Axman tabbed as Nicholls’ part-time football coach post-Stubbs

A lightning bolt out of the sky.

That was how Nicholls State interim head football coach Steve Axman described the call he received asking if he’d be interested in coaching a college program for the remainder of the 2014 season.

Axman, 67, had been semi-retired but was still actively involved in the game. He was helping out as a coach at Perry High School in Gilbert, Ariz., roughly two hours from Flagstaff where he had once spent eight seasons as the head coach at the University of Northern Arizona from 1990-97.

When asked if he was interesting in guiding the Colonels on a short-term basis in the wake of former coach Charlie Stubbs’ resignation, Axman didn’t have to think very long about it.

“I got on the phone to call my wife, and she said, ‘I’ll be packing for you.’ That was her answer,” Axman said last week during his first week on the job. “It worked out well. I guess my availability and my background seemed to fit what they were looking for.”

Axman’s background is no doubt impressive.

He began coaching at the collegiate level in the mid-70s and went on to make stops as an assistant at Arizona, Stanford, Maryland, UCLA and Washington, in addition to the eight seasons he was head coach at Northern Arizona.

Among the quarterbacks he coached or helped develop are former Pittsburgh Steeler Neil O’Donnell, ex-New England Patriot Scott Zolak, and most notably, former UCLA star and three-time Super Bowl-winner Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys.

More recently, Axman spent four months last year coaching at Simon Fraser University, a Division II school in Canada. He eventually moved back to Arizona and was assisting at Perry for about six weeks until he got a call from Nicholls the following Monday after Stubbs resigned.

“When they called, I said I’d certainly be very interested in talking about (coaching at Nicholls), and it just seemed to be a good fit,” said Axman.

So how did the move to bring Axman into the Colonels program come about?

According to Axman and Nicholls athletic director Rob Bernardi, one of the persons who played a big hand in finding the school’s interim coach was actually Bernardi’s brother, Gary.

Gary Bernardi is currently the offensive line coach at Colorado and when contacted, he recommended someone he thought would be perfect for what the Colonels were looking for: his friend Steve Axman.

“My brother had worked with him at Arizona and UCLA,” said Rob Bernardi. “He said, ‘He’s living in Arizona; he’s retired. I know he’d love to do that.’ As I visited with the president about it, there were a lot of good things. One, it was just a temporary appointment. He wasn’t interested in going beyond that. (Two) he fit what we needed. (Three) he was available, and he’s got an impeccable reputation.”

Had Axman turned the Colonels down, it’s likely that Nicholls would have promoted from within the program, possibly associate head coach Chuck Hepola.

But Bernardi recognized that what the Colonels needed was not only a head coach but someone who could handle the play-calling duties as offensive coordinator in addition to serving as the team’s quarterbacks coach.

Stubbs had been filling all three roles in his five years at Nicholls, and Axman had experience at doing all three as well.

“That seemed to be the thing that both (Nicholls President Bruce) Murphy and Rob Bernardi felt good about,” Axman said. “I did that before, where I was the head coach and the coordinator and coaching the quarterbacks, so it is a good fit and hopefully I’ll be able to help.”

In truth, Axman may not have been the Colonels’ first choice, but he was the most logical one.

In the wake of Stubbs’ absence, Rob Bernardi admitted that he made the quick decision to reach out to former USC and Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron, a Galliano native with deep ties to Southeast Louisiana and someone who is immensely popular within the area.

Of course, any scenario in which Orgeron would have agreed to coach the Colonels, even for a few months, would have been a dream for the school and would have generated an enormous amount of publicity both for the program and perhaps the entire community.

Rob Bernardi took a chance at the home run hire, but in the end came away with a well-traveled coach that fit everything the school was looking for.

“When a lot of thoughts are going through your mind as to who would be good, Ed was obviously the first one for a lot of reasons,” Bernardi said. “But any discussion that took place was simply on a temporary basis.”

Going forward, Rob Bernardi said any school in the position Nicholls is in now almost always has a short-list of candidates in mind with regards to a permanent coaching search.

He didn’t say who those candidates might be, but he reiterated that Axman understood his role was only temporary.

“He’s a terrific person and he’s got a lot of qualities where I could see him becoming very popular with the players,” Rob Bernardi said of Axman. “But I don’t see a scenario where (becoming a full-time coach) happens. I think he probably is at a point in his career where he’s not interested in that.”

For his part, Axman said he fully understood that he would only be coaching the team on a short-term basis, but that he would do everything in his power to help the program grow in that time.

“I said that if I was going to do it, I’m going to jump in and coach this program as I know how,” Axman said. “From recruiting to taking care of any – and hopefully very few – academic and disciplinary problems, I’m going to take that on and do everything that I can until they bring somebody new in.

“I think I’m a very positive person. I said to the team that the thing I’m looking for from you is to play hard, play fast, and play smart, and practice fast, practice hard and practice smart.”

At a time in which Axman was still learning many of his new players’ names, the Colonels lost their first game under their new coach, 77-3, at North Texas last Saturday.

Nicholls travels to Conway, Arkansas to begin Southland Conference play at 3 p.m. Saturday at Central Arkansas.

Steve Axman