Steve Kazor recently went 21 months without a day off.

Twenty-one months? Asked to clarify that time frame, Kazor confirmed.

Months. Not days. Not weeks.

Well, there was one day he took off. Sort of. It was the day one of his sons got married, but even then Kazor confessed to taking a few business-related calls the morning before the ceremony.

It’s quite a track record for a man who recently turned 77, but the New Kensington native continues to tackle his job with the energy of someone half his age. And, really, he doesn’t have much choice.

In 2023, Kazor was hired as the general manger of the Michigan Panthers, one of eight franchises that make up the United Football League, which is heading into its second season. With UFL coaches being part-time employees, Kazor is something of a one-man show in the offseason. Hence his prolonged stretch without a day off.

If the Panthers — and, in the bigger picture, the UFL — are to put a good product on the field, long stretches of work are a necessary evil.

“It’s been an interesting experience,” Kazor said. “It’s been quite a road here, but it seems to be really becoming an outstanding opportunity.”

Kazor has had quite a road himself. From his playing days as a college nose tackle at Westminster (Utah) to his current post, Kazor has spent 60 years in football.

Along the journey, he has coached at major colleges, won two Super Bowl rings, worked under Hall of Fame coaches Tom Landry and Mike Ditka and coached on teams that featured legendary running backs Tony Dorsett, Walter Payton and Barry Sanders.

“I just kind of stayed in it,” Kazor said, “just kind of kept steamrolling and moving into a lot of different things.”

Going west

Kazor spent his formative years in New Kensington until his father, an atomic engineer, took a job with Westinghouse Electric in Las Vegas. The family moved there just before Kazor entered high school.

At Rancho High School, Kazor was a standout player under Pittsburgh native Chuck Razmic. But Kazor knew he didn’t have the size to play at a big-time college program — although he said he had walk-on offers from Notre Dame and Utah — and eventually wound up at Westminster in Salt Lake City, where he was a four-year letterman and, as a senior, a co-captain.

As his college time drew to a close, Kazor decided he didn’t he have the aptitude to follow in his father’s profession — “I didn’t get any of those genes,” he joked — nor would he be able to make a career in pro football. So he decided to channel his passion for the sport into the next-best thing: coaching.

He started as an assistant at Westminster, then wove his way through various assistant positions in the college ranks, including serving as defensive backs coach at Texas in 1977 and ’78.

After serving as a defensive assistant at UTEP in 1979 and 1980, Kazor got his first break in professional football when he was hired as a scout by the Dallas Cowboys.

Landry and ‘Iron Mike’

He knew it was coming, but when his alarm clock would go off in the wee hours of the morning, Kazor was befuddled.

Why would a coach want to hold his staff meetings at 4:30 a.m.? That’s what Tom Landry insisted on.

“I didn’t have the guts to ask coach Landry,” Kazor said, “but I asked Mike.”

“Mike” being Mike Ditka, an important connection for Kazor’s future in the NFL. And when Kazor asked the Aliquippa native about the reasoning behind the ungodly hour for the staff meetings, Ditka answered in his inimitable style.

“He goes, ‘You’re dumber than you look, aren’t you?’ ” Kazor remembered. “I said, ‘Apparently.’ So he said: ‘There are no phones. There’s no skirts, and there’s no ties.’ ”

The implication being there were no distractions at 4:30 a.m.

“Once everybody got into the office, (Landry) got pulled 10 ways to Sunday,” he said. “We got a lot done in the hours before that.”

Kazor’s primary duty with the Cowboys was advance scouting, particularly NFC East opponents. On occasion, he would help defensive coordinator Ernie Stautner — a former Steelers standout — in practice.

Kazor must have made an impression on Ditka, despite his “dumb” questions. When Ditka was hired as the Chicago Bears coach in 1982, he brought Kazor with him to serve as special teams coordinator and tight ends coach. Kazor also would assist Buddy Ryan with the defense.

Kazor spent 12 seasons with the Bears, earning his first Super Bowl championship ring with the famous 1985 squad. That team — and most of the Bears teams under Ditka — was a reflection of the coach’s snarling exterior. The Ditka whom Kazor knows, however, is much different.

“I think a lot of that is persona,” he said. “Everybody used to talk about how him and Buddy Ryan used to go at it all the time, and that wasn’t the case at all. A lot of that stuff was Buddy for show. They actually got along quite well.

“Mike is my younger son’s godfather. He would give you the shirt off his back. He was a big donor to a lot of churches. One of the things was an orphanage that he donated to, and people didn’t even know about that.”

