Learning from his mistakes: How Willie Taggart got it right the second time

As he walked out of that office in December of 2002, Willie Taggart was angry with himself. Furious even.

He had just interviewed for his first head coaching job, and it had not gone well. At all.

Taggart was only 25 years old at the time. So, in truth, he might have been a little too inexperienced to replace longtime head coach Jack Harbaugh at his alma mater, Western Kentucky, anyway. But he had made it into the room for an interview. He should have at least given himself a chance by performing well in that setting.

He didn't.

"I was his coordinator, and we had just won the I-AA national championship," Taggart explained. "And after that, Coach Harbaugh retired. And our athletic director and president called me up and asked me to interview for the job.

"I wasn't ready. I was 25 at the time. I wasn't ready. ... I'm trying to put something together really quick before I go in there. And I just slap some stuff together, and it was bad."

Taggart doesn't just pronounce the word "bad" as one short syllable, either. He extends it to "baaaaaaaaaad" to highlight just how poorly he feels he did that day.

Thinking about that moment more than 15 years later, while sitting in his new office at Doak Campbell Stadium, Taggart can't help but shake his head at the memory.

But as bad it felt at the time, he knows that failure also played a pivotal role in him becoming the type of coach who would be on Florida State's radar a decade and a half later.

"Pretty much every question they asked me, I was sitting there like, 'Uhh. Umm,'" Taggart said. "It was just bad all over. And I was so frustrated with myself when I walked out of there."

To the point where he vowed it would never happen again.

"I told myself the next time that happens, I'm going to make it hard for them to tell me no," he said.

One of the people who told Taggart no that day was Dr. Camden Wood Selig, who was the athletic director at Western Kentucky at the time and now serves in the same capacity at Old Dominion.

"I didn't feel that he was terrible," Selig said. "I just felt that he had room to improve. What was difficult for us was that Jack Harbaugh gave him such glowing recommendations. He said that he was the smartest football player he had ever coached, had the most innate sense of the game and adjustments that needed to be made of anyone that he had ever coached or coached with. He just raved about Willie.