Dan Connor: From NFL to assistant's job at West Chester

On Tuesday afternoon, Dan Connor had just walked out from a linebackers and special-teams meeting. Nothing new about that. Connor had been in so many of them during six years in the NFL and for four years before that at Penn State, where he remains the all-time leading tackler.

But this time, Connor, 28, was running the meeting as first-year linebackers coach at West Chester University. Connor figures he prepared for about an hour on what he wanted to cover as the Rams installed some new looks.

The reality is, Connor had been preparing for the session for years. Late in his pro career, Connor said, he had started to assemble a notebook that stretched to 25 pages, typewritten. He'd known it was time to think about life afterward. Connor's body had been telling him it was time.

"I had a neck injury last year in New York that was pretty devastating and caused a lot of damage, took the strength out of my left arm, pretty much to this day," Connor said this week, just out of the meeting. "I don't have much strength left. I couldn't even raise it for a couple of months."

He measures his pro career in surgeries. He had six of them, one for each of his seasons in the league, which included stints with the Panthers, Cowboys, and Giants.

It wasn't a shock that Connor wanted to get into coaching. His father is still an assistant coach at Strath Haven High. This spring, Connor helped out at West Chester as a volunteer. When West Chester's linebackers coach, Bill Shuey, a former 11-year Eagles assistant, left to be Widener's defensive coordinator, Connor got the job.

"We had a concern about who we would hire in that position because Bill Shuey . . . had some NFL experience, and we had two really good experienced players coming back," said West Chester head coach Bill Zwaan, whose team reached the NCAA Division II semifinals last season.

Taking an NFL player seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? Not necessarily.

"If he just talked about himself, it wouldn't have worked," Zwaan said.

But Connor tries to simplify everything, the way he liked to learn. For a new defensive scheme, Connor said, he put together a list of four rules, a checklist of progressions from before the snap to the end of the play.

"We've just given him the linebackers and let him run," Zwaan said. "We don't have to keep an eye on him or anything like that."

As a coach, Connor said, he believes college is the right level. Not the pros?

"I don't see myself ever as an NFL coach," Connor said. "The hours are tough on those guys, and the players - it's a different atmosphere. The team changes year to year. You don't normally develop relationships with guys. With college guys, you work with them for four years, you really get to know them. The NFL - jeez - you go through 10-15 linebackers a season."

One of his big influences, Connor said, is his former Penn State linebackers coach, Ron Vanderlinden, now the linebackers coach at the Air Force Academy. Plenty of Connor's 25 pages of notes came from Vanderlinden.

"I read his book, I got a DVD from him on position drills," Connor said. "Once I finished with that, that's when I started going through with a highlighter, stuff I liked."

I wasn't going to mention this to Connor - it felt like ancient history - but two people I talked to about this story immediately brought up the prank call that Connor and a couple of Penn State teammates made to a retired Nittany Lions assistant coach, Joe Sarra. That got so much publicity, it stuck to Connor and, especially around here, remains almost a decade later, alongside those 419 career tackles from 2004-07.

"It's such a big media market, when I got in trouble, I got suspended, the whole deal, I knew it was big," said Connor, a former Parade national high school linebacker of the year. "Something like that, it sticks out."

And, he said, it didn't go away during his time with Joe Paterno. "You got in Joe's doghouse, you didn't really get out," Connor said. "He was hard on me, but it was good. I needed it. Especially at that age. At 18, 19 years old, you need someone to kind of whip you into shape."

What was he like on the sideline Saturday at his first game, a 35-30 West Chester win at New Haven?

"I stayed calm," Connor said. "Young guys sometimes tend to get a little emotional. I liked the coaches who kept it positive, calm and relaxed, on game day. Then when you go over it in the meetings, they can drop the hammer a little bit and teach. Game day, it's too stressful to add another stressful voice."

The biggest difference he found between playing and coaching? You don't get beaten up for three hours.

"You feel pretty healthy on the bus ride home," Connor said.