NEW ORLEANS — In the 1980s, Gettysburg College used two small buses to transport its entire football team and all of its gear. The staff and players would pack in for away games, and stragglers would be put into a van with the college’s two athletic trainers.
There wasn’t a lot of space, and with no option for expanding the stock of buses, coach Barry Streeter decided he would just limit who was allowed to be on either bus.
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“I was a real stickler on that,” he said.
But on the rare occasion that there was an open spot on the bus after a road game, Brandon Streeter would get to ride home with the team. He’d sit next to his dad and they’d talk shop as they made their way from Lancaster or Haverford or Allentown back to Gettysburg’s 200-acre campus in rural Pennsylvania.
During home games, Brandon would stand on the Gettysburg sidelines, behind his father, holding the cord from his father’s headset (“You have to start somewhere,” Barry Streeter joked). Brandon would do his best to keep players and assistant coaches from stepping on the cord, but every so often someone would trip on the cord and it would yank Barry’s head back. He’d turn, give Brandon a look and then return to coaching.
Eventually, the program got wireless headsets and Brandon got promoted to ball boy.
For Brandon Streeter, now the Clemson quarterbacks coach and recruiting coordinator, these moments defined his childhood and young adult years. He was not just a son, he was the son of a head football coach. He was not just a player, he was a player raised by a coach. And, nothing has shaped him more as he has become a coach himself.
The Streeter family in 1978, with Brandon at bottom left. (Photo by Gettysburg College athletics)Little by little, even just 16 years into his career, Brandon has started to become more like Barry. At first, it was just their similarly calm demeanor. But now it’s their mannerisms, the cadence and rhythm of their voices. Brandon is starting to look more like his father, too.
“He’s literally turning into Dad,” Brandon’s brother Jason said.
In many ways, Brandon hopes that to be true.
For 39 years, Barry was at Gettysburg — the first three as defensive coordinator, the next 36 as head coach. He won and lost and took teams to the playoffs and didn’t take teams to the playoffs. He produced all-conference players and guys who never saw the field. He kept an office — Office 103 — and noted every happening of the season from meetings to game plans to travel logs to conversations in 39 different notebooks that he stored on his bookshelf.
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He was steady. He was measured. He was reliable.
To Brandon, Barry as a head coach was everything that he wants to be as a quarterback coach for Deshaun Watson and Kelly Bryant and everyone who follows.
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And six weeks ago, on the day that Clemson clinched the ACC Atlantic division, Barry coached his final game. He retired after almost four decades in that office and on that sideline on which Brandon had grown up.
A week before Barry Streeter arrived here for Clemson’s matchup with Alabama in the College Football Playoff Semifinal (8:45 p.m. ET Monday, ESPN), he turned in his office keys and went from head coach to former head coach.
Now, Brandon is no longer the “son of the coach.”
Now, Barry is the “father of the coach.”
Barry is adjusting to this view. To be on the metaphorical sideline, to be the one holding the cord rather than the one with the headset.
“The time flies,” Barry said. “I can assure you of that.”
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When Brandon’s college playing career at Clemson was over, as he was trying to decide whether to go into coaching, Barry gave him a piece of unexpected advice: Walk away from the game for a little bit.
“If you can live without it, then you need to live without it,” Barry told him. “It’s not one of those things that you can kind of do. You’re either in or you’re out.”
Brandon played a year of Arena League football and got a Masters degree in human resource development. But by the summer of 2002, Brandon had decided he couldn’t live without football. So he began cold-calling teams in the South, reaching out to any coach who might have room on a staff or someone who might remember the former Clemson QB who set 11 school records while he was playing there.
Charleston Southern had an opening. They did the phone interview and asked him to drive down to see if he thought the fit would be good. He had no other offers or interest, so he packed up his car with all his belongings and decided that he would take the job no matter what. He was there for two years.
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Brandon had been back at Clemson as a graduate assistant for two years when Liberty coach Danny Rocco called. He took the interview thinking that Rocco reminded him a bit of his dad, and when he got to campus and spoke with the staff, he felt a familiar Gettysburg vibe.
“I knew that it looked like what my dad did,” Brandon said. “So, I knew it couldn’t be wrong.”
He followed Rocco and that Gettysburg feeling from Liberty to Richmond until Clemson came calling again and he had the opportunity to join Dabo Swinney, another coach who had tendencies similar to those of his dad.
“I knew what it was supposed to look like,” Brandon said. “I knew what to look for and it started with making sure that the job you take, that you’re taking the job because of the people you’re working with and for.”
And the longer Brandon has been in these situations, the more similarities he sees to his own, and his father’s, beginnings.
