Paul Dunn up front with attack plan

ORONO – First-year head coach Jack Cosgrove could have gone a number of ways when it came to picking an offensive coordinator for the University of Maine football team.

He could have hired an outsider. He could have kept the job himself since he did it well for the past three seasons. He could have given it to another former UM quarterback in assistant coach Bob Wilder.

Instead, Cosgrove chose to confer the OC’s headset on Paul Dunn, who has spent the past three seasons as Maine’s offensive line coach.

The second guessing in the cheap seats at Alumni Field is already audible. The offensive line coach? Oh great. Off-tackle runs on first and second down, and, for something really wild, a toss wide on third down. Followed, of course, by a punt.

Dunn, 33, knows the image. An offensive lineman himself at the University of Pittsburgh a decade ago, the lantern-jawed native of Glenolden, Pa., still cuts an imposing figure, even if the 255 pounds he carried as a player have shifted slightly south.

Dunn also knows that the average fan calculates an inverse relationship between the size of the football player’s body and the size of his brain and, further, assumes big guys who root around in the mud know little about what it takes to throw the football from point A to point E after first checking options B, C, and D.

“I’ve never been accused of being a real smart guy,” said Dunn, smiling slightly as UM offensive linemen grunted under iron weights nearby. “But there are offensive line coaches who have done this job well. Look at Tom Bresnahan, the offensive coordinator with the (Buffalo) Bills. He’s an offensive line coach. Vince Lombardi, the coach everyone agrees is one of the greatest ever, was an offensive line coach and, before that, he was an offensive lineman.”

Dunn has strong feelings about the importance of the running game, even though he works in a conference that has developed a reputation as a passer’s league.

“I look at the teams that have done well in the Yankee Conference over the past three years, and I find they’ve all been at or near the top in running the football,” he said.

But just when a listener begins to think this is a clue as to how Dunn plans to attack opposing defenses, with all the imagination of a front-end loader attacking a rock pile, the coach smiles slyly.

“I also like to think I’ve picked up a little something on the passing game from some of the people I’ve been around,” he said.

Suddenly the bio clicks in. Pitt. The early ’80’s. Dan Marino.

“Marino was my roommate,” Dunn admits, when asked if he once protected the current All-Pro Miami Dolphins quarterback. “Jackie Sherrill was our coach. We were known to throw the football a little.”

Dunn, who started three years for Pitt along with future NFL linemen like Russ Grimm, Mark May, Bill Fralic and Jim Sweeney, is asked to relate his favorite Marino story.

“We’re playing in the Sugar Bowl against Georgia. It’s fourth and five with 34 seconds left and we’re down three. We’re at a spot that would give us a 42-yard field goal. Jackie decides we’re going to go for the field goal and the tie. Marino goes to the sideline and says, `we’re going for it.’ The rest is history. He drops back, hits our tight end in the end zone and we win,” said Dunn, who would go on to play a year with the Tampa Bay Bandits in the now defunct USFL before starting his coaching career.

Dunn still sees Marino frequently in the offseason (they both were in each other’s wedding). He said the Dolphins QB taught him something valuable to use as a coach.

“I asked him one time about (passing) technique. Should a quarterback turn his hips such and such a way. He looked at me and said, `don’t make it difficult. Just throw the — thing.’ ”

Maybe it’s from having protected such a great QB as a player that Dunn makes a former QB like Cosgrove and current UM quarterback Emilio Colon feel comfortable. Even if Dunn is a first-year offensive coordinator.

“He’s a good coach. He knows the game. I have a lot of confidence in Coach Dunn,” said Colon, Maine’s two-year starter.

Cosgrove said it was the almost instinctive rapport he and Dunn had developed over the past three seasons that iced the decision to name him OC.

“He had the best knowledge of the way I was thinking. Even though I’ve had the (OC) title, he had all the thoughts and lines on the run game and (pass) protections. Anybody who knows offensive football knows it all starts up front,” said Cosgrove, who is willing to take his chances with the Alumni Field critics with Paul Dunn where he excels. Up front.