Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Wolverines snatch coveted Matt Dudek away from Arizona Wildcats
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona football coach Rich Rodriguez promoted Matt Dudek a year ago, giving him the title of general manger and director of player personnel.
No non-head coach at Arizona has ever had such a title and so many over-arching responsibilities.
Dudek touched everything in the UA football operation: roster management, coordination of recruiting efforts, working as the school’s NFL liaison, and taking part in marketing and compliance issues.
Given Dudek’s people skills and work ethic, I suspected it wouldn’t be long until a powerhouse in the SEC or Big Ten wanted him on their staff.
And now it has happened. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is expected to announce this week that Dudek has left Arizona and will join the Wolverines. It’s going to be a significant loss for the Wildcats at the worst possible time.
It comes after RichRod lost assistant coaches to Nebraska, Cal and West Virginia in the off-season. The only thing I can compare it to in UA football history is the transition from 2002 to 2003 when John Mackovic, coming off a 2-10 season, lost assistants Charlie Camp, Scott Pelluer and Rick Dykes.
Some of the exodus is surely that Arizona went 3-9 last season. Given the fragile and transient nature of college football, the first instinct is to CYB — cover your butt. Get another job before you lose the one you’ve got.
Another part of Dudek’s departure is that Michigan plays a game unfamiliar to that at Arizona. No one knows that more than RichRod, who coached the Wolverines for three seasons.
In the last few months, Harbaugh has created two positions — three if you count Dudek. That gives Michigan 37 full-time people on Harbaugh’s staff. The Wolverines hired Navy’s Sean Magee as director of player personnel last spring, and hired Cincinnati recruiting coordinator Cooper Petagna last month.
Dudek’s new title is director of recruiting. It is more money, more prestige and a new clock starting on his employment. Good for him.
Meanwhile, RichRod will join the Pac-12 coaches at the league’s annual media days in Los Angeles. Here’s the ballot I dispatched to Pac-12 headquarters for the annual media poll to be released this week:
South: 1) USC; 2) Utah; 3) UCLA; 4) Colorado; 5) ASU; 6) Arizona.
North: 1) Washington; 2) WSU; 3) Stanford; 4) Oregon; 5) Oregon State; 6) Cal.
It’s too close to call between ASU and Arizona; the site of the Territorial Cup probably gives the Sun Devils a small edge. If either team breaks .500, it will be coach-of-the-year territory.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
After Vern Friedli retired from coaching Amphitheater High School’s football team in 2010, his state record 331 career victories — achieved at Morenci, Casa Grande, San Manuel and Amphi — were immediately challenged.
Lakeside Blue Ridge coach Paul Moro, who won 13 state championships at a small-school classification in the White Mountains, seemed sure to hit 331 and beyond. Sure enough, last October, in his first year at Tempe Marcos de Niza, Moro won game No. 332.
But the biggest challenges to Friedli’s monumental victory total came not from Moro, but from Phoenix-area coaching legends Jesse Parker of Mesa Mountain View and Karl Kiefer of Tempe McClintock.
Kiefer retired with 302; Parker with 309.
Incredibly, Parker died Friday in Phoenix at 77, about 12 hours after Friedli, 80, died in Tucson.
The rivalry between Friedli and the two Phoenix-area coaching giants was civil, but that was about it. Friedli once told me that coaching one of those Phoenix “super schools” was like putting the football teams at Amphi and Canyon del Oro together.
Friedli did more with less, no doubt.
During Friedli’s prime years at Amphi, he became part of a no-love-lost rivalry with Jeff Scurran’s powerful Sabino program; Scurran won three state titles. For about 10 years, beginning in the late ’80s, the Sabino-Amphi game was a “can’t miss” occasion.
“I really didn’t get to know Vern,” Scurran, 70, said Saturday as he prepared to open Catalina Foothills’ training camp in Flagstaff. “Our longest conversations were those small-talk sessions we’d have on the field just before kickoff.
“But I was always respectful of his career and the young men’s lives he impacted. I know he was a good man.”
