Deland McCullough
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Deland McCullough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So he starts coaching and he realizes he can use football to uplift kids and make it even more compelling for them to want to stay in school and learn these lessons by using this sport that he loves.
Well, football pulls him back. And of course, he ends up at Miami of Ohio is where he gets his first college coaching gig. And he's not there for too long. He has pretty immediate success, gets recruited to go coach at Indiana, has success there, helps a couple running backs to the NFL. And he gets nominated for Coach of the Year honors.
And he starts doing some coaching internships in the NFL and really starts to set his sights on some bigger programs and the opportunities at the pro level. He ends up doing one of his coaching internships actually with the Seattle Seahawks, which is where Coach Sherman Smith was, coaching under Pete Carroll. And he gets a chance to really use his skill set.
In some of the other internships, they kind of just had him watch, but Coach Sherman Smith puts him right in there. And he starts to recognize pretty immediately, Dillon does, that his coaching style is really similar to his old coach. He really picked up a lot of messages from him as, I'm going to be a role model and a leader. I'm going to treat these guys like full human beings.
I'm not trying to scare them into anything. I'm going to give them respect and they're going to give me respect in turn. The guys think that he's being a giant kiss ass, that he's just really trying to impress everyone and show them that he's deserving of a spot in the NFL. And they're making fun of him for copying everything Sherman does. You walk like him, you talk like him, you want to be him.
And he kind of is at first a little embarrassed. And then he realizes, I don't care if they know that this is how bad I want it. And he literally starts changing his passwords to I will coach in the NFL. He's trying to like manifest it that hard.
USC comes calling, one of the greatest programs in all of college football history. So he's on a plane with his family. He's got kids at this point and ends up in Southern California. And he is getting some major side eye when he arrives. He's got some very unique coaching styles. He likes to fill footballs with water. to make them really heavy and harder to hold.
And then when you get back to the normal football, you're clenching it tighter. He's got a big pylon with a stick, and he's jabbing guys as they're trying to run by to poke the ball out to get them to practice holding on. And that running back's crew is ready to go, and he has yet another really successful squad.
And he realizes there's still a part of him that very much wants to know who he is. And he starts looking on websites and sort of isn't fully committed. And then there's a moment that his mom calls him where the lawyer that helped her facilitate his adoption has passed away and she can get a box of records from his office.
Things like the orphanage where you were adopted. And he's like, wait, an orphanage?
She reveals his name was originally John. And he said, why? Why John? She said, I don't know. It's maybe religious or something. Who knows?
And so first he starts looking in Ohio and ultimately is able to get the call back that they found his papers. But the woman on the other end says, I can't tell you them. I can't send them to you. And he says, what do you mean? And he realizes that she's holding papers for a different state. You remember I said his mom said Pittsburgh. That's where we went to pick up Dylan when we adopted him.
So even though he grew up in Ohio, he was actually born and adopted in Pennsylvania and the laws were different in that state.
Well, first he is sort of surprised at how thin the envelope is and figures it must be something telling him they couldn't find it. And imagine getting the mail and it's like, you know, 10% off at Bed Bath & Beyond and then your birth certificate. Like that's how unassuming this letter was.
So they all start Googling. He plugs in Carol D. Briggs in a couple places and ends up finding her, sends her a message on Facebook, and essentially just says, did you have a baby that you gave up for adoption in Pennsylvania in 1971?
And at first she accepts the message but doesn't answer. And then he sends a follow-up question mark.
So she had been a 16-year-old honor student, had had an oopsie, and her family sent her off to an orphanage slash home for mothers and girls in Pennsylvania to have the baby in private, be pregnant in private, and then go back to school with no one the wiser. She didn't tell anyone but her parents and her one cousin.
She didn't even tell the dad because he was already off to college and she felt responsible.
Probably passed him in the aisles at the grocery store. They were in the exact same place. And it just happened to be that the family that adopted him out of Pennsylvania was a family that lived in Youngstown.
At first, he thinks, well, wait, if you're in Youngstown, do I have siblings? Like, I might know them, right? If you had other kids, I might have grown up with them. Who else in my family might I have known? And she did not get married. She didn't have any other kids. And she'd been looking for him for years.
Showing 41–60 of 90 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →