We sat down with Matt McChesney, owner and operator of Six Zero Strength + Fitness in Centennial, to get his take on the first few months of the Karl Dorrell era at Colorado as well as his former position coach at CU, Chris Wilson.
Matt McChesney played football at Colorado from 2000-2004 and spent six years in the NFL with the New York Jets, Miami Dolphins and Denver Broncos.
Six Zero Strength + Fitness is located at 7101 South Fulton Street, Suite G, Centennial, CO 80112. You can get in contact with coach McChesney and Six Zero here.
Q: What's been your overall feel or assessment thus far for Karl Dorrell and his new staff:
McChesney:“Chris Wilson was my defensive line coach the whole time I was (at Colorado), so there’s a great relationship there. With coach Dorrell, we’ve already been in meetings about all the players. The relationship is going strong and I think he’s the right guy for the job. I think we upgraded everywhere — at the head coach position and everywhere."
"The opportunities that are (in Boulder) right now are really apparent and I think the guys up there right now are going to feed off of the fact that everybody thinks we’re going to suck. The coaching staff and players are very motivated to go out and prove everybody wrong. They’re a pretty hungry group and I think they’re going to be good. I’m not going to say they’ll win the Pac-12, but they’ll turn heads and I’m looking forward to it.”
Q: You certainly know coach Wilson well, dating back to your time as a player at CU, so what should players and fans alike expect from him as he gets settled in overseeing Colorado's d-line?
McChesney: "(Expect) fire, compassion and a competitive drive...There’s good players up in Boulder in that room. Mustafa (Johnson is) a pro, Terrance (Lang is) is a pro, Jalen (Sami) is a pro. (Nate) Landman’s a pro, even though he’s not a d-linemen. I think (CU) has a lot of potential to be really good up front. What coach Wilson is going to bring is not only the accountability of winning championships, but the resume he has of putting all these guys in the NFL, from CU, to Oklahoma, to Mississippi State to USC — he’ll put his ****in' boots down. On top of all that, he also has a Super Bowl ring. If you remember those Eagles defensive lines when he was (in Philadelphia) for a few years — everything that they did was 100 mph, those guys played hard as ****."
"I’ve seen a noticeable drop in effort up front in the last 10-12 years. I can remember a game three years ago when Arizona came into town and Khalil Tate ran for god knows how many yards. It was because we weren’t chasing the football. We were watching him run the ball all over the field...I think there’s not going to be any more excuses or bull****. From an accountability standpoint, you can have a coach but that doesn’t mean the guys have to respect him. If the guys up in the d-line room don’t look at coach Chris Wilson and understand that he is there to do everything humanly possible to help them become the best player possible and he doesn’t show them the proper respect by playing hard — you don’t need to kiss his ass. You can have disagreements with him. He likes that. He wants some adversity and some confrontation."
"To be honest with you, if the guys go up there and really maximize their relationship with him and let him coach them, they’re going to be so good up front, it’s going to be ridiculous. They might need to buy in — that’s my two cents. Say yes sir, buy in, play as hard as you can everyday and coach Wilson will get the most for you.”
Q: On the recruiting side of things, what's been your observation of Dorrell and his staff's approach to things thus far?
McChesney: “The thing that I love about Dorrell and their philosophy up there, is that I think mass offering is a plague and I don’t understand why so many coaching staffs do it and rely on it, and then brag that they can recruit, when all they did was a watch a kid get offered by somebody else and then turn around and offer them."
"It’s like the way coach MacIntyre slow-paced Trey Zuhn. I must have told CU 50 times, if you want to recruit this kid, you’ve got to be first on him and they didn’t listen to me. Nebraska offered him first...so one thing I love about coach Dorrell is that he is not mass offering at all. If guys don’t fit what they’re looking for, they move on. I dig that. That means that they’re really doing their job instead of letting Kansas State do the job and then offering someone because they did."
"The fact that they’re so open-minded but at the same time they’re very selective on who and what kind of athlete and man they are recruiting, I’m excited to see how it goes."
Join the conversation on McChesney's remarks at Buff Nation, the premiere message board community serving countless Colorado fanatics.
