ALLEN PARK, Mich. -- The scribblings on the metal door of the Gibbs Hall dorm room started way before Jim Bob Cooter and Casey Woods moved into the place in 2003. It had been a semi-tradition, messages and autographs from University of Tennessee athletes scattered across the door. And they were next.
Their contribution ended up being different: A running tally of scores, giving the friends a decade's worth of trash talk. When the Nintendo red light came on, the Sharpie came out. Lines drawn. Columns made. Head-to-head "Tecmo Super Bowl" results tracked, from Game 1 until they moved out. More than 150 matchups -- special games marked by a star denoting every 25th game.
There were rules: Playing as San Francisco was abolished. No play-call-controller cheating (this had been accused at least once). The loser of special games owed the winner a beverage.
Even now, over the phone at UAB, where Woods is a receivers coach, it hurts to admit this: Cooter, the Detroit Lions offensive coordinator, led the all-time series by at least 10 games. Woods is convinced Cooter treated the 8-bit simplicity of Tecmo with the strategy of a coach, knowing every roster.
“He was scheming long before, and he approached every game and he knew your tendencies,” Woods said. “He was a third-level thinker, and that was the beauty of the old 'Tecmo Bowl' games, especially, is that you only had eight plays and so, you know, you had eight plays to pick offensively and eight plays to pick defensively.
“So if you really got into strategy then, because it was like, ‘I know what you’re going to call,’ and I know what you think I’m going to call, so you were second, third levels of trying to figure it out.”
The evolution of Jim Bob Cooter as a coordinator might start there, inside Gibbs Hall, staring at a television hitting A and B. 'Tecmo' gave way to the NCAA and Madden video games, especially when Cooter and his friends were good enough to be in the game.
Cooter exploited playcall tells mercilessly until his opponent adjusted. Bo Hardegree, now the quarterbacks coach for the Miami Dolphins, still laments Cooter's tormenting him when he blitzed too much.
“There was thought into what he was doing. He wasn’t just hitting buttons,” Hardegree said. “There was a process, definitely a thought process in what he was doing.
“Whether we were just having fun or not, he was trying to beat me in [that] he had a certain direction he was going to do that, a certain plan.”
Much of Cooter’s Tennessee football education came off the field. A walk-on quarterback who spent most of his career assisting starters getting ready for games, his role was twofold: The name that the student section in Neyland Stadium chanted in blowouts, and the student learning from offensive coordinators Randy Sanders and David Cutcliffe, preparing for a coaching career.
Cooter saw the game planning, scheming and endless work his coaches did and said, yep, that’s for me.
“The more you really like a subject, the easier it is to work hard at it,” Cooter told ESPN late last season. “And I really liked -- at the end of the day, we work a ton of hours, but we are just coaching football. We go to football practice, and at the end of the week is a football game, so life’s pretty good.
“We work a ton of hours and we work really hard and the stress level can be high, but at the end of the day, we have a pretty good gig here and sure do enjoy it.”
Cutcliffe saw “a football junkie” with a mind like his greatest pupil, Peyton Manning. He started giving Cooter work a graduate assistant would do, even if Cooter didn’t officially become one until 2007.
Cooter searched for tendencies. Cutcliffe had Cooter teach younger quarterbacks almost as an apprenticeship. His work impressed and helped later, when it gave Cutcliffe confidence that Cooter could work well with Manning, one of the most meticulous quarterbacks ever.
“I know what I got back from him,” Cutcliffe said. “I know when I gave him a young quarterback to school up on something that it was going to be done and done to the nth degree. I think that’s why he has moved so quickly.”
In 2009, Cooter interviewed for a job with the Indianapolis Colts, working with Manning and Cooter's current boss, Jim Caldwell. They wanted someone who could handle Manning’s demands, a young coach with a sharp mind.
Cooter is in the back of the room. It’s 2009. He’s in the NFL, an offensive staff assistant. And he’s scribbling in a notebook, listening to offensive coordinator Tom Moore explain his high-level offense.
The low man in the room, he’s already wondering what he would do, how would he handle that situation. What would he call? If you’re looking for a base for what the Lions run now, it starts in this meeting room.
“He was learning,” Moore said. “He would ask questions when the meetings were done, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? He wanted answers for his own knowledge, but he took meticulous notes and listened to what we were doing, and he’s just a hard worker.”
His job was typical of staff assistants: Take in film. Compile stats. In this case, because Moore operated in a pencil-and-pad world, Cooter input notes, scouting reports and game plans into the computer. He kept his thoughts in a separate notebook.
Those coffee-stained notes still exist. In the summer of 2016, when he deconstructed and reconstructed the Detroit offense, he flipped through them. He still does this. Something new pops up each time, as the base of Cooter’s offense is rooted in Moore’s single-back philosophies.