Double duty

Maury Buford admitted he didn’t like taking punting tips from most coaches. To his way of thinking, if a guy never punted a football, how was he going to tell Buford how to get better at his craft?

“And you saw a lot of that,” Buford said, “even in professional special teams coaches. They never kicked a football in their life.”

Buford came to the Bears at an opportune moment. After spending three seasons with the San Diego Chargers, Buford was traded to the Bears during the 1985 preseason, landing under Kazor’s tutelage.

Kazor had a varied background in coaching to that point, but he hadn’t been a punter. Buford easily could have shunned any advice Kazor gave him. Instead, he took it to heart.

“He was calm, and he was direct,” Buford said. “One of the main things I know he helped me with, if I ever got into a slump, the majority of the time it would be because my steps were too long.

“Steve would just look at me during practice … he’d holler, ‘Shorten your steps, Buford! Shorten your steps!’ I did it, and, boom, it fixed it.”

Emery Moorehead played tight end and special teams under Kazor in Chicago, and he cultivated an appreciation for what his coach did.

“His job was special teams, which controls all parts of punting and kicking,” Moorehead said, “and then a position coach (for tight ends), so he really was nailing down two full-time positions, and that’s pretty hard to do.”

At 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, Moorehead, even 40-plus years ago, was undersized for a tight end. And in the Bears’ run-heavy scheme featuring Payton and Matt Suhey, run blocking was paramount.

“He made sure I understood the footwork that was involved at tight end,” Moorehead said, “because when you’re not a big bruiser, you have to have good footwork to make the blocks work.”

As sound as Kazor’s advice was, Buford said he didn’t always listen. One of Kazor’s suggestions Buford shunned eventually became a norm for NFL punters.

In the final few minutes of game-day warmups, Buford would stand at midfield and angle punts toward the “coffin corner.” At one point, Kazor told him to try kicking the ball end-over-end rather than on a spiral as was the popular technique of the day.

“He goes, ‘Try it. Point the nose straight down and make it look like a kickoff,’ ” Buford said. “And I tried it a few times and wasn’t real successful, and then I just kind of poo-pooed it. I never tried to implement it in my kicking game.

“But you see all the punters doing it now. And that’s the first time I ever heard of anybody doing that.”

Who is the best?

After his stint with the Bears, Kazor went back to the college ranks from 1993 to 2005, with a three-season stop as a Detroit Lions assistant (1994-96) in between.

So in the NFL, Kazor was on coaching staffs of teams that featured three of the greatest running backs in history. That makes him qualified to answer the question: Who was the best?

Kazor is diplomatic in his answer.

“Tony was a power runner,” he said. “He’s one of those kind, get the knees up and hit it downhill out of some I-formations. He was a guy who could carry guys on his back.

“Now, Walter could do that, too, but Walter was a little more well-rounded being able to throw the ball and kick. And he was more of a counter stuff guy: toss, get outside, plant, cut back against the grain.

“And Barry, he was a completely different animal. We used to teach our offensive linemen — I was coaching tight ends and assistant offensive line in Detroit — just grab onto both numbers and push the guy and just hang on and let Barry figure out where to go.”

Payton’s versatility sometimes got him — and Kazor — in hot water with Ditka.

Kazor often would take a turn at running the scout team offense in practices, and it wasn’t unusual for Payton to sneak into the scout team backfield. That drew Ditka’s ire.

“Mike would be yelling out, ‘What the heck do you got Walter in there for? Get him out of there,’ ” Kazor said.

A leg up

After a one-year stint coaching the Ottawa Renegades in the CFL, Kazor was back in the NFL in 2007 as a scout with the St. Louis/L.A. Rams. He spent 16 years there, helping the Rams build two Super Bowl teams: 2018 (loss) and 2021 (win).

“That’s kind of been my niche now,” Kazor said. “I coached almost every position. I was a coordinator of all three phases — not at the NFL level, of course — but I just had some opportunities to learn a little about every position. Sometimes I think I see things that other scouts don’t who haven’t coached before.”

When asked about his greatest find as a scout for the Rams, his answer is perhaps surprising.

Kazor admitted he hates crowds, so when he would get assigned to a college game, he tried to show up before the stadium opened. On one such occasion, he was at Oregon State to scout players from the opponent, Stanford.

He was helping to set up tables in the press box when he noticed a tall young man in a black jogging suit stroll onto the field.

“He opens a bag and gets some balls out and loosens up, and all of a sudden I hear this ‘bwanngg!’ ” Kazor said. “It was him punting the football, and he’s killing it.”

