The process of hiring an assistant football coach at woebegone Arizona was supposed to be something out of the “Major League” movie script. Something like Jedd Fisch reduced to calling a down-on-his-luck coach working at Tire World.
“I’d like to offer you a coaching job on my new staff.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jedd.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? This is a chance to coach in the Pac-12.”
“Let me think it over, will ya, Jedd? I’ve got a guy on the other line about some whitewalls. I’ll talk to you later.”
Instead, Fisch lost count of how many men sought to join him at Arizona.
“One hundred would be on the low side,” he said Thursday. “There was an incredible amount of interest in coming to the UA.”
He referred to the process of saying no to scores of coaches as a “horrible cycle of rejection.”
This was not to be expected at a school on a record 12-game losing streak.
For the last few years, coaching football at Arizona was 50/50 with a job selling whitewalls. But on Thursday morning Fisch did something no coach at the UA has ever done: He introduced his coaching staff, one by one, 20 minutes at a time in a series of Zoom Q&As.
Fisch put a face on a program that has been without personality. He wisely gave voice to a group of coaches who have more than 120 years of experience in college football, and 70 years in the NFL.
Fisch was like a proud father, popping his suspenders. For the last decade, Arizona hasn’t popped suspenders. It has popped up to the infield, an easy out.
The UA football program all but became anonymous, hidden behind closed doors.
On Thursday, Don Brown, who has been the defensive coordinator at Michigan the last five seasons and didn’t really need the work — the Wolverines must pay him $1.7 million this year — said he moved to Tucson because “I believe in Jedd and the way I knew this (program) was going to be run.”
Don Brown’s teams are well-known for bringing pressure.
Brown, who is 65 and has coached forever, got so amped up talking about the opportunity — “I’m kinda excited to install it again,” he said — that he raised his voice and all but climbed out of his chair to sack the Zoom screen.
“I gotta calm down here for a minute,” he said.
Talk about a promising development.
The men Fisch hired belong to a flourishing coaching tree with all the right names. Receivers coach Jimmie Dougherty, for example, was pirated away from Chip Kelly’s staff at UCLA. When Dougherty described his coaching background, he clicked off names from Larry Smith to Jim Harbaugh to Steve Sarkisian to Chris Petersen.
His father, Tim Dougherty, now the defensive coordinator at powerhouse Chandler Hamilton High School, traces the family football genealogy to Bill Callahan, former head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Oakland Raiders.
Jimmie Dougherty
This is a new way of football at Arizona. The head coach is not afraid to surround himself with big personalities and big reputations.
Late in the 2018 season, Arizona coach Kevin Sumlin became so desperate that he fired defensive coordinator Marcel Yates and two anonymous assistant coaches.
To find an emergency fill-in defensive coordinator for two games, Sumlin met with Chuck Cecil, an analyst whose job was to examine game film and report data to full-time coaches.
“I don’t know you and I don’t trust you,” Sumlin told Cecil that day.
Such was the depth of the disconnection and dysfunction inside Arizona’s football program. One of four College Football Hall of Fame players in UA history, Cecil wasn’t viewed as an asset as much as an outsider.
Is there any wonder Sumlin failed so thoroughly? It was his responsibility to get to know Cecil, to build trust and work toward winning football games together. It was head-shaking that Sumlin and the football administration didn’t get it.
By comparison, on the morning Fisch was introduced as Arizona’s new coach, he got Cecil’s phone number and called.
On Thursday, 33 years after he was selected as the Pac-10’s defensive player of the year — after 17 seasons as an NFL coach — Cecil was treated like a Wildcat again.
“Talk about a blessing,” he said. “It’s not a job, it’s a passion.”
While discussing his role as a secondary coach on Fisch’s staff, Cecil became emotional. He clenched his fist and pumped it when talking about a long-ago, late-night conversation with his wife, Carrie.
“Nine or 10 years ago when I was coaching (the NFL Tennessee Titans) I told my wife that at some point I had to go back to Tucson. I said, ‘I have to go back. I have to. I have to.’ I hope to make fairy tales come true for the guys here.”
Fairy tales? If Fisch can pull this off, if he can make UA football relevant, it’ll be like Jack and the Beanstalk.
But in college football, you don’t plant a handful of magic beans in an attempt to beat Arizona State and USC.
“There’s not any magic,” new defensive line coach and Arizona Hall of Fame linebacker Ricky Hunley said Thursday, describing the hard work required. “Jedd is exactly what these kids need right now. You’ll see the tide shift.”
The first waves reached shore Thursday.
