Peter Vaas coached Notre Dame’s quarterbacks the year Brady Quinn was the toast of college football.
He won two World Bowl championships as a head coach in NFL Europe.
And he has coached in the Sugar, Fiesta and Orange bowls.
But Vaas would scoff at the notion that his new job as Miami University’s offensive coordinator under first-year head coach Mike Haywood is any less important than those other roles.
“At the various talent levels, there’s always going to be a knot in your stomach, and it’s always going to be the same knot,” Vaas said, “because the football is just as important. The intensity is the same.”
He was undefeated head coach for Allegheny College in 1987 and again four years later as an assistant to Fighting Irish head coach Lou Holtz.
“Being undefeated was just as exciting to the players at Allegheny as winning the 1992 Sugar Bowl was to the Notre Dame players,” he pointed out.
Vaas said he learned about the importance of any job, at any location, when he drew his first college paycheck by pushing a broom.
“I ended up taking a job as a janitor in the gym at Allegheny in August of 1974,” he recalled. “The way it worked, they had only one full-time assistant coach. The second assistant was paid through the maintenance department.”
During a typical day, Vaas said, he would “make coffee in the morning, set up badminton sets, sweep the floor and keep the swimming pool clean and chlorinated.”
Vaas, who was raised in Westwood, Mass., a suburb of Boston, said his first love was baseball.
But he was walk-on quarterback at Holy Cross who became a three-year starter there, and tried out in the Canadian Football League but didn’t make it past training camp with the Ottawa Rough Riders.
