That thick, wavy black hair once had no place atop Tino Sunseri’s head.
Long before he arrived in Westwood as UCLA’s offensive coordinator and a GQ cover candidate, his father made him shave that glorious mane, the better to protect his head so that it would fit snugly inside his helmet as a young quarterback.
“I always had an emphasis of, ‘Hey, I don’t care how your frickin’ hair looks or what women think,’” Sal Sunseri said. “The bottom line is, I wanted him to be secure.”
This is how the Sunseris operate. Success means sacrifice. It’s why Anthony Sunseri, Tino’s grandfather and the family patriarch, would rise at 5 each morning to prepare for another day of running the family’s Italian deli and grocery store in Pittsburgh. The man who called himself Tony Macaroni wouldn’t come home until after 5 in the evening, only to tackle a stack of bills and other obligations just so that he could get to bed and rise to do it all over again.
“The bottom line,” Sal said of his father, “he would say, ‘If you can’t get up in the morning, you ain’t worth a s—’ .”
Tino was on the move practically from birth. The son of a college and NFL coach who schlepped him from Pittsburgh to Iowa Wesleyan to Illinois State to Louisville to Alabama A&M to Louisiana State to Michigan State to the Carolina Panthers by the time he was in middle school, Tino grew up with a sporting goods store’s worth of gear and a deep appreciation for the players who wore all those helmets and jerseys.
Perhaps the first coaching adage Tino learned was that if you win, you stay. If you lose, you move.
A rare respite came when Sal spent seven glorious years as defensive line coach with Carolina. His wife, Roxann, would make 150 meatballs with garlic bread that Sal would distribute a few days after wins. Though intended for the defensive linemen, Sal would make sure to squirrel some away for other players such as running back DeShaun Foster.
“They’re a 10 out of 10,” Foster said of the meatballs.
It was in the Panthers locker room that Tino, accompanying his father to work with wide eyes, first encountered the player who would one day become his boss. Reserved as he was, Foster found it easy to befriend the middle-school boy who dutifully slipped on rubber gloves to pick up jockstraps and jerseys.
“He would come up to you as a young kid that looked up to all these NFL players, that was having all the success,” Tino remembered, “and would take the time to be able to talk to you, spend time with you and was really, really genuine.”
More than two decades later, Sal was lounging on his couch when he got a call from Foster, now UCLA’s coach, asking if he could have Tino’s phone number. The request came only a few months after Foster and Tino shared a hug at the Rose Bowl, the first time they had reconnected since Foster’s time with the Panthers. Tino’s Indiana Hoosiers, thanks largely to the efforts of the quarterback he coached, had just walloped Foster’s Bruins.
During their brief exchange, Foster told Tino that he would hire him someday. That day was sooner than either might have imagined.
The first time he met reporters covering his new team, Tino Sunseri shook everyone’s hand.
This is how the Sunseris operate. Respect matters. It’s why Tino indulged every customer, both nasty and agreeable, while working his college summers as a bus boy and waiter at Bella Notte, the family restaurant in Pittsburgh known for its shredded pepperoni pizzas.
He’d fully engage when he could, breaking out a big smile. Other times he’d shift into keep-his-mouth-shut mode if he thought it might yield better results from someone who was being difficult.
“He knows how to talk to people,” said Nino Sunseri, Tino’s uncle and godfather who runs the joint. “If you can get people who aren’t nice to perform for you, picture what you can get nice people to do for you?”
Working at the restaurant also taught Tino that he didn’t want to do that sort of thing forever. If things broke his way, maybe he’d be an NFL quarterback.
By then he’d already led his Pittsburgh high school, Central Catholic — which also happened to be the alma mater of Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino and two-time Pro Bowler Marc Bulger — to a 16-0 season and state championship thanks to his strong arm and perfectionist streak. At Pittsburgh, where his mother had been a star gymnast and his father an All-America linebacker, Tino helped the Panthers reach three bowl games while piling up the third-most passing yards in school history.
Undrafted yet undeterred, Tino pivoted to the Canadian Football League. He won a Grey Cup during his three seasons with the Saskatchewan Roughriders before being cut. His coaching start came with a former colleague of his father’s when he joined Jimbo Fisher’s Florida State staff before the 2016 season as a quality control assistant.
Tino would go on to work with some of the top offensive minds in the college game, culling ideas from Nick Saban and Steve Sarkisian during two seasons as a graduate assistant at Alabama. In 2021, he landed his first big job as quarterbacks coach under Curt Cignetti at James Madison.
“Those guys,” Sal Sunseri said of his son’s mentors, “knew how to put points on the board.”
Eyes wide once more, Tino watched closely, absorbing every tidbit.
As he went on to help Cignetti and Indiana achieve historic success during a 2024 season that ended in the College Football Playoff, somebody was increasingly keeping tabs on him.
