Hansen's Notebook: Jedd Fisch's finds in Carroll, Dougherty paying off with Arizona's QB play

The Star's longtime columnist also discusses the first look at Tommy Lloyd's deep Wildcat basketball roster, Iguodala vs. Terry for best UA hoops pro career, the kismet of Arizona football getting Oregon State at home in its Pac-12 goodbye and Salpointe's interesting 6A journey.

Fisch hits paydirt with offensive hires

Arizona’s four leading quarterbacks coaches across the last 50 years have been, in no particular order:

• Steve Axman, 1980-83, who helped to develop Tom Tunnicliffe;
• Homer Smith, 1996-97, who was exceptional working with Keith Smith;
• Dino Babers, 1998-2000, who successfully operated the Smith-Ortege Jenkins tandem;
• Sonny Dykes, 2007-09, who elevated Nick Foles to the starting lineup.

At a school that hasn’t produced a first-team all-conference quarterback since Bruce Hill in 1975, it’s not a long list, although it’s beginning to appear as if third-year UA quarterbacks coach Jimmie Dougherty’s name will soon be added to Axman, Smith, Babers and Dykes.

The remarkable performances of redshirt freshman QB Noah Fifita reflect on Dougherty as much as anyone, and it all fits with how Jedd Fisch has delivered Arizona from a 1-11 season to relevancy in Power 5 football.

Unlike previous UA head coaches John Mackovic, Rich Rodriguez and Kevin Sumlin, Fisch has not surrounded himself with sycophants and unthreatening coaches who were often not of Pac-12 caliber.

This could be Arizona’s top football staff since the school’s 1990s best-decade ever staffs that included elite-level coaches Babers, Smith, Rich Ellerson, Larry Mac Duff, Johnnie Lynn, Jim Young, Pat Hill, Clarence Brooks and Charlie Dickey.

Dick Tomey sought talent and skill, not someone he could push around. Fisch is proving to be the same way.

Fisch hired offensive line coach Brennan Carroll away from his father’s Seattle Seahawks staff, aggressively pursued and hired College Football Hall of Famers Chuck Cecil and Ricky Hunley, raided the UCLA staff to hire Johnny Nansen and Jason Kaufusi, and, most recently, made a coup by hiring accomplished former Arizona, Stanford and Texas secondary coach Duane Akina.

As we’ve seen this season, Dougherty is a significant improvement on former Arizona assistant coaches. When Fifita was rushed to action four weeks ago against Stanford, he was ready and able.

Dougherty gets little or no national attention because he agreed to jump from UCLA to join Fisch’s reconstruction project, and that’s somewhat puzzling in the coaching industry. An assistant coach almost always moves up, not down.

Other than Homer Smith, I’m not sure Arizona has ever been able to hire a QB coach to match Dougherty’s résumé.

The son of an iconic Illinois high school coach, Dougherty was Larry Smith’s starting QB at Missouri. You couldn’t learn from a better football mind and mentor than Smith, Arizona’s head coach from 1980-86. It’s clear Dougherty’s football upbringing has a lot of Larry Smith in it.

After that, Dougherty joined young Jim Harbaugh at UC-San Diego for three seasons, was soon coaching under Steve Sarkisian at Washington and then went back to join Harbaugh, this time at Michigan, in 2016.

That’s when Fisch and Dougherty met; Fisch was Michigan’s QB coach. He and Dougherty worked together. It clicked.

When Fisch was hired a year later to be UCLA’s offensive coordinator, he recommended the Bruins hire Dougherty as QB coach. But it wasn’t that easy: Dougherty had already agreed to a well-funded contract to be Oregon’s receivers coach and had moved his family to Eugene to be with first-year Ducks coach Willie Taggart.

That didn’t stop Fisch. After seven weeks at Oregon, Dougherty resigned and moved to UCLA, where he and Fisch reconnected.

Once Fisch was hired at Arizona, Dougherty was among the first he hired to assist with a massive reconstruction project. You couldn’t have faulted Dougherty if he had jumped ship and left Arizona after an opening season in which his QBs were Gunner Cruz, Will Plummer and Jordan McCloud (in fairness, McCloud has found some success at second-year FBS program James Madison). But he stuck it out, and today Arizona has two QBs, Fifita and Jayden de Laura, who appear capable of leading Arizona to a bowl game.

Think about this: Fifita committed to a 1-11 Arizona program two years ago. He didn’t have a list of impressive suitors; Fifita’s unimpressive list of scholarship offers came from Cal, Fresno State, Utah State, Colorado State and Hawaii. But still, Arizona was riding a 1-23 streak.

Fisch and Dougherty impressed Fifita, signed him and now Arizona’s football program is in better position than at any time since November 2014.

It's not just the players. It's coaching as much as anything.

Lloyd’s program: No bells, no whistles, just basketball

Arizona introduced a new pre-game video at McKale Center Friday night and it was not up to UA standards. It was a sterile minute or two of dunks and bro-hugs, with no familiar names narrating a list of Final Fours and NBA draft picks.

It’s what you might expect for a pre-game video at Cal or Arizona State.

But once Tommy Lloyd’s 2023-24 club was unveiled, it didn’t matter. What you see is what you get, and Arizona is loaded. My observations:

• Sophomore point guard Kylan Boswell played aggressive defense and shot confidently and accurately from 3-point distance. He has improved significantly since March. He has a bearing about him. The Pac-12 doesn’t have a sure-thing all-conference point guard since UCLA’s Tyger Campbell finally exhausted his eligibility. Could Boswell be his successor? His top challenger might be Washington’s Sahvir Wheeler, a transfer from Kentucky.

