"I always want to be the first person to know how bad I am, and the last person to know how good I am. As long as I can live by that, I will continue to strive to be better." — Sam Mills.

NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Mills overcame hurdles at every level because of his stature: his first high school coach initially wouldn't play him, no major college would recruit him, and the NFL wouldn't draft him — or even take him on as an undrafted free agent. But his irrepressible passion for the game would not be denied, driving him to blaze a unique career path.

Veteran journalist and Hall of Fame selector Paul Domowitch brings Mills' extraordinary life and the era he played into vivid focus in a brilliant new biography: Just Give Me a Chance to Fail: The Life of NFL Linebacker Sam Mills. Domowitch was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer for nearly forty years, covering the USFL's Stars, the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, and the game of pro football in a transformative time in its history. He has been a Pro Football Hall of Fame selector since 2002.

The book, which is excerpted here, details Mills' roots in New Jersey, through his time in the USFL, making it to the Saints, and his years with the Panthers and eventual induction to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

You can preorder the book here, and hear him discuss the book on the latest episode of the Happy Half Hour.

Frank Glazier was a coaching nomad when the then 41-year-old was hired to replace Ken Schroeck as Long Branch High School's football coach shortly before the 1975 season. He had been a very successful high school coach in Maine, Florida, Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, losing just 19 of 82 games.

He also had coached at the college level, serving as a defensive coordinator at Pennsylvania Military College (now Widener University) and Springfield (Massachusetts) College.

The president of the Long Branch Board of Education trumpeted Glazier's hiring, calling him "one of the most astute and knowledgeable coaches along the entire eastern seaboard." He said the board envisioned "a complete about-face in the Green Wave's ability to produce champions" with him as head coach.

Glazier would end up staying at Long Branch just three years before moving on again, but he left an indelible imprint on both the program and Mills. Mills would play for some excellent coaches during his prolific career, including Jim Mora, Vic Fangio, Dom Capers, and Steve Sidwell. But none of them would have as huge an impact on him as Glazier.

He was a brilliant coach who was ahead of his time with respect to many of the things he did and taught. He was bullish on weightlifting before it really became a standard part of football training. He emphasized the importance of film study. He would hand out thick scouting reports to his players before games. He was a fanatic about conditioning.

Glazier taught Mills and the rest of the Long Branch High players how to work out the right way. He showed them new training techniques and drills that they had never seen before.

Long Branch High School didn't have a weight room when Glazier got there in 1975. Well, not much of one, at least. It kept a few barbells and a Universal weight machine in a small classroom for its sports teams to use, but that was it.

"If you had five people in there, it was packed," says Ed Balina, a running back on the football team and, like Mills, a wrestler.

What the school did have was three gyms.

Shortly after he was hired, Glazier convinced the Board of Education to take the third gym, divide it in half, and build a weight room on one side and a wrestling room on the other. When it was completed, Long Branch's weight room would become the envy of every high school sports program in the state of New Jersey.

"I remember it being featured in magazines as one of the best on the East Coast, including colleges," Balina says.

Glazier would have his players do circuit training in the weight room. Top, then middle, then legs. This was long before circuit training really became the norm in football strength training.

After that, he'd take them to the wrestling room and have them do bench jumps, which was one of Glazier's favorite workout drills. He would extend a string about 18–20 inches off the ground and have his players jump back and forth over it laterally. The purpose of the drill was to improve foot speed.

"We'd be dying after those workouts," Balina says. "But we were in shape. I don't know how many games we won in the second half because we were in better shape than the other team."

Glazier worked his players hard. Preseason practices began with a two-week "boot camp." Three practices a day. A 6 a.m. mile run that every player had to complete in less than six minutes. Skull sessions. The first year, they slept on cots provided by a local merchant. The next year, Glazier brought in beds. The parents would rotate making and serving meals.

"It was brutal," says Balina. "The coaches would blow the whistle and wake us up every morning at 5:30. We'd be on the track at 6 and running the mile. If you didn't run it in six minutes, you had to run it again after the third practice at night. I felt sorry for the linemen because they had to run it in six minutes too."

Years later, when Mills was in the NFL, Balina happened to be talking to him and asked him about Glazier's boot camps.

"Sam, you've played at every level for a lot of teams," Balina said. "Do you guys do what we did in those camps?"

"Nothing even comes close to what we did," Mills responded. "I still do most of the drills we learned from Glazier, including bench jumps."

Glazier's demanding approach to football wasn't for everyone. The boot camps, the three practices a day, the spring practices, the early-morning mile run, triggered a mass exodus of players who wanted no part of The Glazier Way. They ended up with only about 25 players on the team that first year. But the ones who stayed, like Mills and Balina, were all in.

