Howard Mudd's back to coaching again because Colts have Frank Reich, Chris Strausser

INDIANAPOLIS — The first time Frank Reich called Howard Mudd, he wanted to know about Chris Strausser.

Reich and Mudd go way back, back to the golden era of Colts football, and the next time they talked, they started reminiscing, talking about old calls code-named Harry Potter and how the game has changed over the years.

A few days later, Reich called Mudd back with a proposal. He’d already hired Strausser; now he wanted Mudd.

“I’ll walk from Seattle,” Mudd remembers telling Reich. “But it’ll take me a while.”

The 77-year-old Mudd didn't have to walk. A plane brought him back to the place that cemented his status as a coaching legend.

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He hadn’t been planning to come back.

He’d last coached for Philadelphia in 2012, and he was enjoying life in Seattle. Mudd hadn’t left the game. He’d taken consulting gigs, working with Strausser at the University of Washington and traveling to NFL cities for a couple of days in the spring to help out coaches he knew. He spent a year working with a company that provides video for broadcasting crews, watching NFL film to help prepare the analysts in the booth.

But if Mudd was going to return to coaching full-time, it had to be the right situation, a situation made right because of the people involved. Even now, Mudd has a lot of friends in football, offensive line coaches who’ve picked his brain at one point or another, and as a result of his legendary name and a career that spanned decades, he knows a lot of NFL coaches.

Simply knowing Mudd wouldn’t have been enough to get him to come out of retirement.

“It’s who you trust,” Mudd said.

Indianapolis had the people Mudd trusts.

He holds great respect for Jim Irsay, Pete Ward and Chris Ballard, and if the Colts’ brass had asked, he’d have come back in some capacity.

Returning in a full-time role required another level of trust, a trust in the other coaches on staff, in the head coach he’d be working with on a daily basis. Trust in a head coach like Reich, who spent years with Mudd when he first returned to the NFL, and had impressed the legendary line coach with his inquisitive and intuitive nature.

Trust in a colleague like Strausser, a man Mudd trusts implicitly, even though they haven’t known each other that long. A few years ago, before his final season at Washington, Strausser reached out to Mudd — a man he’d never met before — to ask the veteran to teach his Huskies offensive line the art of pass protection.

“My fear was that he was going to very grumpy, knowing his history and knowing he’s a little bit older than me,” Strausser said. “We really hit it off right away.”

Mudd was immediately impressed by Strausser’s humility.

Rather than simply picking Mudd’s brain, taking in the information and then re-packaging it as his own innovation, Strausser ceded the floor to Mudd in the legend’s first meeting with the Huskies offensive line, then twice brought his offensive linemen to Mudd’s house to watch the man who protected Peyton Manning teach his charges in the backyard.

An iron-clad friendship was forged.

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“We’ve talked on a regular basis for the last three years, almost daily,” Strausser said.

For that reason, neither Mudd nor Strausser is worried much about the division of responsibilities on Reich’s staff. Indianapolis now has three assistants — one more than the NFL norm — specializing in the offensive line; Mudd’s title is senior offensive assistant, Strausser is the offensive line coach, Colorado’s Klayton Adams is the assistant offensive line coach.

Reich wants all three minds working full-time with an Indianapolis offensive line that formed into the NFL’s best up-and-coming front five last season.

“When we started this thing, I said, yeah, I’ll come back and be Chris’s assistant,’ Mudd said he told Reich, but the head coach wasn’t having it.

“No, no, no, I want the real guy,” Mudd remembers Reich telling him. “I want every bit of what you were when you came here.”

On a different staff, a staff with less of a collaborative approach and bigger egos, that might be a problem.

Reich’s staff is built on the principle that everybody’s involved and offering ideas, and part of the reason Mudd and Strausser have developed such a strong bond in just three years is that they teach the game the same way.

“I know that Chris Strausser trusts that if I say something that isn’t quite what he���s saying, that his well-being isn’t at stake, and I feel the same way (about him),” Mudd said. “Not everyone in this league, just because I know them real well, would I be comfortable doing that with.”

Mudd made his decision because of the men he trusts, and because he sees what these Colts can be. The turnaround Ballard and Reich have engineered has been remarkable, and Mudd’s excited about helping Indianapolis get back to the top of the NFL, to where the Colts were when he left them.  

He never thought he’d be back in this role again.

“Nothing like this,” Mudd said. “This is really. … it’s got me pretty stoked up, this old man.”

A man who is happy to be back.

Follow the Indianapolis Star's Joel A. Erickson on Twitter @JoelAErickson.

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