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
It has been business as usual for Salpointe Catholic junior basketball wing Majok Deng, who last week was offered a scholarship by UCLA to go with those from Arizona and most of the Western powers. But it was a coming-of-age month on the AAU circuit for Salpointe sophomore guard Evan Nelson, who was offered scholarships by New Mexico and Grand Canyon. But perhaps the emerging name of the summer in Tucson hoops is Amphi junior-to-be Jackson Ruai, who was offered a scholarship by Nevada last week. Ruai, a versatile and athletic, 6-foot 3-inch wing player, is on Deng’s Arizona Power AAU club, which means he is being evaluated by virtually every top-25 program in the country.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
After averaging 16 points for the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, Palo Verde High grad Bryce Cotton chose to re-sign with the Perth Wildcats in Australia. Last season, Cotton was the MVP in the Australian pro league finals, scoring 45 points in the championship game before a crowd of 13,611 at the Perth Arena. He had a chance to sign with Spanish league power Unicaja Malaga, but at this point seems set to return to Australia for 2017-18.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Former Santa Rita High softball standout Jane Teixeira, who later played for the Texas Longhorns, has been hired as senior associate commissioner of the PacWest Conference. That league — which includes schools such as Fresno-Pacific, BYU-Hawaii, Cal Baptist and Dixie State — hired Teixeira away from Conference USA where she was director of NCAA compliance, among other things.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Tucson High grad Jeremy Harden, who led Pima College to the No. 7 overall finish in the 2010 NJCAA basketball finals, is a head coach. The former Boise State assistant last week accepted the coaching position at Wenatchee Valley College in central Washington, a Northwest Athletic Conference league of schools mostly in Washington and Oregon. Harden spent last year as an assistant coach at Tohono O’odham College. Good for him.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
I got my first in-person look at 7-foot Arizona freshman basketball player DeAndre Ayton last week as he walked through a corridor of McKale Center with fellow freshman Emmanuel Akot. How times have changed. Both Ayton and Akot appear much older than their listed ages of 18. They could pass for 25, and it’s not like they are skinny, going-to-get-pushed-around freshmen. This isn’t 1990 any more. The physical development of top college basketball prospects has changed dramatically.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke, who formerly was the chairman of the NCAA Division I baseball committee, used his baseball connections and instincts to keep Jay Johnson safely in his office at Hi Corbett Field this summer. As Oklahoma, Alabama and South Carolina changed head coaches, Heeke was pro-active, ahead of the storm, reworking Johnson’s contract and giving him a more market-appropriate salary. Johnson was paid $335,000 in base salary last year. The market at the top of the college game is much higher than that; South Carolina hired South Florida’s Mark Kingston for $600,000 per year through 2023. Details of Johnson’s contract are not yet final.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
UA senior-to-be Krystal Quihuis, one of the leading women’s golfers in the NCAA, won the Trans National Golf Championship in Southern Pines, North Carolina, recently, shooting 70-70-68-73. Her score of 281 was 10 strokes better than all but one other golfer. Quihuis’ next big event is the U.S. Women’s Amateur from Aug. 7-13, at the San Diego Country Club. That could give a slight advantage to UA junior Haley Moore, who grew up golfing the San Diego courses.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Bill Frieder resigned as ASU’s basketball coach 20 years ago this summer. Now there’s another Freider in the Pac-12: His daughter, Laura Frieder Hazlett, was hired last week as the Pac-12’s chief financial officer. A grad of ASU with a doctorate at Cal, Laura served as CFO at Cal-Berkeley, and also worked with the Oregon Ducks on a financial plan to build Matthew Knight Arena on the UO campus.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
When Augie Busch agreed to leave Virginia and become the swimming coach at Arizona, his plan included hiring one of the most impressive young staffs in NCAA swimming. Not only did he bring former UA All-American and team captain Cory Chitwood from his Virginia staff, he also hired 16-time Arizona All-American Beth Botsford, head coach at the Waunakee Wave swimming school in Madison, Wisconsin. Botsford is one of the top athletes in Arizona history; she was recruited to Arizona by Augie’s father, Frank Busch, after winning two gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Botsford spent two years on the coaching staff at Wisconsin under ex-UA assistant Whitney Hite before taking over the Wisconsin swimming academy. Sam Busch, Augie’s youngest brother, also returns to the UA from the Virginia (and Auburn) staff. “Sam is already recruiting very tenaciously,” Augie Busch said. “That’s the only way he knows how to do it.” Chitwood is now part of the USA Swimming coaching staff for next month’s World Championships in Budapest, Hungary.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
