Dan McCarney happens upon Mike Leach and his wife in a Houston hotel, both in town for Big 12 football media days.

They group-hug and make small talk. McCarney, the Iowa State head coach, notes that it’s nearly time to get preseason camp cranked up. Back to the grind.

Are you ready to get revved up?, McCarney asks Leach, Texas Tech’s coach.

Actually, Leach says, he’s preparing for vacation. He’s headed to Jamaica to get his advanced diving certification. No kidding, Leach has floated amid sea creatures in Belize, Hawaii, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.

The funny thing is, even under water amid the creatures, Leach thinks about football.

“It’s just kind of always rolling through your head,” he says. “You’re thinking things like, ‘This guy can really be a good player if he stays focused.’ Or, ‘What can I do to help this guy improve?’

“You do other things, but you’re never not doing football.”

Husker head coach Bill Callahan is known as a grinder in the office, but he’s certainly not alone.

Former Baylor coach Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, occasionally fields calls from exhausted college coaches. What can I do to rejuvenate? they ask. Teaff suggests they find diversions, something to take their minds off their jobs. Read books. Watch movies. Deep-sea dive. Whatever.

Teaff, though, understands there’s a certain inevitability at work here. Coaching football at most any level is a time-consuming endeavor, but particularly at the highest levels of the sport. Sixteen-hour work days are common this time of year. The thing is, there’s so much riding on a week’s worth of work, he says. For instance, if Nebraska loses, virtually an entire state slips into varying degrees of depression. Try taking a nap knowing you could be partially responsible for that consequence.

 Coaches are forever analyzing their team, analyzing their opponent. Teaff insists the general public doesn’t understand the challenge of preparing to face an opponent one week, then immediately shifting gears for the next foe.

 Says Leach: “Football is task-oriented. There isn’t anybody — no matter how casual they might seem — who isn’t working very, very hard. If you really think about it, football is a task designed so that it can’t ever be completely finished. So you have to pinpoint what’s important.”

“It’s brutal,” Leach says of the work hours.

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It’s no different at Nebraska. For instance, Callahan has been known to call staff meetings at 10 p.m.

Husker junior defensive end Adam Carriker gets a feel for the Husker coaches’ workload through defensive line coach John Blake.

“From what he’s told me, he leaves about midnight and gets here at 6 or 7 in the morning,” Carriker says. “And I know coach (Phil) Elmassian didn’t even leave the stadium a couple nights during preseason camp.

“When I’m done playing, I want to be a coach. But I don’t want to be a Division I coach. I have to be able to see my family. Even if you’re making $200,000 a year, to me it’s not worth it if you can’t enjoy it.”

Elmassian, Nebraska’s 54-year-old cornerbacks coach, has been coaching in college for three decades. He says work hours haven’t changed — 14- to 18-hour days remain the norm, especially during the season. He agrees with Leach that you could work around the clock and never feel you have everything covered.

That’s because there are interminable variables in football, Elmassian says. For one thing, there are 22 men on the field at once with varying levels of speed, size and learning abilities, making the formation of scouting reports a daunting challenge.

What’s more, Elmassian says, football playbooks have become increasingly complex, adding to the workload.

“When I started in this business, it was a very stabilized game,” Elmassian says. “Teams were using two-back offenses, and if they ran the option, God knows they weren’t going to throw it.”

One might think the computer age would’ve cut down on office hours. Quite the opposite, Elmassian says.

“Information, information, information,” he says. “There’s more information than ever before. For instance, when I was with Bill Dooley in the 1980s (at Virginia Tech), we had 16-millimeter film. It was too expensive to watch a bunch of film, so we watched it only once a week, on Wednesdays.

“Now, everything gets filmed.”

Indeed, by the time coaches reach their offices after practice, video of the workout is available to break down.

“There’s always something,” said Scott Downing, Nebraska recruiting coordinator/tight ends coach. “I know it’s the same with other businesses. But it seems like in football, you’re always under the gun. There’s a game coming up on the weekend. There are key recruiting dates. Spring practice. It just keeps coming.”

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Sundays during the season might be the longest day at Texas Tech, Leach says. Coaches arrive about 10 a.m. to begin about four hours of film study. Then meetings commence: A coaching staff meeting, followed by a team meeting, special teams meetings, player meetings with position coaches. A dinner break is followed by practice at 8 p.m., followed by more film study into the wee hours.

Leach returns to work at 9 a.m. on Monday to fulfill media responsibilities. He says a “mad scramble” ensues around noon as Tech coaches begin in earnest to prepare for the upcoming opponent. By Tuesday, Leach says, everything in Tech’s game plan needs to be installed for Saturday’s game.

“You just get consumed by it,” Leach says. “You just try to divide your time and have other interests.”

Leach prefers non-fiction reading. At the moment, he’s reading a book of wild stories and anecdotes from life in Las Vegas as well as a book about legendary basketball coach John Wooden.

Mike Breske, defensive coordinator at Wyoming, insists he knows of head coaches who demand their assistants arrive at the office at 7 a.m. and stay until 11 p.m., “whether they’re doing anything or not.”

Wyoming head coach Joe Glenn, a Lincoln native, is “fairly flexible,” Breske says.

“He assigns tasks and leaves it up to the coaches to get the work done,” Breske says.

Still, Breske makes it a point not to count the hours he works. It might disillusion him, he says. He wonders sometimes if, given the high number of office hours per week, there’s a point of diminishing returns.

“You reach a point where you’re working in circles,” he says. “Where does the scheming stop? No doubt about it, you can overcoach.”

It should be pointed out the NCAA limits student-athletes to 20 hours of football per week. Packed into that schedule are meetings, weight lifting, practices and a three-hour game.

During the summer, NCAA rules bar coaches from watching players’ workouts. Callahan is like a lot of coaches in that he disagrees with the rule, saying, “It’s like a CEO of corporation not being able to watch and evaluate the people who work for him. I think we need to amend it.”

Says Breske: “Sometimes, as coaches, we forget there are other things in these kids’ lives.”

There’s not much else in coaches’ lives, said Colorado’s Gary Barnett.

“You don’t have a personal life,” he says. “You really don’t. It’s just a way of life, and that’s how it is.”

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It can be a relatively bizarre life. For instance, Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, a former Nebraska player and assistant, last season politely requested that a reporter call him back later.

 At 2 a.m.

“That’s when I’m getting done with everything,” he says.

Tampa Bay head coach Jon Gruden is typically in the office by 4 a.m., Kiffin says.

“You have to have a true passion for coaching and a love of the game to get into it,” he says. “You also have to realize that (in the NFL), you’re judged by what your team does on 16 Sundays a year. You don’t get those days back, so you have to be as prepared as you can possibly be. That takes time.”

No kidding. Lots of it.

Reach Steven M. Sipple at 473-7440 or ssipple@journalstar.com.