Alumni Spotlight: Mike Groh

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Take a minute to study the University of Virginia’s 1994 and ’95 football rosters, and it’s not hard to see why those teams were so successful.

In that golden era of UVA football, Hall of Fame coach George Welsh’s standouts included twins Tiki and Rondé Barber, Mike Groh, Jamie Sharper, James Farrior, Germane Crowell, Demetrius Allen, Charles Way, Ryan Kuehl, Randy Neal, Will Brice, Rafael Garcia, Chris Harrison, Tyrone Davis, Mike Frederick, Anthony Poindexter, Percy Ellsworth, Joe Crocker and Patrick Jeffers. And more.

“Both sides of the ball had a lot of talent,” Groh recalled. “There’s a bunch of guys that played a long time in the NFL.”

In 1994, the Cavaliers finished 9-3 after defeating TCU in the Independence Bowl. They posted a 9-4 record in 1995, with another postseason win, this one over Georgia in the Peach Bowl. The ’95 season, of course, also included a historic victory over Florida State. The Seminoles were 29-0 in ACC play before losing to the Wahoos in front of an amped-up sellout crowd on a Thursday night at Scott Stadium.

The quarterback on those teams was Groh, who’d joined the program in 1991 and, after waiting his turn to lead the offense, proved more than capable in that role.

Groh passed for 1,711 yards in 1994 and 2,510 in 1995, when he was named to the All-ACC second team. Three decades later, he remains immersed in the sport. Groh, 53, is heading into his fourth year as the New York Giants’ wide receivers coach and his 14^th season overall as an NFL assistant.

He grew up around the sport, so his choice of career wasn’t unexpected.

“Certainly from a younger age I kind of always thought I would be a coach,” Groh said, “so to find myself sitting here 25 years later, am I shocked? No, I’m not shocked by it.”

He didn’t go into coaching immediately after his playing career ended. First, Groh worked for several years as a stockbroker with Davenport & Company LLC in Richmond. It was “a great company with great people,” Groh said, but he missed the competitive nature of football. And so he returned to the sport in 2000 as an offensive assistant with the New York Jets, whose head coach was his father, Al Groh.

Thus began a coaching odyssey that’s taken Mike Groh to Charlottesville, to Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Louisville, Ky., back to Tuscaloosa, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Indianapolis and, now, back to the New York metropolitan area.

He lives in Summit, N.J., about 20 miles from Randolph, the Jersey town where his family lived when Al Groh coached the Giants’ linebackers. (The elder Groh also served as New York’s defensive coordinator in 1991.)

The first NFL game Mike Groh attended was at the Meadowlands, where the Giants played, and later, in the summer of 1990, he assisted Bill Belichick, then the team’s defensive coordinator, as a ball boy during training camp.

“So it’s very comfortable to be back here,” said Groh, who starred for Randolph High School. “I always wanted to coach for the Giants, so it’s really cool to be here.”

At UVA, Welsh retired at after the 2000 season, and his successor was Al Groh, who hired Mike Groh as wide receivers coach. The younger Groh later worked with the Wahoos’ quarterbacks before taking over as offensive coordinator before the 2006 season.

Mike Groh’s tenure at his alma mater ended after the 2008 season, when athletic department leaders insisted that his father make staff changes. Al Groh, also a former UVA player, was dismissed as head coach after the 2009 season.

When he reflects on his time coaching at Virginia, Mike Groh said, he remembers “a lot of really good moments. I think that we were building the team the right way. We had the right kind of players. I think you could look at the players that came off of those teams that we had a chance to recruit, and they would match up very favorably with the teams that I played on with Coach Welsh, in terms of their talent. I got a chance to be a part of a lot of young men’s lives, and a lot of those guys are in coaching now, and I think that’s a testament to the experience that they had when they were playing for us.

“Wish we’d won a few more games there. I’m certainly not the coach now that I was then. So I’ve come a long way in my progression as a coach. But when you look back on it, UVA is still a very special place to me, and I’m really focused more on the good than any of the bad. There were a lot of positive experiences that I can take from it.”

From Charlottesville, Groh went to Tuscaloosa, where he joined head coach Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama as a graduate assistant in 2009. The Crimson Tide won the national title that year, after which Groh left to become quarterbacks coach at Louisville. He rejoined Saban’s staff after one season with the Cardinals and served as Alabama’s receivers coach and recruiting coordinator in 2011 and ’12.

The Crimson Tide was crowned national champion in each of those seasons, too.