Kazor began to calculate the hang time on the punts. Then he checked his scouting list and didn’t have any punters on it.

The young man was Johnny Hekker, who was a senior at Oregon State. He went undrafted, but the Rams signed him as a free agent. Hekker, currently with the Carolina Panthers, wound up as a four-time first-team All-Pro, was named punter for the NFL’s 2010s all-decade team and set records for highest net punting average in a season (46.0 in 2016, since broken) and longest punt (65 yards) in a Super Bowl.

“We got a steal on that,” Kazor said. “Nobody knew he could punt the ball like that.”

Kazor gave honorable mention to linebacker Morgan Fox, who played at Division II Colorado State-Pueblo. Fox, who played four seasons with the Rams, played for the L.A. Chargers in 2024 and, in his career, has 27 1/2 sacks, 183 total tackles, four forced fumbles and four fumble recoveries.

Michigan calling

Mike Nolan remembers the first time he met Kazor. It was 1987, and both were special teams coaches in the NFL, Nolan in his first year with the Denver Broncos and Kazor in his sixth with the Bears. The teams met on “Monday Night Football,” and it was the first game after the infamous player strike.

The two chatted briefly during pregame warm-ups, then, as they continued on in the NFL over the ensuing decades — Nolan was the San Francisco 49ers coach from 2005-08 — they would cross paths periodically.

Nolan now is the coach of the Michigan Panthers and working under Kazor’s leadership. Kazor, incidentally, was brought to the Panthers at the behest of one of his former Bears players, Jeff Fisher, who, after a long NFL coaching career, coached the Panthers before Nolan’s arrival.

Nolan credits Kazor with getting the Michigan franchise going in the right direction. The Panthers went 7-3 last season and qualified for the UFL playoffs after going 4-6 the previous season in the old USFL.

“I don’t know what would happen if he ever stepped away,” Nolan, 66, said. “He’s been a godsend. … I came back to help the players in kind of a give-back mode. Without Steve, I don’t know if it would be that for me. … He’s a lot of the reason why I continue to enjoy coaching.”

Michigan aims to take another step forward this season — Year 2 of the UFL kicks off March 28 — and Nolan said he believes Kazor has created the environment to make it happen.

“He kind of leaves us alone with the coaching, although he’s got opinions about it at times. And he is the GM, so rightly so,” Nolan said. “One of the beauties of the UFL is you don’t really have anybody breathing over your shoulder with crazy notions of this and that who don’t know anything about football.

“That’s what the NFL consists of a lot of times. When the owners and cronies get involved … just let us do our jobs or let us go.”

Michigan plays its first game March 30 at Memphis, and the game will be carried on ESPN. Along with ESPN, ABC and Fox will carry the UFL’s games.

Kazor said that exposure will be key as the league continues to try to solidify itself where other spring football ventures failed in the U.S.

“Anybody can say whatever they want,” Kazor said, “but that’s where the money comes from is TV no matter what league you’re in.”

Can’t slow down

Kazor finally took a day off. But there aren’t many of those as he ramps up toward Michigan’s season.

Even so, Kazor has shown no signs of slowing down. He said he has tried to keep in shape, walking a few miles each day. It’s a far cry from his time as a scout when endless travel and paperwork left little time for a healthy diet and regular exercise.

“I ballooned up pretty good,” he said, “driving 6 in the morning to a place, then visit with everybody, go to practice, drive four or five hours to the next place, type (notes) until midnight, have a bag of chips, a couple Cokes and a beer then start all over again.”

To those who know him best, there’s little surprise that Kazor continues to keep going. Moorehead said he gets together with Kazor about once a year and admires his seemingly unceasing energy.

“I think he just loves the game,” Moorehead said. “He still loves being involved in the game, making personnel decisions. ‘Kaz’ is still working, which is great.”

Added Buford, who, as a general contractor in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, did some recent work on Kazor’s home: “He still gets excited talking about football and guys that we played with and were teammates of mine and students of his.”

Nolan said Kazor continues to go about his job like a man of 27 rather than 77, constantly jumping from one task to another.

Kazor didn’t indicate when he intends to step away for good. There’s too much to do to get the Panthers ready for kickoff in less than three weeks.

Perhaps one day he will retire and take days off permanently.

“Just that I’m still in it,” Kazor said when asked to reflect on his long career. “I’ve been lucky enough to impress some people to give me opportunities, and they know I’m going to work hard and put the hours in.”

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