AUBURN - It was cold and dark on that November day in 1979. Snowflakes swirled in wind so cold it would cut through the warmest of clothes. Two Division II Michigan schools - Wayne State and Saginaw Valley - were playing for a conference championship.

Dick Lawry, 76 years old and retired from a coaching career that spanned more than 40 years, was the head coach at Wayne State. He remembers the fiercely competitive linebacker who played ever harder as the conditions got worse.

"It was really cold," Lawry says. "I mean really cold. You could see his breath. I can still picture it to this day. We were behind and he didn't like it. I will never forget how hard he played, and the impact he had on how hard other guys played. He was so intense and was just daring the other team to run right at him."

The linebacker was Brian VanGorder, who as Auburn's defensive coordinator, will try to teach that mindset to another generation of football players.

"He was just a very, very intense football player and without a doubt the best football player in our league," Lawry said. "He was one of the four or five best players I ever coached. And a super human being."

Even then, Lawry believed VanGorder would one day be a successful coach.

"From watching him play, he was just bound to be a coach," Lawry says. "He was a coach on the field. You didn't really have to say much to the defense, because he was there pushing them on."

VanGorder grew up in Orchard Park, Mich., 100 miles west of Detroit, the third of Robert and Gloria VanGorder's four sons. His father, a factory worker at General Motors, believed in hard work and in competition.

"He was a very difficult man," VanGorder says. "We had to be working. If you were sitting down or lying around when he got home, it would be ugly. We worked and we played sports. That was our life."

VanGorder had a paper route when he was 9. He was caddying at the local golf course at 11. It was his father's way.

"He stood for all the right things -- honesty, integrity and work ethic," VanGorder says. "I've always tried to keep those things in line in my life."

It was from there that VanGorder began an unlikely journey that would lead him to the highest level college football, to the NFL and finally, in January, to Auburn.

***

It's early on a February morning. VanGorder has already had one meeting. He'll meet again with defensive coaches. Later, he'll meet with head coach Gene Chizik to talk about how he wants to restructure the defensive staff. There is so much to do and so little time. Spring practice is but a month away.

"Anytime you are separated from your family and at the same time you are teaching a whole new system to not only your players but your coaching staff, you can't feel completely settled," VanGorder says. "It's a lot of work."

But it's VanGorder's work, and he would swap it for no other. He's a master tactician, but he says football, at its core, is the same in high school or in the NFL or at Auburn.

"Even when times get tough, I always remind myself this is a gladiator type game you've been playing for a long time," VanGorder says. "Football is football. Yeah, there are great strategies involved and they are very important, but the idea of a man's ruggedness and toughness mentally and physically are all great things that existed then and exist today. If you don't have that, your team doesn't have much of a chance.

"All those great things that are involved in the ruggedness of a man and the toughness, the ability to handle stress and pressure, exist today just like they did back when I began the game. I remind myself of that all the time."

That's way he learned the game back home in Michigan, where he loved the University of Michigan and legendary coach Bo Schemebechler.

"From a philosophical and emotional standpoint, Michigan football influences me greatly to this day," VanGorder says. "I was there a lot. I grew up watching it. The Michigan-Ohio State game was like a kid down here watching Auburn-Alabama. It built an emotional part of me that will always be."

***

VanGorder is 52 years old, and he's been coaching since he went to work as an assistant at West Bloomfield (Mich.) High School in 1981. A year later, at the age of 23, he became head coach at Boca Raton (Fla.) Academy.

He had started down a path that would be anything but easy.

"As I entered that world, I had gone to Wayne State University," VanGorder says. "I didn't start with a network that was really going to help me with any kind of upward mobility."

In those days, VanGorder wasn't thinking of coaching in the SEC or the NFL. He was thinking about trying to win state championships. He spent seven seasons as a very successful high school coach, five of those seasons in Florida, before Lawry told him about a restricted earnings position at Grand Valley State University. He went to work coaching the defensive line in 1989 for $16,000 per year. A year later, he was the defensive coordinator

In 1992, VanGorder's school called. He became the head coach where had played, at Wayne State.

"That was a program the president had been trying to drop for years," VanGorder says. "I didn't have any fulltime coaches. I was paying guys as volunteers. I had like a bunch of GA's. That forced me to really study. I had a decent background in defense, but it really forced me to study offense."

From Wayne State, 45 minutes from the Michigan campus, he reached out to the school that was his childhood favorite for advice.

"Cam Cameron was the offensive coordinator at Michigan at the time," VanGorder says. "I sat in on all their meetings. Wayne State was really a good experience for me over the course of three years, really learning about offense, which makes you a better defensive coach."

