Callaway: ‘People Ask Me Where I’m From, and I Usually Tell Them the SEC’

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Once he gets going, the stories and names pour from Russ Callaway‘s memory cloud. The 35-year-old Callaway, Florida’s new tight ends coach, is probably as close as one can be to being born a college football coach.

Callaway never imagined it any other way.

“That hunger was in me from an early age,” Callaway said.

In tracing Callaway’s path to his office inside UF’s Heavener Football Training Center, you quickly realize this orange did not fall far from the tree. Callaway is the son of Neil Callaway, a veteran Southeastern Conference assistant coach and former head coach at UAB. Like his father, Russ shares stories with a Southern drawl and down-home appeal.

Neil Callaway played college football for legendary coach Bear Bryant at Alabama. He started his coaching career as an assistant for future Auburn head coach Pat Dye – who recruited Callaway as a player to Alabama – when Dye left Bryant’s staff to become a head coach for the first time at East Carolina.

Russ Callaway was nowhere to be found in the playbook in those years, but when he arrived amid his father’s decade-long run as Dye’s offensive line coach at Auburn in the mid-1980s, he savored the life his father’s career offered he, his older brother Clay, and their sister Kate, who is now the director of performance nutrition for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers.

“People ask me where I’m from, and I usually tell them the SEC,” Callaway said.

He could write a book about the players and coaches he met growing up.

Russ remembers being in the Auburn locker room when Bo Jackson returned to campus at the height of his “Bo Knows” years and sang the alma mater following a big win. When Neil took a job at Alabama, Russ recalls sweaty days helping longtime Crimson Tide equipment manager Tank Conerly with chores. He would get a prize at the end of the day. He remembers his dad taking the boys with him on drives around south Georgia to recruit, sometimes dropping them off with George Bobo, father of former Georgia quarterback Mike Bobo and a close friend, while Neil visited a player.

That was part of his father’s plan.

“I don’t think you have to neglect your family, but I think you have to include your family in the process,” Neil Callaway said. “There’s a lot of good memories.”

Neil recalls a Sugar Bowl trip when he wondered if he had another son because Russ and Bulldogs…