Arizona hasn’t won an outright conference football championship since 1936. It has gone 0 for 42 in attempts to qualify for the Rose Bowl. But thanks to ESPN, the Wildcats now have two coaches ranked among the top 150 in college football history.
Introducing Warren Woodson and Darrell Mudra. According to ESPN, they belong in a sainted group with Pac-12 coaches such as John McKay and Don James.
It’s a swing and a miss times two.
ESPN has been persistent and thorough in championing the concept of a 150th anniversary of college football, spending months in an attempt to get the game’s historical pieces properly aligned.
But inevitably, it missed a few, and none more so as it relates to Arizona football.
On Tuesday, ESPN announced its top 150 college football coaches in history. How’d it do? It smartly listed four Sun Devil coaches — No. 43 Frank Kush, No. 83 Dennis Erickson, No. 86 Dan Devine and No. 97 John Cooper. All are legit top-100 selections.
And although Erickson did his best work at Miami, Cooper at Ohio State and Devine at Notre Dame, it was Kush’s selection that best identifies ASU as a “football school” — now and probably forever.
And he has not coached an ASU game since 1979.
If anything, ESPN didn’t rank Kush high enough; he had much more of an enduring impact than USC’s Pete Carroll (No. 37), who briefly (nine years) made the most of Southern California’s vast population center the same way Chip Kelly and now Mario Cristobal have taken advantage of the Nike brand at Oregon.
Those men inherited football wealth; someone like Washington State’s Mike Price, who coached the Cougars, of all teams, to a pair or Rose Bowls and three finishes in the AP’s top 10 in a six-year period, was a miracle worker.
Let’s see Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler do that.
But missing Mike Price is a forgivable football sin. It’s difficult to put a correct order to 150 years of football history; you’re bound to omit a worthy coach, or put in someone like Darrell Mudra or Warren Woodson, whose coaching careers don’t match those of fellow Arizona coaches Jim Young and Dick Tomey.
Woodson is No. 108 on ESPN’s list; Mudra is No. 114. Young and Tomey didn’t make the cut.
Young’s credentials are undeniable. He overcame rebuilding obstacles at decidedly non-football schools Arizona, Purdue and Army and went 120-71-2. Compare that to No. 144 Bill McCartney, who went 93-55-1 at Colorado.
According to ESPN, Woodson and Mudra are saints in the football coaching profession, worthy of more acclaim than Young and Tomey, although those who have closely followed UA football know that to be untrue.
Woodson was hired by Arizona in 1952 during a period this newspaper referred to UA football as “a graveyard.” UA athletic director Pop McKale hoped to hire Bob Blackmon, who would go on to be a College Football Hall of Fame coach, winning 164 games at Illinois, Dartmouth and Cornell. But McKale was overruled by President Richard Harvill, who had been impressed by Woodson’s Hardin-Simmons teams.
How did it go? In December 1955, Wildcats students hanged Woodson in effigy from the top floor of the Student Union.
Said Woodson: “Life for us has been more miserable than at any other places I’ve coached,” which included stints at Hardin-Simmons, Central Arkansas and Texarkana JC. In 1956, Woodson had a tense meeting with the UA’s booster club, the Towncats, in which he said: “I know more about football than anybody here. I’m smarter about football than you. Stay out of my business.”
A few weeks later, Woodson resigned. His UA record: 26-22-2.
By 1958, UA athletic director Dick Clausen met with NCAA officials and admitted to a paying-players scandal during the Woodson years. Clausen said that Woodson and the Towncats split about $25,000 a year to a group of about 10 UA football players.
Warren Woodson’s combined record at Arizona was 26-22-2. “I was told Arizona was a graveyard for football coaches and, you know what, it turned out to be true.”
The NCAA subsequently put Arizona on probation for acts committed in the Woodson years; it didn’t affect Woodson, who coached New Mexico State through most of the 1960s.
In a 1992 interview, Woodson said he had no recollection of paying players and told me he couldn’t overcome political pressure from McKale and Harvill.
“McKale was an old pissant,” he said. “He was always sniping at me, interfering with my work. I was told Arizona was a graveyard for football coaches and, you know what, it turned out to be true.”
ESPN’s research crew missed that one.
Mudra was hired in 1967 after future San Diego Chargers coach Don Coryell declined Arizona’s offer.
Mudra was high-maintenance, a my-way-or-the-highway personality who fought with the administration over academic issues.
Clausen, who hired Mudra away from North Dakota State, later told Star columnist Abe Chanin that he had been warned by a Big Ten athletic director not to hire Mudra.
“I didn’t listen,” said Clausen. “Darrell had a fantastic winning record in small college, so I said let’s take a chance. If he can win here, that’s the most important thing. We can handle everything else.”
Well, not quite.
At the outset of his second season, 1968, Mudra sold his Tucson home. He quit a day after Arizona played in the 1968 Sun Bowl. He told Clausen “there is no way I’m going to make it with (president) Harvill.”
Said Clausen: “Darrell will alienate anyone who gets in the way.”
Out at Arizona after a quick 11-9-1 log, Mudra went on to coach with success at Western Illinois, Northern Iowa and Eastern Illinois. He spent two years as Florida State’s head coach, going 4-18, which means his record at FBS schools was 15-27-1. Top 150 worthy? Maybe not.
Woodson died in 1998; he was 94. Mudra, 90, lives in Crawfordville, Florida.
ESPN’s list of Top 150 college football coaches painfully continues the narrative on what sometimes seems to be a cursed existence for Arizona football. Ranked between Woodson and Mudra at No. 112 on ESPN’s list is Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry, who won 163 games in his career.
Tomey won 184.
ESPN missed that, too.
