Mike Bajakian Shaped By Mentors

UMass offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian's style is a blend of the head coaches he's worked for previously.

Mike Bajakian clearly considers himself a teacher first and foremost, but the first-year UMass offensive coordinator has never been above playing the role of student throughout his career in coaching either.

Bajakian has been in the business for 30 years and has taken something away from virtually every stop.

“I’ve been lucky my whole career to work for and with great head coaches,” he says.

But it started even before that, having realized he wanted to be a coach while he was still a player in high school.

“My high school coach at Bergen Catholic, Fred Stengel, is a legend in New Jersey High School Football,” Bajakian says. “He had an assistant coach on staff, a guy named Joe Haemmerle who was very influential in my life. I'll start with those guys.”

When Bajakian went on to play at Williams College, he studied his head coach, Dick Farley, and offensive coordinator, Dave Caputi, closely.

When he graduated, he wasted little time getting into coaching, starting as quarterbacks coach and passing coordinator at Delbarton School in his home state of New Jersey.

John Kowalik, who was the head coach at Delbarton at the time, helped Bajakian score a graduate assistant spot at Rutgers under Terry Shea.

“Those guys have helped me along the way,” Bajakian says.

After a year coaching quarterbacks at Sacred Heart in Fairfield, Conn., he landed another graduate assistant position, this time at Michigan.

“I GA’d for Lloyd Carr at Michigan,” he said. “If you know much about Coach Carr, he started out as a teacher and a coach and similar to him, I've always thought that deep down I'm just an educator, I'm just a teacher. I may be coaching football, but teaching is what we do. So he always approached coaching from the perspective of a teacher and I thought that was very beneficial.”

After coaching quarterbacks at Central Michigan for two years, Bajakian landed as a quality control coach with the Chicago Bears.

“Lovie Smith has been very influential in my career,” Bajakian says. “Lovie Smith hired me again in Tampa Bay.

“At this point in my career. I'm a little bit older when I went to Tampa Bay with the Bucs, but I had the chance to work with two brilliant offensive minds, Dirk Koetter and Todd Monken. Those two guys very, very, very much shaped the offensive philosophy, so they were influential in developing that.”

Between those stints with the Bears and the Bucs, Bajakian was offensive coordinator under Butch Jones at Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Tennessee.

“I worked for Butch Jones for 10,” Bajakian says. “He was the head coach and I was the offensive coordinator for eight straight years, but we had been assistants together prior to that. So there's a piece of me - whether it be the attention to detail or the overall vision - that comes from him.”

After Tampa, he landed at Boston College for a year under head coach Steve Addazio.

“I learned a ton from Steve just about communication, speaking your mind,” he says. “Obviously, he is one of the best offensive line coaches in the business. So I just learned a lot about technique and the schematics of the guys up front.”

And from BC, he went to Northwestern, where he was offensive coordinator under Pat Fitzgerald for four years.

“Fitz is a salt of the Earth kind of guy and great head coach and a guy that I learned a ton from and frankly a guy that I model my coaching style and how I organize things off of what I learned from him at Northwestern,” he says.

“You name it. I've often said that my coaching style is a mix of all the guys I've worked with and worked for.”

As much trust as UMass head coach Joe Harasymiak is putting in Bajakian by giving him autonomy over the Minutemen offense, it says a lot that an experienced coach like Bajakian sees Harasymiak as the next guy he wants to work under.