“Sometimes my handwriting is not great, so there are times where I can’t remember my own notes,” Cooter said. “... I can sort of recall what I was thinking and remind myself, and sometimes there may be five pages of notes and maybe I feel pretty locked in on four and a half pages of that stuff, but that last extra little half-page would be a good reminder for me or a good note for maybe this offense -- or hadn’t looked over something in two, three years and say, ‘Man, that’s a good idea for this one team we’re playing this year.’
“Things like that happen, and that’s a lot more offseason type of learning and type of studying because in-season time is so important, you can’t spend too much of it doing it.”
Instead of making a note about a note on another piece of paper, he types the note in his phone and sets a reminder date for the Monday of the week he thinks he wants to use it.
After stopping in Kansas City in 2012 -- where he saw different philosophies for the first time in the NFL -- the Broncos needed an offensive coach to work with Manning. They hired Cooter.
He did similar things in Denver as he did in Indianapolis and Tennessee. He studied tendencies and opposing defenses for Manning and then presented it, often without referring to notes, in meetings.
“He could see it in his head. He didn't have to draw it up or see it on film,” Manning told ESPN by email in 2016. “He could visualize something that I was saying in his head, describing the defense. He could visualize that in his mind. It's easier to have faster, quicker conversations when you don't have to draw it up. You can talk on the sideline about that, or certainly in practice or in meetings."
When Cooter wasn’t with Manning, he’d be in a shared office with Broncos assistants Chris Beake and Brian Callahan. They’d sit at a horseshoe desk. Football conversation flowed. Cooter had focus. His intelligence was obvious. His communication style was direct, laced with dry wit.
“He’s a lot like you see him,” said Callahan, now Detroit’s quarterbacks coach. “There’s not a whole lot of pretense to Jim Bob. He’s kind of 'what you see is what you get.'”
Cooter is in another meeting room now. It’s in Detroit. Instead of sitting in the back, he’s leading. The offensive coaches are older, more experienced. And they are listening after Cooter was promoted following Joe Lombardi’s midseason firing in 2015. Cooter has that presence. He might be the smartest person in the room -- every person ESPN spoke with for this story referenced his intelligence within the first five minutes -- and knows enough to know he doesn’t know everything.
Cooter gets credit for innovative wrinkles, such as the tip-pass to Golden Tate employed last season, but insists those aren’t him. Putting together the Lions’ plan for a week is a joint effort. He’ll jot down plays or ideas, or his phone will remind him of something. When he meets with position coaches Tuesday mornings, they collaborate and listen.
“You can only see things from your own perspective, so I’m seeing it from my perspective and I’m sort of trying to get them wired up the way I think is going to be best,” Cooter said. “And sometimes I just won’t see a certain play that maybe one of our other guys sees, or maybe I’ll think something like, 'I don’t think that’s going to be very good' and they’ll kind of be adamant that our guy is going to run this route well or block this run well or whatever, and a lot of times they are right.”
Then he presents to Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, who has his own notes. Together, they solidify a game plan. This is how they prepare. If something didn’t work on a Sunday, Cooter owns up to it post-mortem.
It’s part of his accountability and levity. He’ll sometimes point out a coach running wildly on the sideline or a funny moment in the stands. He drops the observation in -- sometimes mid-sentence -- and continues his critique.
This is Cooter. He has his quirks. He starts media sessions with phrases such as, “Comin’ in hot” or, “Plenty of seats available" when one is sparsely attended. Conversations in the quarterback room delve into philosophy and space. Cooter has strong theories about drinking green tea at night -- something he once tried to convince Callahan to doing without success. It’s part of the evolution of a man learning to be one of the NFL’s up-and-coming coordinators.
A thing Cooter will never change is this: his name. He understands the attention. He wouldn’t be name-dropped on “Ballers” and might be leading the Lions offense in anonymity instead of a fantasy-football-name favorite.
It’s part of holding on to his Tennessee roots. When he left Knoxville, it was suggested he change it. Go by something different. He went to sandwich shops and received weird looks when he ordered a sub and gave the name “Jim Bob.”
Now he’s past explanations. He’s over staffers asking him, after he’s hired and they are putting his bio on the website, “Are you sure you want to go by Jim Bob?”
“You have to kind of assert yourself,” Cooter said, “and say, ‘Hey, listen, this is my name. Here we go.’"
That’s all done now. He owns it. Jim Bob Cooter is a man comfortable with himself. He knows what he wants, what he likes, how he thinks, how he prepares. He’s been working this for a decade now, the evolution of a coach with one of the best names in sports.