A basem*nt, hoverboards and old playbooks: Steve Wilks adjusts to family time (2024)

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio —In the basem*nt of his 95-year-old Tudor home in this upscale Cleveland suburb, Steve Wilks has stacks of plastic crates containing the playbooks from his various NFL stops, which recently have been more like layovers at O’Hare.

He keeps the binders in a corner of the finished basem*nt, which — with its hardwood floors and scarcity of furniture — is prime real estate for his two youngest children to zip around on their hoverboards.

With plans to set up his office there, Wilks’ basem*nt soon will function as something of a confluence of football and family, the latter of which has at times gotten the short shrift during the Charlotte native’s 25-year coaching career.

He aims to change that.

For the first time since starting out as an assistant at Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University, where he supplemented his income by selling drinks and snacks outside Ericsson Stadium before Panthers’ games, Wilks is sitting out a season.

Fired as the Cardinals’ head coach after one year and then swept out as part of Freddie Kitchen’s staff following his lone season in Cleveland, Wilks is hitting the pause button on a career that took him to football’s pinnacle — if only briefly.

The idea is to stay in Cleveland and spend more time with his wife and three children, stay current on NFL and college trends by studying film and visiting college and pro camps and look for work again next hiring cycle when opportunities for a defensive coordinator who’s coached in two Super Bowls might be more plentiful.

“I wanted to reconnect with my family, do some things I normally wouldn’t have a chance to do and really spend some time working on my craft,” Wilks said on a recent weekday morning after dropping his 12-year-old daughter Melanni and 8-year-old son Steven James at school.

Over a two-week stretch in February, when he normally would have been preparing for the combine, Wilks took a family trip to Atlanta, where his oldest daughter, Marissa, is a freshman at Spelman College.

The next weekend he and his son flew to Orlando for a Magic game — he and Orlando coach Steve Clifford became friends when both coached in Charlotte — then drove to Tampa to check out an XFL game.

It’s been a nice break for the former Panthers assistant who always preached the importance of faith, family and football, even if he didn’t always get to all three.

“To me, the one that gets neglected a lot is the one in the middle. I felt like I couldn’t move them again this early (in the year) trying to go and chase another job,” Wilks said. “So I just wanted to be able to take some time and really put family first.”

Wilks talked to several teams after learning he would not be retained by new Browns coach Kevin Stefanski. He had an offer to join former Panthers coach Ron Rivera as the assistant head coach/secondary coach in Washington and also spoke with ex-Carolina general manager Dave Gettleman about a possible position with the Giants.

But Wilks ultimately decided to take a year off, following the lead of former Packers coach Mike McCarthy and others. With the Cardinals still on the hook for the final two years of Wilks’ four-year contract, he could afford to be choosy.

Bill Polian, the former Panthers GM and a member of the NFL’s personnel development committee, thinks taking a year off can be beneficial.

“When you get into one of those real bad cycles, they tend to perpetuate themselves because you’re going from one rocky job to another. That’s why those jobs open,” said Polian, who’s set to meet with Wilks this week in Charlotte.

“Sometimes it’s best to step away, take a year off if you can afford it, get your batteries recharged,” Polian added. “Go take a fresh look at things. See how other people are doing things and have the ability to think about it, write about it, talk about it in a way that is not necessarily colored by the disappointment or bitterness that you’d feel about your last couple of jobs.”

That approach worked out well for McCarthy, who used his one-year hiatus to brush up on new offensive tendencies, turned the barn at his Green Bay home into his own football headquarters and wound up getting hired by Dallas in January after interviewing with three other teams, including the Panthers twice.

Wilks, 50, hopes to be coaching again next year. But after getting fired twice in a 13-month span — and seeing the strain that put on his family — Wilks didn’t want to rush into anything.

“When you go through two years like I did, you want to make sure that the next (job) is gonna have some longevity. You don’t want to go into a situation where there may be some speculation there, and all of a sudden you find yourself (and) it’s three years in a row,” he said. “Just really the thing about this league, there’s not really a lot of patience anymore. You’ve got to win now. I definitely want to get back into it as quickly as possible.”

Wilks met his wife, Marci, in 1997 at an outdoor jazz concert in Charlotte, where she was working as a nurse. Wilks was at Savannah State at the time. Before they were married three years later, Wilks let Marci know what she was getting into.