Groh said his time in Tuscaloosa “gave me the ability to kind of sit back after eight years as an assistant at Virginia and really, if you will, continue an education. I got to be around some really good football coaches, to learn a new system, to see a different way. Although a lot of the same core values and the principles that I was hearing were very familiar, they were just said maybe a little bit differently.”

When he played at UVA, he paid attention to the way Welsh ran the program. “One of the things that Coach Welsh did that I think you need to do to be a successful head coach is hold people to a high standard and be consistent and unrelenting with that and whatever it is that you determine are your core values,” Groh said. “And he did that.

“Obviously, he and his staff did a tremendous job attracting really good football players and getting them to come to Virginia to start with and building the program really from nothing. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, it certainly was not a program you ever thought would be [ranked] No. 1 in the country.”

Virginia ascended to the top spot in the polls in the fall of 1990. Groh enrolled at UVA the next summer. Playing for Welsh, Groh said, he saw the importance of “holding people accountable and the discipline that it takes—and this has become a cliché now that it’s been popularized—just to do your job and do it at a really high level over and over and over again. The systems that they put in place allowed us to be good on offense and play complementary football, with a really good defense and kicking game.”

His three seasons at Alabama gave Groh an opportunity to study Saban, whom many consider the greatest coach in college football history. Like Welsh, Saban demanded accountability and held “not only the coaches, but the players too, to that standard every single day,” Groh said, “which I believe is really what you have to do. You’ve got to be that demanding and you’ve got to be unrelenting with it.”

Most college coaches never win a national title. Groh has rings from three championship teams, and those seasons “were all special,” he said.

“Certainly with that third one, we had the expectation to make it to that game and probably every opportunity if we could get there to win it, and we were able to do that. The first time you do something, a lot of times it’s the hardest, but then coming back and being able to do it again, when people do circle your name on the schedule and you’re getting everybody’s best shot, then it’s even harder to do something a second time, and then be able to repeat and do it back to back was really special.”

Groh left the college game for the NFL after the 2012 season. He coached the Bears’ receivers for three seasons (2013-15) before heading to the West Coast. In 2016, he held two positions with the Los Angeles Rams (receivers coach and passing game coordinator). He spent the next three seasons with the Eagles: the first as receivers coach and the final two as offensive coordinator.

From Philadelphia, he went to Indianapolis and coached the Colts’ receivers in 2020 and ’21. Then came something of a full-circle moment for Groh: an opportunity to work for the Giants.

“I’ve always just tried to do a really good job with the job I’ve got,” he said. “Usually things work out in your favor if you do that and you stay focused, and I certainly do really appreciate this opportunity to be here in New Jersey working for the New York Football Giants, for an outstanding ownership group like the Maras and the Tisch families. All these NFL jobs, they’re not necessarily the same. We’re all in the same league, but they’re not all equal. I feel very fortunate to be here and work for a great head coach, Brian Daboll, and [general manager] Joe Schoen, the way that they’ve been putting this roster together over the last several years.”

For NFL coaches, there are breaks in the calendar that their college counterparts don’t always enjoy.

“In the offseason, you get your life back,” Grohs said. “Our hours are very reasonable. Here, we work two Saturdays [in the spring]—one during the draft and one during the rookie mini-camp—but other than that, we’re not working over the weekends. We’re home for dinner every night. You get several weeks of vacation throughout the course of the spring. Right after the season, you get time off in February, a little time off in March. So depending on who you’re working for, obviously that calendar can change, but we get a lot of half-day Fridays or Fridays off or whatever here. So it certainly makes it a lot more manageable in the off-season. You get to be around your family.”

Groh has two children: an 11-year-old son and a daughter who’s soon to be 8. “They’ve both got their activities,” he said, and his offseason schedule allows him to attend many of them.

“I can get there for the end of [a] practice and kind of see what’s going on,” Groh said. “I can get to almost every game that they’re playing, and I’m able to pick them up and drive them home and be there for dinner and all that kind of stuff. It’s like what most dads and moms get a chance to do. That part is rewarding.”

Groh, who owns a condominium in Charlottesville, keeps up with college football, and he’s seen how NIL and the transfer portal are transforming the sport.

“It’s interesting,” he said. “It’s not really all that different than what life is like here in the NFL with free agency, although [college players] are free agents every day … It’s just a different time.”

There were no NIL deals when Groh played at Virginia. As the starting quarterback on a nationally ranked team, he would have been in an enviable position had NIL existed back then. He’ll never know.

“I think I got 20 bucks one time at the Biltmore,” he said, laughing.

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