Career
He served as the head football coach at the University of Oklahoma from 1996 to 1998. Currently Blake is the defensive line coach at Lamar University. Prior to that he held the same position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 2007 until 2010, when he left in the midst of a scandal over undisclosed loans and misleading National Collegiate Athletic Association investigators.
Blake served as the head coach for the Oklahoma Sooners from 1996 to 1998, succeeding the one-year term of Howard Schnellenberger.
He compiled a career record of 12–22 which is the worst three-year stretch in The University of Oklahoma football history. Despite being in way over his head as a college head coach, Blake was an admirable recruiter.
He was responsible for bringing in more than half of the 2000 championship team’s 22 starters, including future North.F.L. players like safety Roy Williams and linebacker Rocky Calmus. Prior to his arrival in Norman, Blake had served as the defensive line coach for the Dallas Cowboys, working alongside former University of North Carolina coach Butch Davis (2007-2011) as well as former Sooner and then Cowboys head coach Barry Switzer.
Blake also worked as a defensive assistant at Oklahoma in the early 1990s under Gary Gibbs.
Blake served as the defensive line coach at Mississippi State University in 2003. He later held the same position on Bill Callahan"s staff at the University of Nebraska from 2004 to 2006. Blake resigned his position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Sunday, September 5, 2010.
On February 16, 2016 Lamar University announced that they had hired Blake to serve as their defensive line coach.
After one month at Lamar and during the Cardinals" spring camp, John Blake accepted the defensive line coach position with the Buffalo Bills on March 15, 2016 following the Bills" firing of Karl Dunbar. In 2010, Blake resigned from North Carolina in the midst of an investigation into players" relationships with agent Gary Wichard, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
On March 12, 2012, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that Blake had received a three-year show-cause penalty, which effectively barred him from college coaching during that period. The National Collegiate Athletic Association determined that Blake had received personal loans from Wichard and failed to disclose them to University of North Carolina, and also misled National Collegiate Athletic Association investigators.