From there it was on to Central Florida and stops at Central Michigan and Western Illinois. Along the way, he met Mark Richt, the offensive coordinator at Florida State. Richt was impressed with what he saw when Florida State played Central Florida. VanGorder and Willie Martinez, Richt's teammate at Miami, had already worked together at two previous stops. VanGorder and Richt became friends.

That friendship would lead to VanGorder's breakthrough into college football's big-time.

***

When Richt was named head coach at Georgia after the 2000 season, he put in a call to VanGorder, who had just finished what would be his only season as defensive coordinator at Western Illinois. Richt wanted to know if he'd be interested in talking about Georgia's defensive coordinator position. He was also going to hire Martinez.

"I had interviewed and I was waiting," VanGorder says. "Pretty soon, it got to the point I started to feel like it probably wasn't going to happen. Then I got the call. I probably got that job because he trusted me more than any X's and O's. He didn't know a lot of people. I think he was a little bit nervous about bringing in someone that was maybe more qualified than I was at the time."

If it hadn't happened, VanGorder had already told his family that he might decide to go back to Florida and coach high school football with the intention of making that his career. Instead, VanGorder's career as a college coach was about to take off. He quickly established Georgia as an elite defensive team. In 2003, he won the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant coach.

"It was awesome," VanGorder says. "We had chemistry. I had the right kinds of guys. The first year was kind of tough, transitioning from a team that was very offensive-minded under Jim Donnan and not very good on defense. They didn't really understand what playing tough defense was, but by the end of the year, we were pretty good.

"After that, we were really one of the better defenses in the nation over the next three years. The chemistry was really, really good. My personality was just a real good mesh with guys we brought in, guys like (defensive end) David Pollack."

VanGorder had set his sights on becoming a college head coach. When the Jacksonville Jaguars offered him a chance to coach linebackers in 2005, he took it believing it would improve his chances of moving to college as a head coach. It was there, working for renowned defensive coach Jack Del Rio, that he began to see things differently than he ever had.

"I think that my learning from college to the NFL in terms of how to organize a yearly calendar, how to do business in terms of preparing your team and taking it through the long grind of the season, everything involved in the operation, I'm a very detailed guy when it comes to that," VanGorder says. "I say that because college coaching kind of forces a neurotic state by college coaches because it's just all over the place.

"When I went to the NFL, I saw how detailed everything is over the course of the year. Jack Del Rio, who learned from Brian Billick, who took part of the Bill Walsh philosophy, the detail part of who I am is from that family."

After one year at Jacksonville, VanGorder's wife and five children did not like the NFL. They liked Georgia. He accepted an offer to become head coach at Georgia Southern but he soon found it wasn't what he expected. He went 3-8, got an offer from the Atlanta Falcons and was gone after one season.

"I didn't even know a football program could be run like that program was being run," VanGorder says. "I totally purged it. We lost six scholarships going in because of academics. We had all these kids failing classes. We had no quarterbacks, no tight ends, no fullbacks. We had one kind of tailback guy. We ended up removing 18 scholarship players from the team. I quickly moved out of it and back to the NFL, right or wrong.

"I look back on that and it was probably one of the best coaching jobs I was ever part of. We lost six games by 24 points. We couldn't kick an extra point. That was the weirdest thing. Honestly, we couldn't kick an extra point. We were tied or led every game by halftime. It was a very good job by a coaching staff."

When the Falcons called, VanGorder moved again. He would stay five seasons, four as defensive coordinator. Then another old friend called. Chizik was looking for a defensive coordinator.

Scott Fountain, now Auburn's director of player personnel, was the offensive line coach and assistant head coach at Georgia Southern. He'd also worked with VanGorder at Central Florida.

"One of the first things I noticed about him was that he was a players' coach and a man's man," Fountain says. "He's going to be very demanding of his players, but players are going to love playing for him because he's going to be consistent in what he says and what he does and how he treats people."

***

Philosophically and personally, VanGorder says he is not the same coach who helped Mark Richt win big at Georgia. He's better. And being a head coach is longer part of his agenda.

"People said I should stay in the NFL because I was going to be a head coach," VanGorder says. "I don't know if that's what I wanted. With my personality, the owner, the general manager need to line up with how I see a football program should be run. It's even more stressful in college because you are dealing with a president and an athletic director and a lot of support staff that really need to be in line with serious football.

"Does that exist? Yeah, but at the same time, I would look for just the perfect situation. I'm not willing at my age to compromise myself and what I know about the business. I've worked hard and carry a lot of experience and knowledge into it. I'm not willing to compromise that. That's the main reason I left the NFL. That's where I am and who I am at this point in time."

VanGorder's focus now is on spring practice and helping Auburn again go after the biggest prize in college football.

"As I’ve said before, whether it’s the NFL, whether it’s college football, there are elite jobs," VanGorder says. "This is an elite job."