“Seeing how he has evolved as a coach and everything,” Foster said of the coach he hired in December, rewarding him with a two-year contract that will pay him $1.3 million this year, “it just resonated, like, this is somebody that I wanted.”
Similar to the way he handled customers at the family restaurant, Tino tailors his approach to each quarterback.
Sometimes that meant demonstrating what he wanted on the practice field or showing game footage of top quarterbacks making the right decisions. Other times, for the players who preferred to see plays spelled out with Xs and O’s, he’d diagram it on paper.
“He wanted to get to know you,” said Kurtis Rourke, the Indiana quarterback who led the Hoosiers to an 11-2 record last season before being drafted by the San Francisco 49ers, “and know what learning style worked best with you.”
This is how the Sunseris operate. Meticulousness matters. Rourke said that Tino’s exacting nature bled into every quarterback, maximizing their potential. Indiana’s quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator would put plays up on the whiteboard and have everyone in the room explain every detail of what was supposed to happen.
“It helped us learn and understand so that when we went out into the field it wasn’t like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’” Rourke said. “It was very much second nature to us.”
In his first season with the Hoosiers after transferring from Ohio, Rourke completed 69.4% of his passes for 3,042 yards and 29 touchdowns with only five interceptions.
Winning big with a new quarterback was nothing new for Tino.
In Tino’s first year at James Madison, veteran quarterback Cole Johnson helped the Dukes reach the semifinals of the Division I-AA playoffs. In 2022, transfer quarterback Todd Centeio (now a graduate assistant at UCLA) was part of a team that won the Sun Belt Conference’s East Division title. A year later, Sunseri and Jordan McCloud, a transfer from Arizona, teamed to win another division title.
What’s Tino’s formula? He said it’s as much about continually assessing himself as much as his quarterbacks.
“Did I articulate this the right way? Is he receiving the information?” Tino said, repeating the questions he asks himself. “Because it’s not about what I know, it’s what he knows and what he can apply. And so the biggest thing is making sure that you don’t overload the computer and it shuts down. You want to make sure that you’re consistently being able to give it data so that it can be able to make sure that it’s ready to be able to have the information you need when you need it.”
Comparing teaching football to fatherhood, Tino said it’s essential to tell players not what they want to hear but what they need to hear to grow into the best version of themselves.
What Nico Iamaleava, the highly rated transfer quarterback from Tennessee, has heard and seen makes him confident that his coach’s history of immediate success could be on the verge of repeating itself.
Tino has been so active in practice drills, mimicking the footwork he wants and rolling out and firing a pass during one recent session, that he might as well pull on one of the quarterback’s blue jerseys.
“He’s a high-energy guy, man,” Iamaleava said of the coach who will turn 37 in December. “He just has that certain presence to him that makes you want to go play for him.”
Like his father, who liberally sprinkles “frickin’” and “the bottom line” into conversation, Tino is fond of certain phrases. He inserts “make sure that” and “be able to” in almost every sentence, often multiple times.
This is how the Sunseris operate. Consistency and familiarity matter.
That’s why many believe Tino’s UCLA offense will look a lot like Indiana’s, even if Tino wasn’t the one calling plays for the Hoosiers when they rolled up 41.3 points and 426.4 yards per game last season, easily surpassing the 18.4 points and 328.8 yards that UCLA produced under Eric Bieniemy.
“I expect it to be similar to what Indiana’s done and did last year,” said Rourke, adding the caveat that he has not spoken with his former coach much since he took the UCLA job. “You know, his offense works, it’s very fast-paced, it has [run-pass options] and a great passing attack.”
It’s clear from the snippets of practice reporters have been allowed to watch that presnap movement — designed to keep defenses guessing about the play call — will be a staple of the offense. Its design also appears to value efficiency over unnecessary gambles.
In an attempt to conceal his scheme before the season opener against Utah on Saturday at the Rose Bowl, Tino would only say that it’s “everything” that can squeeze the most out of his players’ capabilities. His father predicted it would reflect all of his son’s mentors over the years.
“I think it’s going to be a combination of a little bit of Sark, a little bit of Jimbo, a little bit of frickin’ Alabama,” Sal Sunseri said, “because he knows one thing, that you’ve got to be able to run the ball and you’ve got to be able to hit explosives.”
Recovering from a shoulder injury that required surgery, Sal won’t be there Saturday to share another special moment at the Rose Bowl with his son. They had been at the stadium together in January 2014 when Sal was Florida State’s defensive ends coach and the Seminoles beat Auburn to win the final Bowl Championship Series title game.
“That Rose Bowl’s been pretty good to him,” Sal said, “so hopefully he can go out there and do what the old man did and win some games.”
It’s certainly what he knows. This is how the Sunseris operate.
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