I shook my head when I saw a tweet from ex-UA guard Kobi Simmons last week. He tweeted: “My story starts now. Chapter 1.” But what about his high school, AAU and college days? Is it all about the pros now? Simmons also posted a twitter image of a Range Rover he bought his mother with the money he will receive from a two-way contract with the Memphis Grizzlies. I’ve got nothing against Simmons or the way college basketball has now become a pit stop on the way to pro basketball, but had he stayed in college another year or two — transferring to a place like Gonzaga or Iowa State for a year — he would surely have been a first-round pick in 2019 or 2020. Now he’ll be fodder, bouncing between the G League and the Memphis bench for a few years as he matures, improves his shooting skills and game management. His pay this year will range between $75,000 and $279,000, depending on how much time he spends in Memphis.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
ASU football coach Todd Graham, acting as a tour guide for the Sun Devils’ $240 million football plant last week, exhibited typical preseason coaching gobbledygook when he told reporters: “We believe the smarter player is the better player. Are we just going to go out and out-talent everybody? Our plan to win is to out-teach, out-smart, to out-discipline, to out-character our opponent.” Haven’t we heard that before? Come on, man. Just play.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
I finished reading former Sahuaro High and UA receiver Jay Dobyns’ new book “Catching Hell” last week. It is exceptional. It’s in the same category with his first book, “No Angel,” the story of his days as a DEA agent when he infiltrated the Hell’s Angels.
Dobyns’ second book includes more of a personal look at his Tucson upbringing, including his days as one of the Pac-10’s top receivers.
I laughed when he wrote about the late 1970s recruiting push that had coaches like Lou Holtz in his living room. Dobyns’ reputation was as a “slow, white possession receiver.” But when Holtz timed Dobyns over 40 yards at Sahuaro, Cougars assistant coach Bob Vielledent, who fully understood that Dobyns was better than a “slow, white receiver,” helped his cause.
Vielledent measured off 35 yards, not 40, and when Dobyns ran a 4.4, Holtz offered him a scholarship on the spot. “Catching Hell” is due out early next week.
Arizona football coach Rich Rodriguez promoted Matt Dudek a year ago, giving him the title of general manger and director of player personnel.
No non-head coach at Arizona has ever had such a title and so many over-arching responsibilities.
Dudek touched everything in the UA football operation: roster management, coordination of recruiting efforts, working as the school’s NFL liaison, and taking part in marketing and compliance issues.
Given Dudek’s people skills and work ethic, I suspected it wouldn’t be long until a powerhouse in the SEC or Big Ten wanted him on their staff.
And now it has happened. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is expected to announce this week that Dudek has left Arizona and will join the Wolverines. It’s going to be a significant loss for the Wildcats at the worst possible time.
It comes after RichRod lost assistant coaches to Nebraska, Cal and West Virginia in the off-season. The only thing I can compare it to in UA football history is the transition from 2002 to 2003 when John Mackovic, coming off a 2-10 season, lost assistants Charlie Camp, Scott Pelluer and Rick Dykes.
Some of the exodus is surely that Arizona went 3-9 last season. Given the fragile and transient nature of college football, the first instinct is to CYB — cover your butt. Get another job before you lose the one you’ve got.
Another part of Dudek’s departure is that Michigan plays a game unfamiliar to that at Arizona. No one knows that more than RichRod, who coached the Wolverines for three seasons.
In the last few months, Harbaugh has created two positions — three if you count Dudek. That gives Michigan 37 full-time people on Harbaugh’s staff. The Wolverines hired Navy’s Sean Magee as director of player personnel last spring, and hired Cincinnati recruiting coordinator Cooper Petagna last month.
Dudek’s new title is director of recruiting. It is more money, more prestige and a new clock starting on his employment. Good for him.
Meanwhile, RichRod will join the Pac-12 coaches at the league’s annual media days in Los Angeles. Here’s the ballot I dispatched to Pac-12 headquarters for the annual media poll to be released this week:
South: 1) USC; 2) Utah; 3) UCLA; 4) Colorado; 5) ASU; 6) Arizona.
