GREELEY — For Ed McCaffrey, looking out at Nottingham Field felt just like coming back home again.
“This is really where it all started for me,” the former Broncos wide receiver said late Friday afternoon as he was introduced as the new head football coach at Northern Colorado.
“We practiced out on those fields for seven or eight years. I slept in (those) dorms. I ate in the cafeteria and we met in the classrooms. My first taste of Colorado was right up here in Greeley, on this campus.”
UNC was the home of the Broncos’ preseason training camp from the summer of 1982 through 2002, before it relocated to the team’s headquarters in Dove Valley. McCaffrey, 51, caught 462 career passes and won two Super Bowls with the Broncos from 1995-2003.
“I’m so happy to be here and I want to bring championship football back to the University of Northern Colorado,” said McCaffrey, who spent the last two seasons as the football coach at Valor Christian High, where he won a Class 5A state title in the fall of 2018. “And it’s (starting) today.”
McCaffrey addressed the skepticism of a first-time collegiate head coach taking a job at the Division I FCS level directly from the prep ranks, and admitted he saw some of that uncertainty in his players’ eyes when he met with them earlier in the day.
“Some of them gave me the eyeball,” the former Broncos wideout admitted. “I said, ‘That’s a kid I want to coach’ … I got a couple of those stares today and I’m glad I did.”
McCaffrey has signed an offer letter agreeing to a five-year deal worth $190,000 annually, UNC athletic director Darren Dunn said.
“For me, it’s not about winning the press conference,” Dunn noted. “I’m doing it because I think he’ll be a great football coach. He knows football. Football is football, no matter what level.”
McCaffrey won the news conference, too, in a landslide, even joking to the UNC players in attendance that they might know him better as “Christian’s dad,” a reference to Carolina Panthers tailback Christian McCaffrey, the coach’s second-oldest son and an NFL MVP candidate.
The former Broncos wideout is going to interview current UNC staffers over the next week to 10 days and has received almost 100 phone calls, Dunn said, from potential assistant coaches inquiring about a role on his staff.
“I plan on being here. I plan on being here for a long time … I don’t have plans after here. And I plan to be here. And I promise you, I’m going to give it all that I’ve got.”