"A lot of seniors quit," says Balina. "They were used to the old regime, the old ways. It was disappointing because we had talent. But a lot of them just didn't like Glazier and didn't like the hard practices."

Glazier knew right away that he had a once-in-a-lifetime player in Sam Mills. One of the first things he did after he was hired was ask Jim Simonelli, a Long Branch native who had played linebacker for him at Pennsylvania Military College and had been on Schroeck's staff a few years earlier, to work with Mills on technique, reading offenses, and recognizing tendencies.

Glazier asked Simonelli to teach Mills how to read "the triangle"—the two offensive guards and the running back—at the same time. For an inside linebacker like Mills back then, if you could master that, it was like getting your hands on the colonel's secret recipe.

"That's why Sam became so good at the upper levels [college and the pros]," Simonelli said before he died in 2025. "He could diagnose things. He was so intelligent. He was a quick study.

"When he learned to read that triangle, he became a beast. You couldn't stop him. He was a step ahead of everybody. It was hard enough to block him when he was standing in front of you. But when he was moving away from you or diagnosing the plays and moving to the football, he was just incredible."

If you're a defensive player, your eyes are your most important tool. They take your body where it needs to go. Mills always excelled at that. He never took a wrong step. He never got fooled.

Glazier believed that football was as much about the brain as it was about the body. Film study wasn't nearly as big in the '70s as it is today, especially at the high school level. For starters, the technology was much more primitive. You had to sit in a dark room with a whirring projector and watch games the same way you watched your family's grainy vacation film.

But Glazier understood the importance of getting inside the mind of your opponent and knowing his tendencies. It was like being able to predict the future. He knew how valuable that information could be to a cerebral linebacker like Mills.

Glazier taught Sam how to watch film. He would give his players thick scouting reports before a game. It was Greek to most of them, but not to Sam. He and offensive lineman Randy Mickens, a future Columbia grad, were the only ones on the team who could read the whole thing and understand it.

"Sam was such a tremendous diagnostician," said Simonelli. "He would do his film work. And he really knew how to watch film. Some people watch film and they watch themselves running around and don't really see anything. Sam would watch film and he would study the movement of the guards. He would study the backs and look for them to tip what they were going to do."

Mills' instincts and his ability to absorb everything were rare, particularly for someone his young age. Sam made all of the calls on the field for the Long Branch defense. Every defensive signal. The coaches would just point to Sam and he would make the call based on the other team's formation and tendencies and personnel package.

"He could just diagnose it and analyze it—boom!—right there on the field," Simonelli said. "He could make the call and have them in the right defense every time."

Mills was more than just a smart player. In addition to being a strong tactician, he had excellent technique and was impossible to block. No one is exactly sure who taught Mills how to tackle. He got excellent coaching at the Pop Warner level, so it might've been there. Regardless, by the time he arrived at Long Branch High School, his tackling technique was absolutely flawless.

"You teach kids to wrap, keep your feet moving, nose on the ball," says Bob Biasi, who was an assistant on Glazier's staff. "The real good ones learn to roll their hips. Sam was doing all of that in our very first tackling drill. He had that quick twitch. He was just a very technically sound player."

Glazier motivated and inspired Mills. He showed him that he could do great things, regardless of his size or other people's opinion of him. Before Glazier came along, Sam hadn't been sure about that. If enough people tell you you're too small, if enough people tell you that you can't do something, you start to believe it. But Glazier kept telling Sam: You can do it; you can do it.

Mills was the heart and soul of Long Branch High's football team in 1975 and 1976. In addition to playing linebacker, he also was a standout guard on offense and dealt out the same kind of punishment on that side of the ball that he did on defense. Even playing with just 25 players, the Green Wave finished 4–4–1 in the tough Shore Conference in '75, Sam's junior year.

The Green Wave ran the "veer" offense, which was created by University of Houston coach Bill Yeoman in the '60s. It was a triple-option system that used split backs and was based on reading the defensive end and linebacker. It was the original version of the RPO [run-pass option] and zone-read principles now heavily used by NFL offenses.

Opposing defenses dreaded it when the Long Branch offense would run a counter play with Sam leading the way as the pulling guard. "I think he was 215 pounds back then," Simonelli said. "He was like a freight train coming down the tracks. God help you if you got in his way."

The Green Wave became a dominant team in Glazier's second year at the helm, winning nine of 11 games and making it to the playoffs. Mills recorded 88 solo tackles and assisted on 99 more as a senior. He was a first-team All-Shore Conference selection that year, though interestingly, not as a linebacker. He was a first-team pick as an offensive lineman.