• Keshad Johnson, who started every game for Final Four San Diego State last year, was as advertised: steady and involved. Johnson would be a core leader for any Pac-12 team this year. I was impressed that he shot 8-for-8 afield but more so that in a 110-70 blowout, he did not jack up a single silly, contested 3-pointer.

• Caleb Love is an offensive force. He scored 24 points in 23 minutes but didn’t overdo it, driving to the basket with his quickness and elusiveness more than choosing to let ’em fly from the 3-point line. If the former North Carolina standout can play with that approach, he could be the Pac-12 Player of the Year.

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• Who sits? Who plays? Lloyd has so many pieces that he won’t even miss Azuolis Tubelis. What impressed me was that freshman Motiejus Krivas, sitting out with a minor injury, is clearly two or three inches taller than 7-foot Oumar Ballo. If Krivas is big-game ready, he could give Lloyd’s inside-heavy offense a one-two punch like few in college hoops.

• In a 40-minute, 40-point blowout, a game that doesn’t count in any standings, Lloyd didn’t sit back and relax. At every full timeout, he stood on the court surrounded by assistants Jack Murphy, Riccardo Fois and Rem Bakamus, seeking their input before he would step into the huddle and give instructions to the players. Lloyd seemed to take Lewis-Clark State College as seriously as he might the Oregon Ducks. Good move.

Who you got: Iggy or Terry?

When ex-Arizona Wildcat Andre Iguodala announced his retirement from the NBA last week, it created a debate: Which Wildcat had the better NBA career, Iguodala or Jason Terry? Both played 19 seasons in the NBA. Here are the numbers:

• Games played: Terry 1,410; Iguodala 1,231.
• Points scored: Terry 18,881; Iguodala, 13,968.
• Minutes played: Terry 42,034; Iguodala, 39,507.
• Steals: Terry 1,603; Iguodala 1,725.
• Playoff games: Terry 134, Iguodala 188.
• NBA titles: Terry one; Iguodala four.
• Money earned: Terry $108 million; Iguodala $189 million.

The only other ex-Wildcat to play 1,000 NBA games was Mike Bibby (1,001), who played 17 NBA seasons.

Short stuff: Ex-UA coach gets huge raise, Cosgrove's Aztecs rolling again

• When Arizona baseball coach Jay Johnson bailed out to coach at LSU two years ago, he said it was because the Tigers had a better chance to reach the College World Series. Indeed, Johnson’s Tigers won it all in June. The money soon followed: Last week LSU and Johnson agreed to a new seven-year, $12.55 million deal that makes him one of the highest-paid college baseball coaches in history. That’s about $1.75 million per year. By comparison, Johnson’s successor at Arizona, Chip Hale, is working on the third year of a five-year deal worth about $440,000 per year. ...

• Pima College’s men’s soccer team concluded the regular season last week with a 12-2 record, ranked No. 2 among NJCAA Division II programs. What’s new? Nothing.

Coach Dave Cosgrove’s club has gone 150-27-17 since 2015, winning two national championships. Their only loss was a 2-1 game to Arizona Western College, 11-0-3, which is ranked No. 1 in NJCAA Division I.

PCC will play host to the NJCAA Division II national championships next month at the Kino North complex, but to get there probably has to beat No. 4 ranked Phoenix College, 8-1-2, in the region playoffs that begin this week.

What makes Cosgrove’s year-to-year excellence so impressive is that he wins mostly with Southern Arizona players. Of the 10 Aztecs to start the most games this year, six are local players, including Stetson Miller of Cienega High; Brandon Sanchez of CDO; Mateo Soto, D’Andre Pickett and Daniel Ehler of Tucson High. ...

• It seems fitting that Arizona closes the last month of its final season in the Pac-12 with a home game Saturday against Oregon State. The 1978 Arizona-OSU game was the UA’s first Pac-10 game in history. The Wildcats won 21-7 before 49,056.

Arizona owned OSU in Tucson, going 9-0 from 1978-97. Bad times set in in 2000, as the Beavers won their first-ever game in Tucson, and then won five straight and six of the last eight.

Saturday’s game should be a sellout. Why not? If Arizona can’t draw 50,000 now, it’ll be a big letdown, especially for one of the best OSU teams of the last 50 years.

My two cents: Salpointe's 6A journey no cakewalk

I am still getting over the shock of Salpointe Catholic’s 49-0 loss to Liberty a week ago in Peoria. This is a Salpointe program that has gone 204-54 dating to the 2000 season as Tucson’s ranking football heavyweight.

True, Liberty is a mega-power, a high school version of Transfer Portal Central, one that is as good a pick as any team to win the Open state championship this season.

But 49-0? Come on.

After due research, I discovered the loss to Liberty was the most lopsided in Salpointe’s history. That’s a long time, dating to 1952, covering 834 games.

The previous worst loss in Salpointe history was 52-6 to Nogales in 1953, followed by a 58-14 loss to seven-time state champ Chandler Hamilton High during the abbreviated 2020 COVID season.

The Lancers have a chance to erase the memory of that 49-point blowout on Friday when they play at 12-time state champ Scottsdale Saguaro on Friday.

Gulp. No one said the journey in Class 6A would be easy.