Q: After dipping your toe in the coaching waters with the Bills last summer (as a Bill Walsh coaching intern, on Bills head coach Sean McDermott’s staff during training camp), you really do enjoy this, don’t you?
Munnerlyn: “I’m definitely enjoying it, man. At first, I didn’t think about it. I was like, I don’t know if I want to coach. When I was done with football, I was lost for a couple of years, trying to figure myself out. I didn’t think I wanted to coach, but I started training people, and then I realized, like, oh man, I’m liking this. And then all of a sudden, now I’m coaching, I’m a head coach three years later, so I’m definitely enjoying it.
“It’s different. I was with the Bills last year, and everybody asked if I wanted to coach in the NFL. And I’m sitting there like, I don’t know. As I went and did that thing, I think my heart was in high school because you get to teach these kids in high school, you get to teach and coach them, so you get to teach them the game, but also you’re coaching them as well. But in the NFL, the next level, you’re really coaching because some guys are stuck in their own ways. And I used to be one of those guys, you know, going into Year 9, I had a coach come in and say, you know, Cap, you should press like this. I’m like, I tried it out that practice, like it don’t work for me. So I went back to my old ways. He went to coach Rivera, like, he ain’t listening to me, he wants to press his way, he wants to do this, and I’m sitting there like, coach, this is what got me here. This is what made me who I am. So he really couldn’t teach me new things because I was stuck in my ways.
“But in high school you can teach these guys, you can groom them and you can teach them the ropes. So, that’s the biggest difference that I see from the high school level to the NFL. You’re really just coaching. You say Cover 3 in the NFL, the guys know what Cover 3 is. But you say Cover 3 in high school, you really have to go into details. So that’s another thing that I like about it.”