“When we got married, he said, ‘There’ll be a day when I’ll be fired because that’s the way it goes,’” Marci said. “But we went a long time before that ever happened. It was crazy in the beginning where we were moving every year for six years. But it was fun. It was by choice. He was getting promoted every single year. And he was working really hard, so we didn’t think about it.”

The couple crisscrossed the country in the early years of their marriage, with one-season stops in Normal, Ill., Boone, N.C., Johnson City, Tenn., Bowling Green, Ohio, and South Bend, Ind., where Wilks finally reached the big time as an assistant on Tyrone Willingham’s Notre Dame staff.

Then Willingham was fired after the 2004 season and Wilks was on the move again, following Willingham to the University of Washington.

“Every time I would go to the coaching convention in college,” Wilks said, “my wife would be like, ‘Just give me a call and let me know where we’re moving to.’”

In 2006 Wilks jumped to the NFL, joining Lovie Smith’s staff in Chicago as the defensive backs coach under Rivera, the defensive coordinator. The Bears went to the Super Bowl in Wilks’ first season in Chicago, losing to Peyton Manning and the Colts in the rain in Miami.

The Bears chose not to renew Rivera’s contract after the season, and he landed in San Diego with Norv Turner. Wilks joined them two years later after the Bears fired him.

Wilks was driving Marissa to her elementary school the day after he’d been let go in Chicago. She was slamming doors and pouting and he wasn’t sure why — until she showed him that day’s edition of the Chicago Tribune.

“She throws the paper in the front seat. She’s like, ‘Why did he have to put your name and your picture in the paper, talking about you got fired?’” Wilks said.

“Two weeks later, I was in San Diego with Ron. So I’m gone,” he added. “And then again, they’re still there (in Chicago), trying to deal with everything.”

Things stabilized for Wilks and his family after that, at least by coaching standards: Three years in San Diego were followed by six seasons with Rivera in Wilks’ Charlotte hometown.

Wilks grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in west Charlotte, but had a paper route when he was a Johnson C. Smith assistant that took him to some of the more tony areas of the city. When Wilks returned to Charlotte in 2012, he couldn’t help but smile when the realtor showed him and Marci houses in south Charlotte where he’d delivered papers.

“I used to have a paper route over here,” Wilks recalled telling the realtor. “Long story short, now I have a house there.”

Wilks became one of the league’s most respected secondary coaches in Carolina, working with Josh Norman, Kurt Coleman, Roman Harper, Tre Boston and James Bradberry, among others, and eventually adding the title of assistant head coach.

He was promoted to defensive coordinator after Sean McDermott left to become Buffalo’s head coach in 2017. A year later, Wilks was Rivera’s next sought-after assistant, taking the Cardinals’ job after drawing interest from the Giants and several other teams.

It proved to be a bad match.

Wilks inherited a bad roster that didn’t include a quarterback when he was hired (the Cardinals later signed Mike Glennon and Sam Bradford and drafted Josh Rosen 10^th overall).

Wilks also had off-the-field drama to deal with. General manager Steve Keim was arrested on DUI charges and was suspended for much of training camp, while Pro Bowl cornerback Patrick Peterson requested a trade at midseason without first talking to Wilks.

Plus, the Cardinals just weren’t good, averaging an NFL-worst 14.1 points per game behind Rosen and offensive coordinator Mike McCoy, who was fired near midseason and replaced by Byron Leftwich.

Wilks would soon be gone himself, fired after a 3-13 finish that was the Cardinals’ worst record in 18 years. Team president Michael Bidwill told reporters he wasn’t satisfied with Wilks’ plan for 2019, but declined to elaborate.

A week later the Cardinals hired former Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury, an offensive-minded coach who’d never worked in the NFL. Arizona drafted quarterback Kyler Murray No. 1 overall and finished 5-10-1 in Kingsbury’s first season.

Wilks took the high road when discussing his quick dismissal in the desert.

“I understand that this profession is all about production and performance. And 3-13,” he said. “I’ve stated this before. I wish I had more time. I felt like I probably really could’ve done some good things there. But for whatever reason, they decided to move on, and that’s what happens sometimes.”

Rivera hates the knee-jerk mentality among some NFL owners, saying coaches need several years to implement their systems and change the culture. He pointed to San Francisco, which went 6-10 and 4-12 in Kyle Shanahan’s first two years before going 13-3 and making the Super Bowl last season.

“I felt bad for Steve because I know the kind of person he is and I know the only way you can build is if you do start from the bottom and work your way back up,” Rivera said. “The guy’s got a track record of success. The guy has a history of being part of reclamation programs. So to not give a guy a chance to go through his plan, that’s a tough pill to swallow.”

It was especially tough considering that Wilks was one of the only two black head coaches hired over the NFL’s past three hiring cycles (along with Miami’s Brian Flores).

Despite the glaring lack of minority coaches, Wilks said he’s glad he was given an opportunity and believes Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy deserves to be a head coach.

“I just think again, it’s just the expectations of winning right now,” Wilks said. “And that’s what you have to do.”

After Wilks was fired in Arizona, he moved to Cleveland as the Browns’ defensive coordinator. Marci took the kids back to Charlotte, so Marissa could graduate with her high school friends.

All told, the family has moved five times in the past 15 months. And while a couple of those moves were temporary apartment stays while work was done on their homes, it’s still a staggering number.

Over lunch at her home last month with her husband and a reporter, Marci joked about how she should have been a realtor to save on commissions. But she turned serious when talking about the shift she’s seen in the coaching business.

“You can tell the whole athletics and the win-now (attitude), the patience, has changed. And I think that’s what made it so crazy. There’s just no stability,” she said. “It used to be, ‘OK, I’ve got three years.’ But now it’s year to year. There’s no stability. Your contract is really just for you. It doesn’t really mean anything about where you’ll be from year to year.”

Wilks knows where he’ll be for the next year, at least.

Instead of breaking down tape of college cornerbacks or participating in free agent visits, Wilks has been on trash duty and running the carpool in Shaker Heights, where the family decided to stay in part so Melanni could finish eighth grade.

They still have their house in Charlotte, but they’re comfortable in Cleveland. The kids are taking skiing lessons, Wilks has a nearby gym where no one recognizes him and Marci likes the schools. Wilks may coach Steven James’ flag football team this spring — as an assistant.

But life without football still takes some getting used to.

Some of the adjustments are minor. Wilks bought a pair of sweats at Dick’s recently because he no longer receives team-issued gear.

Then there’s the feeling Wilks has when he sees an item on the ESPN scroll about one of his former players or when he gets a text from a coaching friend.

“I think you have your moments. Like last week, I hit a little spell, like, man. I felt like I should be evaluating free agents, looking at these guys coming out in the draft,” Wilks said as he finished up lunch at his kitchen table.

“I don’t want to use the word, ‘depressed,’ but I got a little down a little bit. But talking to some people who have gone through it, they say, ‘Well, you’re gonna hit these little spells,’” he added. “That’s why I think once April hits and a lot of these teams start getting back together with OTAs and minicamps, I can make my rounds and get around. I think I’ll be much better then, just being a part of it.”

Wilks went to the combine in Indianapolis for two days last weekend. He’s sitting down with Polian for career advice on Friday in Charlotte and visiting with Rivera during the Redskins’ OTAs in the spring.

He’s also planning college stops at his Appalachian State alma mater and at Missouri, where Eli Drinkwitz took over after one year at Appalachian.

Wilks has arranged to get NFL game film that he can study and make adjustments to those crated-up playbooks as needed.

Like McCarthy had his barn in Green Bay, Wilks has his basem*nt in Shaker Heights.

“I’m gonna have my greaseboard, a desk with my computer, so I’ll be able to watch film,” he said. “It’s gonna be my little office.”

Not much is down there at the moment, save for a sit-down Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man video-game combo (a nod to Wilks’ 1980 childhood) and the boiler that pumps heat to the cast-iron radiators throughout the house.

Given that his kids have already claimed the basem*nt for their hoverboards, Wilks may be sharing space.

He’s not complaining.

Not long after the family settled in Cleveland, Steven James came home from his first day of second grade and said he loved his new school, an all-boys, K-12 school that counts former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett among its graduates.

“And it hasn’t changed,” Wilks said. “That in itself is like, OK, you know what, we just need to relax for a minute and then try to figure out what’s going on. We just decided to stay, so we don’t have to move twice. Because next year I will be going somewhere, hopefully, then we’ll have to definitely move.”

(Top photo of Steve Wilks: Joe Person / The Athletic)