No entitlement, just honesty, envelops SEMO football under Matukewicz

One could point to several reasons why veteran Southeast Missouri State football coach Tom Matukewicz brings a philosophy founded on brutal honesty to the Redhawk program.

Perhaps it is because he has three years and over $600,000 remaining on his contract.

Maybe it is the fact that he is the winningest coach in SEMO football history at the NCAA Division I level.

It could be that he has guided the program to a pair of Ohio Valley Conference championships and he was named as the league’s Coach of the Year for the second time last fall.

Or maybe, it is simply because he is turning 50 years old this August and he doesn’t feel like being superficial with anyone at this stage of his life and highly successful career.

“I have seen a lot of coaches,” SEMO senior captain and defensive lineman Lunden Manuel said recently. “I’ve met with a lot of coaches, and I’ve talked with a lot of coaches, and one thing that I can always say that we have had here at SEMO is that it is authentic.”

In this day and age of the college student-athlete wielding maximum leverage over a coaching staff, given the threat of transferring that has permeated college athletics like never before, Matukewicz brings reality to the football field, locker room, and film rooms of SEMO football.

“I tell recruits when they visit,” Manuel said, “the man that I met when I was a freshman, the man that I met when he recruited me in high school, ‘Coach Tuke’ is the same person today.

“He uses the same words. He uses the same slideshows. It doesn’t change.”

Following the Redhawks' recent spring football game, an outing in which oft-lauded star quarterback Paxton DeLaurent was playing healthy in real competition for the first time in five months, Matukewicz didn’t hold back in his postgame assessment of his quarterback’s outing.

“I thought it was bad on Paxton’s part,” Matukewicz said of DeLaurent’s night.

Matukewicz was referencing two early interceptions thrown by DeLaurent.

“Two picks where he was just trying to do too much,” Matukewicz continued. “He has to let the game come to him a little bit.”

DeLaurent played better as the night wore on, but with that poor start, Matukewicz couldn’t get out of his mind.

“He settled down,” Matukewicz said of DeLaurent, “he did OK. But he is better than that.”

What allows Matukewicz to be so brash with his evaluation of his program is the fact that he doesn’t view wins and losses as the absolute top priority in his job description, according to Manuel.

“If you look at ‘Coach Tuke,’” Manuel said, “we write this on everything, we say it year after year, we are using this game to create better men.”

When Manuel signed to play at SEMO, he recalled that his parents (Gregory and Sandra Manuel) “made it clear to (Matukewicz), that they were making the commitment and giving him their son” to mold.

“Even though I’m not his son,” Manuel said of Matukewicz, “can he make me a better man?

“In signing a scholarship, that is all that it really is. The family is giving (Matukewicz) their son and hoping that he can make them better. He preaches what we have already learned growing up, or may NOT have learned, growing up. Can he make us better from when we first got here? Can he take an already great individual and make them better? Can he take somebody who has never had, or maybe didn’t have, a family or a home life, and turn them from bad to good? Or from being good to great?”

Manuel’s story is similar to many of the thousands of players that Matukewicz has taught through his nearly three decades of coaching. He played in one game in his first season (2019), made just three starts in his second season, and made just four in his third season.

“Nothing is given to you here,” Matukewicz lectured his players following a practice this spring in which he felt an air of entitlement drifting into his program. “This is SEMO. You have to earn everything here.”