Beautiful Schemer

NASHVILLE —  How do you shred a defense to confetti? Ask Norm Chow.

How do you mold a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback? Ask Chow.

How do you walk away from USC and a chance to win a third consecutive college football national championship? Ask Chow ... but don’t expect much of an answer.

In his new role as offensive coordinator of the Tennessee Titans, Chow will happily open up about working with Titan Coach Jeff Fisher, about the challenges of adjusting to the NFL, about how he already feels very much at home in Nashville.

But he’d rather steer clear of the reasons he became Norm Ciao.

Was there a play-calling power struggle with Trojan Coach Pete Carroll? Was USC not big enough for both of them? Was it painful leaving Matt Leinart, especially after the quarterback said it would have “changed [his] thought process” had he known Chow would be saying goodbye?

“Oh, man,” Chow said this week, his voice trailing off until it was no louder than Oklahoma’s Orange Bowl cheering section. “I wish those questions would just go away. ... I know you’d like to write a story that I’m mad and all that stuff. It ain’t that way.”

Fact is, Chow has moved on. One of the greatest assistant coaches in college football history has become the NFL’s most promising offensive coordinator. In some ways, he feels like a rookie coach again, revitalized by working with Fisher and invigorated by the challenge of transitioning to the pros after 32 years as a college assistant.

“I had heard so many horror stories about lifestyles and coaches in the NFL,” said Chow, who used to say he had no interest in coaching pro football. “But this guy made it easy. He’s just a great guy. The other day, I screwed up a drill. What he wanted done and what I wanted didn’t match. I said, ‘Jeff, I’m sorry ... ‘ And he said, ‘Ah, no big deal.’ Some coaches would be all over you for that.”

Fisher, a former USC defensive back who is entering his 11th season as Titan coach, hired Chow to replace Mike Heimerdinger, who became offensive coordinator of the New York Jets. There was an almost instant rapport between Fisher and Chow, who met for the first time in January when Fisher was flying through Los Angeles and set up a get-to-know-you meeting at an LAX hotel.

“We spent four or five hours together just talking, just getting to know each other,” Fisher recalled. “That was really my only intention, to get to know him. When he left, I didn’t know whether he was interested or not.” But then Chow checked back, wondering if he’d made a good impression. “Coach, this is the best call I’ve ever had,” Fisher told him.

A few weeks later, in early February, Chow formally accepted an offer to join the Titans, who doubled his USC salary by paying him a reported $900,000 a season. They have given him a lot of autonomy, too, putting all the offensive play-calling in his hands.

“He’ll call every play,” Fisher said. “Will I talk to him between series? Yeah. Will I make a suggestion here or there? Maybe. But I’ll never interrupt a sequence.”

It was Carroll, Fisher said, who paid Chow the highest compliment in the hiring process.

“Pete said, ‘Jeff, never in our lifetime will you meet a better play-caller than Norm Chow,’ ” he said.

Chow helped lead the Trojans to three consecutive bowl championship series bowl games and back-to-back national titles. He tutored Heisman winners Carson Palmer and Leinart as the Trojans compiled a 36-3 record the past three seasons.

Chow still feels very connected to the school, where two of his children are students. He listens to his favorite tunes -- among them, the soundtracks to “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables” -- on a cardinal-and-gold iPod. He keeps close tabs on the Trojans, and he relishes the memories he collected during the previous four years.

“What you choose to remember is those kids playing their backsides off,” he said. “Not only the Matt Leinarts and the [running back] Reggie Bushes, but the [center] Ryan Kalils and the [tackle] Sam Bakers, the guys that make up the heart of your football team.”

After only a couple weeks of training camp, Tennessee players are learning what they have in the low-key Chow, who has incorporated much more motion and many more specialty packages in the Titan offense than in years past.

“I think he’s really an offensive mastermind,” center Justin Hartwig said. “His best attribute is creating mismatches, finding mismatches and holes in defenses, mixing things up. He’s really going to keep defenses guessing.”

At a team picnic last weekend, receiver Drew Bennett got an idea of how strategically savvy Chow is. Bennett was playing cards, a game called “Booray,” when Chow asked how to play. The tutorial didn’t take long.

“I started to explain it to him like I’d explain it to the average football player,” said Bennett, who played at UCLA. “He said, ‘No, no, just tell me the rules.’ ... It took me a couple hands to understand not just the game but the strategy of it. With him it was, bam, right off the bat.”

Nobody associated with the Titans says it will take Chow long to make the adjustment from college to the pros. Already, he’s at ease with his players. And, typically, his playful needling has begun. Some of it was directed toward undrafted rookie quarterback Jason White, the 2003 Heisman winner from Oklahoma who in January was on the wrong end of a 55-19 thrashing by the Trojans in the Orange Bowl.

“Coach Chow will put in a play and say, ‘This is one we beat Oklahoma with,’ or ‘This play works against Oklahoma,’ ” said White, who quit football Thursday because of his bad knees. “And I’m thinking, ‘How many plays didn’t work against Oklahoma?’ ”

White realized the value of a coach with Chow’s experience. After all, this is the coach who helped develop quarterbacks Steve Young, Jim McMahon, Ty Detmer and Philip Rivers, among others.

Said White: “As a young quarterback, any time a coach has coached the great players, you want to hear what he has to say.”

That Chow is such a quick study bodes well for his new team. So far, his biggest adjustment has been getting used to the clock-management skills required of an NFL coordinator -- specifically, directing Tennessee’s two-minute offense, which the Titans ran 23 times last season.

“You know how many times we ran that in my four years at ‘SC? Once,” Chow said, recalling the Trojans used it to score a touchdown against Notre Dame.

As for his personal clock management, Chow devotes most of his waking hours to football. He lives in a hotel a half-mile from Titan headquarters, and will stay there throughout the season. He is on a first-name basis with hotel employees, who know to leave a banana and a newspaper in front of his door every morning. Diane Chow, who still resides in the family’s Manhattan Beach home, flies out to Tennessee a few times a month to be with her husband.

“It’s tough, it’s not easy, it’s not ideal,” Norm said. “But if you brought her out, she’d be alone most of the time anyway.”

In some ways, even though he’s 2,000 miles removed from his family and his former life at USC, Chow feels more at home than he has in years.

But once in a while, he feels those West Coast pangs. He laughs about the time he asked some of his Nashville friends the location of the closest, best Asian restaurant.

Their answer?

Los Angeles.

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Well-schooled

In 32 years as an assistant coach at USC (2001-04), North Carolina State (2000) and Brigham Young (1973-99), Norm Chow has tutored two Super Bowl quarterbacks and three Heisman Trophy winners:

Chow’s Super Bowl quarterbacks:

*--* STEVE YOUNG

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* At BYU, Young finished second in the 1983 Heisman vote. Named MVP of Super Bowl XXIX and was a two-time NFL player of the year. Inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame last week.

*--* JIM McMAHON

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* Passed for 4,571 yards and 47 touchdowns in 1980 for BYU. Led the Chicago Bears to a 46-10 rout of New England in Super Bowl XX.

Chow’s Heisman winners:

*--* MATT LEINART

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* Became the sixth Heisman winner at USC. Led the Trojans to an undefeated 2004 season and a national title.

*--* CARSON PALMER

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* Won the Heisman in 2002 at USC and now starts for Cincinnati Bengals.

*--* TY DETMER

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* Named Heisman winner in 1990 as a junior at BYU.