North: 1) Washington; 2) WSU; 3) Stanford; 4) Oregon; 5) Oregon State; 6) Cal.
It’s too close to call between ASU and Arizona; the site of the Territorial Cup probably gives the Sun Devils a small edge. If either team breaks .500, it will be coach-of-the-year territory.
After Vern Friedli retired from coaching Amphitheater High School’s football team in 2010, his state record 331 career victories — achieved at Morenci, Casa Grande, San Manuel and Amphi — were immediately challenged.
Lakeside Blue Ridge coach Paul Moro, who won 13 state championships at a small-school classification in the White Mountains, seemed sure to hit 331 and beyond. Sure enough, last October, in his first year at Tempe Marcos de Niza, Moro won game No. 332.
But the biggest challenges to Friedli’s monumental victory total came not from Moro, but from Phoenix-area coaching legends Jesse Parker of Mesa Mountain View and Karl Kiefer of Tempe McClintock.
Kiefer retired with 302; Parker with 309.
Incredibly, Parker died Friday in Phoenix at 77, about 12 hours after Friedli, 80, died in Tucson.
The rivalry between Friedli and the two Phoenix-area coaching giants was civil, but that was about it. Friedli once told me that coaching one of those Phoenix “super schools” was like putting the football teams at Amphi and Canyon del Oro together.
Friedli did more with less, no doubt.
During Friedli’s prime years at Amphi, he became part of a no-love-lost rivalry with Jeff Scurran’s powerful Sabino program; Scurran won three state titles. For about 10 years, beginning in the late ’80s, the Sabino-Amphi game was a “can’t miss” occasion.
“I really didn’t get to know Vern,” Scurran, 70, said Saturday as he prepared to open Catalina Foothills’ training camp in Flagstaff. “Our longest conversations were those small-talk sessions we’d have on the field just before kickoff.
“But I was always respectful of his career and the young men’s lives he impacted. I know he was a good man.”
It has been business as usual for Salpointe Catholic junior basketball wing Majok Deng, who last week was offered a scholarship by UCLA to go with those from Arizona and most of the Western powers. But it was a coming-of-age month on the AAU circuit for Salpointe sophomore guard Evan Nelson, who was offered scholarships by New Mexico and Grand Canyon. But perhaps the emerging name of the summer in Tucson hoops is Amphi junior-to-be Jackson Ruai, who was offered a scholarship by Nevada last week. Ruai, a versatile and athletic, 6-foot 3-inch wing player, is on Deng’s Arizona Power AAU club, which means he is being evaluated by virtually every top-25 program in the country.
After averaging 16 points for the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, Palo Verde High grad Bryce Cotton chose to re-sign with the Perth Wildcats in Australia. Last season, Cotton was the MVP in the Australian pro league finals, scoring 45 points in the championship game before a crowd of 13,611 at the Perth Arena. He had a chance to sign with Spanish league power Unicaja Malaga, but at this point seems set to return to Australia for 2017-18.
Former Santa Rita High softball standout Jane Teixeira, who later played for the Texas Longhorns, has been hired as senior associate commissioner of the PacWest Conference. That league — which includes schools such as Fresno-Pacific, BYU-Hawaii, Cal Baptist and Dixie State — hired Teixeira away from Conference USA where she was director of NCAA compliance, among other things.
Tucson High grad Jeremy Harden, who led Pima College to the No. 7 overall finish in the 2010 NJCAA basketball finals, is a head coach. The former Boise State assistant last week accepted the coaching position at Wenatchee Valley College in central Washington, a Northwest Athletic Conference league of schools mostly in Washington and Oregon. Harden spent last year as an assistant coach at Tohono O’odham College. Good for him.
I got my first in-person look at 7-foot Arizona freshman basketball player DeAndre Ayton last week as he walked through a corridor of McKale Center with fellow freshman Emmanuel Akot. How times have changed. Both Ayton and Akot appear much older than their listed ages of 18. They could pass for 25, and it’s not like they are skinny, going-to-get-pushed-around freshmen. This isn’t 1990 any more. The physical development of top college basketball prospects has changed dramatically.
