“I told our secretary (Evelyn Moody) that I was going out of the office one day, and I left,” Anderson said. “While I was gone, Phil and a couple of other players came by and Phil started impersonating me. She heard him and said, ‘I thought you were gone.’ He was really good.”
Curry agrees.
“Oh, Phil can do Homer, big-time. He’s just a really smart guy. And a very good person,” Curry said. “I’m glad Homer could see it before I did. It’s just phenomenal what Phil’s accomplished.”
For 17 years he’s sponsored a free football camp for quarterbacks and wide receivers in Mobile in hopes of helping them accomplish what Savage has. Among his brightest pupils have been former LSU quarterback and current Oakland Raider JaMarcus Russell and current West Virginia QB Pat White.
Savage, who says he has spent 37 of his 43 years on earth involved in football, also hopes to find a little more time to return to Sewanee with his wife Dorothy, who is an accomplished theater actress.
“I’ve never had more fun than I had at Sewanee,” he said.
When his talk ended a couple of weeks ago, Savage hung around for more than an hour to chat with current Sewanee students. One of those, Chattanooga’s Brient Hobbs from Ridgeland High, is a Tigers quarterback who would like to intern with the Browns next summer, much as teammate Mitchell Moore is doing this summer.
“It’s a dream come true just to play college football,” Hobbs said. “It could be a dream of mine one day to coach or manage a pro football team. Knowing that Phil Savage also went to Sewanee makes you realize that those dreams can become a reality.”
Even a dream as uncommon as going from Sewanee to the NFL.