Brandon Streeter (far right) and his family after the final road game for Barry Streeter (center) this season (Photo courtesy the Streeter family)Now, with three kids of his own under the age of nine, Clemson is becoming his family’s version of Gettysburg College. His kids stop by the facility for family dinners on Wednesday night. His son is at practice at least once a week. His three-year-old daughter drops off cookies with Brandon’s wife Ashleigh on Thursdays or Fridays for the quarterbacks. He brings his kids and nephews into the locker room after wins.
“He has always said, ‘I’m not just going to take any job if it doesn’t line up with where we are as a family,’ ” Ashleigh said. “I think that has guided his career. He has wanted to do the same kind of thing that his family did.”
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When Brandon was in elementary school, he was sitting in the stands at a Gettysburg College away game when the Gettysburg kicker missed an extra point. Throughout the stands, fans groaned about the kicker and his leg.
“It was a bad hold,” Brandon told his grandpa, with whom he was sitting.
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Brandon’s grandfather relayed this to Barry who knew, in fact, it was the hold. And Barry relayed it to the rest of the coaching staff.
“We were looking at the film saying, ‘Yeah, it was a bad hold,’ ” former Gettysburg defensive coordinator John Campo said. “Brandon was real observant about the game, not just looking at it as fans do, but as a coach’s son.”
Brandon saw pieces of the game that other players didn’t, pieces that he had already begun to pick up on when he was standing behind his dad holding the headset cord or talking to refs on the sidelines as a Gettysburg ball boy.
But Brandon didn’t just watch the game. He watched the people. He saw how his father interacted with his own players and, more importantly, how those players responded to his dad. Barry wasn’t a coach who raised his voice or threw his headset (which would’ve made life being the cord kid pretty frustrating). He wasn’t a coach who yelled at his players for a missed extra point or a bad hold. He didn’t take players to task over dropped passes and missed blocks.
“If there were one word to describe him it’d be poise,” Brandon said. “The players were going to respond to how you respond.”
And Brandon took that into his own coaching because the only kind of response he has ever wanted out of his quarterbacks if for them to play freely.
He knows that’s how he felt when he was playing at his best in his Clemson uniform. His teammates still remember him for being unflappable in tough game situations or when he was coming back from injuries.
Brandon Streeter as Clemson’s quarterback in 1999 (Getty Images)Both Clemson co-offensive coordinators Jeff Scott and Tony Elliott were true freshmen at Clemson in 1999 when Brandon, then a senior, was the starting quarterback.
“I think that has resonated with the quarterbacks that we have now, they’re taking on that mindset of what it takes to be physically tough enough and mentally tough enough to perform at a high level,” Elliott said.
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That high level has been higher than almost any other program. The first starting quarterback Streeter coached with the Tigers, Deshaun Watson, was a two-time Heisman trophy finalist and led Clemson on a winning, 68-yard drive in the final two minutes of last season’s national championship game. This year, junior and first-time starter Kelly Bryant is one of five quarterbacks in the FBS with 2,500 yards passing and 600 yards rushing, and he has completed 67.4 of his pass attempts. In addition, Clemson’s last two recruiting classes, coordinated by Streeter, have included two more elite signal callers — the No. 2 pro style QB in the 2017 class in Hunter Johnson and the No. 1 player in the 2018 class in Trevor Lawrence.
“They know that I played here and I sat in their chairs. I did the same thing at the same place, went through the same exact experiences,” Brandon said. “I think that’s critical when you’re coaching guys at this level. I think that connection can be closer and they can maybe respond a little bit better because of that.”
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Barry Streeter had decided well before Gettysburg College’s 2017 season that it would be his last as a coach.
When Brandon found out about his dad’s retirement, he knew he needed to make it back to see him coach at least one more time. Brandon hadn’t been back to a Gettysburg game since 2015, and before that, it had been almost six years since he had been to one.
Clemson’s idle week fell in the middle of October, on the day that Gettysburg would play at conference powerhouse Johns Hopkins. It was just a week after Barry had made his retirement public.
Brandon, his wife Ashleigh and their three kids flew up to Baltimore for the game.
He split his time that game between the stands and Gettysburg sideline, taking in one last game with his dad doing what he had always done.
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The game was a blowout. Johns Hopkins, ranked 21st in NCAA Division III at the time, won 52-0 in Barry’s penultimate road game of a four-decade career in one spot.
“I didn’t think it was going to be as emotional as it was,” Brandon said. “When you get on the sidelines and just kind of look over your shoulder at your dad, who has been doing it for almost 40 years as the head coach, all kinds of previous memories just kind of flashed through my mind.”
After the game, Brandon and his family greeted his dad outside the field, and Brandon followed his dad to the bus. He joined his dad in one of the front seats and rode back to Gettysburg, as the son of a head football coach, one final time.
(Top photo: Fred Kfoury III / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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