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke, who formerly was the chairman of the NCAA Division I baseball committee, used his baseball connections and instincts to keep Jay Johnson safely in his office at Hi Corbett Field this summer. As Oklahoma, Alabama and South Carolina changed head coaches, Heeke was pro-active, ahead of the storm, reworking Johnson’s contract and giving him a more market-appropriate salary. Johnson was paid $335,000 in base salary last year. The market at the top of the college game is much higher than that; South Carolina hired South Florida’s Mark Kingston for $600,000 per year through 2023. Details of Johnson’s contract are not yet final.
UA senior-to-be Krystal Quihuis, one of the leading women’s golfers in the NCAA, won the Trans National Golf Championship in Southern Pines, North Carolina, recently, shooting 70-70-68-73. Her score of 281 was 10 strokes better than all but one other golfer. Quihuis’ next big event is the U.S. Women’s Amateur from Aug. 7-13, at the San Diego Country Club. That could give a slight advantage to UA junior Haley Moore, who grew up golfing the San Diego courses.
Bill Frieder resigned as ASU’s basketball coach 20 years ago this summer. Now there’s another Freider in the Pac-12: His daughter, Laura Frieder Hazlett, was hired last week as the Pac-12’s chief financial officer. A grad of ASU with a doctorate at Cal, Laura served as CFO at Cal-Berkeley, and also worked with the Oregon Ducks on a financial plan to build Matthew Knight Arena on the UO campus.
When Augie Busch agreed to leave Virginia and become the swimming coach at Arizona, his plan included hiring one of the most impressive young staffs in NCAA swimming. Not only did he bring former UA All-American and team captain Cory Chitwood from his Virginia staff, he also hired 16-time Arizona All-American Beth Botsford, head coach at the Waunakee Wave swimming school in Madison, Wisconsin. Botsford is one of the top athletes in Arizona history; she was recruited to Arizona by Augie’s father, Frank Busch, after winning two gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Botsford spent two years on the coaching staff at Wisconsin under ex-UA assistant Whitney Hite before taking over the Wisconsin swimming academy. Sam Busch, Augie’s youngest brother, also returns to the UA from the Virginia (and Auburn) staff. “Sam is already recruiting very tenaciously,” Augie Busch said. “That’s the only way he knows how to do it.” Chitwood is now part of the USA Swimming coaching staff for next month’s World Championships in Budapest, Hungary.
I shook my head when I saw a tweet from ex-UA guard Kobi Simmons last week. He tweeted: “My story starts now. Chapter 1.” But what about his high school, AAU and college days? Is it all about the pros now? Simmons also posted a twitter image of a Range Rover he bought his mother with the money he will receive from a two-way contract with the Memphis Grizzlies. I’ve got nothing against Simmons or the way college basketball has now become a pit stop on the way to pro basketball, but had he stayed in college another year or two — transferring to a place like Gonzaga or Iowa State for a year — he would surely have been a first-round pick in 2019 or 2020. Now he’ll be fodder, bouncing between the G League and the Memphis bench for a few years as he matures, improves his shooting skills and game management. His pay this year will range between $75,000 and $279,000, depending on how much time he spends in Memphis.
ASU football coach Todd Graham, acting as a tour guide for the Sun Devils’ $240 million football plant last week, exhibited typical preseason coaching gobbledygook when he told reporters: “We believe the smarter player is the better player. Are we just going to go out and out-talent everybody? Our plan to win is to out-teach, out-smart, to out-discipline, to out-character our opponent.” Haven’t we heard that before? Come on, man. Just play.
I finished reading former Sahuaro High and UA receiver Jay Dobyns’ new book “Catching Hell” last week. It is exceptional. It’s in the same category with his first book, “No Angel,” the story of his days as a DEA agent when he infiltrated the Hell’s Angels.
Dobyns’ second book includes more of a personal look at his Tucson upbringing, including his days as one of the Pac-10’s top receivers.
I laughed when he wrote about the late 1970s recruiting push that had coaches like Lou Holtz in his living room. Dobyns’ reputation was as a “slow, white possession receiver.” But when Holtz timed Dobyns over 40 yards at Sahuaro, Cougars assistant coach Bob Vielledent, who fully understood that Dobyns was better than a “slow, white receiver,” helped his cause.
Vielledent measured off 35 yards, not 40, and when Dobyns ran a 4.4, Holtz offered him a scholarship on the spot. “Catching Hell” is due out early next week.
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