Hlas: Dan McCarney is a portrait in resilience

Listening to Dan McCarney on a teleconference Monday after not having been around him for several years, you wouldn't have known anything about him had changed other than he had gotten older with the rest of us.

It was the same Mac who played and coached football at Iowa for 19 years, the same Mac who was head coach at Iowa State for 12 years. He talked a mile a minute. He was passionate about everything he said. He typically dipped freely from his typically deep well of upbeat adjectives, favoring 'phenomenal” and 'amazing.”

It's that same Mac bringing his North Texas team to Kinnick Stadium Saturday as the one who spent so many Saturdays there before. Which, frankly, is phenomenal and amazing.

What McCarney, 62, has battled over the last few years would stop many of us. Or at least slow us down.

He is blind in his right eye. He had a hole in his cornea. Because the eye is misshaped from four surgeries and highly sensitive to light, McCarney now always wears sunglasses.

In February 2012, he suffered a stroke. The left side of his body was numb. He'd had a blood clot at the back of his brain. The stroke came shortly after he had his daily workout. He was helicoptered from a Denton hospital to a neurological trauma center in Fort Worth.

He has said he had minimal lasting damage, just headaches and some numbness in his tongue and left hand. He was back to work less than two weeks after the stroke.

In April 2013, McCarney was climbing two flights of stairs in North Texas' athletic center, something he did daily. He felt heavy pressure in his chest. He quickly learned he had blockages that required quadruple bypass heart surgery.

He was back to work five days after the surgery.

'Either of those or both could have brought me down for good, obviously,” McCarney said Monday.

'When you go through something like that, it could have been long gone. You just have this amazing appreciation for anything and everything that you have in life.

'I didn't know that I could love my family or my friends or my players or my coaches, my experiences and my memories, more than I did. But I do.”

Then last January, McCarney's older brother, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mike McCarney of Portland, Ore., died.

'I miss him so much,” McCarney said. 'He was one of those great brothers that just quietly gave me that great support.”

That was the only somber moment in the coach's 20 minutes on the phone. Otherwise it was all enthusiasm and optimism. It didn't matter if the subject was his team, his 'tremendous respect and admiration for Kirk (Ferentz) and his Iowa program,” or looking back on his days as a Hawkeye player and an assistant coach.

McCarney became an Iowa assistant shortly after his playing career ended, and has grinded away in coaching for four decades. Besides his Iowa and Iowa State experiences, he was an assistant coach at Wisconsin when the Badgers went from the bottom of the Big Ten to the Rose Bowl. He was an assistant for Urban Meyer at Florida when the Gators won the national title.

'I have a pretty good perspective when you talk about going from the worst in college football (Iowa was 0-11 when McCarney played there in 1973), to the top of the mountain, and everything in-between.”

He is in his fifth season at North Texas of Conference USA, and it isn't easy. His team is 0-2, having suffered double-digit losses to SMU and Rice. As you would expect, he calls the fans, students and administration at North Texas 'phenomenal.”

'I just want them to be proud that they brought me here as the head football coach.”

He took over a program that was 8-40 over the four years before he arrived. The Mean Green are 22-29 since, including a 9-4 season in 2013 capped by a win in the Heart of Dallas Bowl.

'The day-to-day stuff is really no different than it is whether you're in a Power 5 conference or not,” McCarney said. 'You're trying to leave the office at night and make sure your program is better than when you got there in the morning. You're trying to teach young people how to win on and off the field.”

To learn about resilience and positive attitude, North Texas' players need only to look as far as their head coach.