by Gary Pinkel
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After my second season at Bowling Green, our coaching staff went to the University of Tennessee in February to visit with the coaching staff there to share ideas on the principles of their offense. I got a call from my wife during the trip. She said Don James wanted to talk to me. She said, “Coach James doesn’t call just to say hi.” She knew something was up. She was right.
I called him back and Coach said, “Gary, Dick Scesniak is going to the New York Giants. I’m moving Bob Stull up to coordinator. I’m looking for a receivers coach. I’ve got 150 names and I’ve narrowed it down to five. You’re one of the five. If I offer you the job right now, will you take it?”
Whoa.
I said, “Coach, I’ve got to go home and talk to my wife.” We’d already lived in Seattle for a year, but we had just bought a house and Vicki was pregnant with our second child. I just needed to talk to her. I could tell he was a little bothered by that. He knew I knew everything about his program and the situation in Washington. It’s not like I had to go home, look at the map, and figure out where Seattle was. So when I returned to Bowling Green, Vicki and I discussed the offer and I called him back the next day. I told him I’d take the job. He said, “Well, I was a little angry you didn’t say yes right away.”
Years later, Don’s wife Carol revealed to me she told him when he got off the phone, “Isn’t that the kind of person you want working for you? He wanted to talk to his wife first to make sure everything was okay.” That settled him down a little bit, but he still wanted the answer immediately. Either way, he got me. We were headed back to Seattle.
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Don James is the greatest coach in Washington Huskies history, but he wasn’t necessarily the school’s first choice when it needed a head coach in 1975. UW wanted Green Bay Packers coach Dan Devine, but the former Missouri coach instead accepted an offer at Notre Dame. Instead, James made his way to Seattle, and after going 11–11 his first two years, the breakthrough came in 1977, when the Huskies made the Rose Bowl. They finished 8–4, won the Pac-8, and beat Michigan in Pasadena. He got things built pretty fast. I think one of the reasons he hired me was I had just played for him. They were going through the transition process, but Coach James could look at his staff and say, “This guy played for me. He gets it. He already knows what we’re all about.” He didn’t have to train me. I knew the structure of the program. I understood his standards, the discipline, all the details. The program at Washington was the same program he ran at Kent State. The budget was bigger and the uniforms were different. Otherwise, he was running the same operation. A lot of players would come to me with questions because I had just played in Coach James’ program. His other assistants were older coaches, and they hadn’t played under him like I had at Kent. Younger Husky players, especially, could relate to me. I believed so strongly in the program after what he pulled off at Kent State, so when I got back to Seattle, I was fully immersed in the system.
I just tried to be myself, but I had such respect for Coach James. That awe had to wear off a little bit. I knew the program inside out. He just plugged me into the system. Coach James wanted me to be honest with the players. I understood what made him tick and I could relay that to them.
When he would speak at coaches’ clinics he would say, “I coach my coaches.” That’s his philosophy. He was the CEO of the company. He had a book called The One-Minute Manager, one of the foremost books at that time on management. It was all about being efficient and productive. In practice he took notes and shared his thoughts during staff meetings and critiqued the coaches on how they ran drills, the good and the bad. He wanted everyone in that meeting to learn from the experience. If there was something really personal he wanted to address about your coaching style, he’d bring you into his office alone. But that rarely happened.
The reason I loved his management style is you always knew where you stood. At Bowling Green, it was entirely different. I struggled without the constant evaluation. But under Coach James, you became a better coach because of his style. That’s how he treated the people who worked for him. He very rarely raised his voice. Sometimes he did, but that happens to everyone in this business. That’s how he made us better and how he made the program better. You’re always learning. He never said, “We have staff evaluations coming up in six months, so we’ll address this issue then.” Why put it off for six months? Why let something linger that long? Under Coach James, you couldn’t be afraid of confrontation. If you can’t handle confrontation or criticism, you can’t coach for him. But when he critiqued your performance, he was always professional and never threatening or personal. The structure and the standards didn’t change from the days I played for him.
Years later, when I was a head coach, I’d attend conferences sponsored by the leaders at Nike. They always discussed goal-setting and talked about what they called “relentless evaluation.” They’re incredibly diligent when it comes to evaluating how they do business and how they make billion-dollar decisions. Hearing those business leaders talk about “relentless evaluation” always reminded me of working for Coach James. We analyzed absolutely everything we did. When spring practices were over, we evaluated how they went. When spring recruiting was over, we evaluated how we managed that part of the program. Winter conditioning ended, we evaluated. We were so oriented around the calendar. When spring ball came up a year later, we pulled out our notes from the previous year and adjusted the drills we talked about changing. None of this had anything to do with coaching football—but it had everything to do with management and how we coached football under Don James. He was very clear it was all about the process. Everyone wants to be good September 1. But what you do daily—from the coaches to the academic staff to the food service employees to the weight room staff to the players, matters. What are we doing every single day to run this organization as efficiently as possible?
Coach James had one big tradition that he carried on from Kent State to Washington—his Thursday talks. Every Wednesday during the season Coach James wrote out a speech longhand on yellow legal pads, then delivered them to the team the next day before practice. This was how he started the final 48 hours until kickoff. He’d introduce a major theme each week. He wanted his players to visualize the steps it took to win on Saturday during those final 48 hours. I borrowed from this tradition when I became a head coach and, like James, saved every Thursday speech I gave during my 25 years as a head coach. After Coach James’ death in 2013, one of our former players, Peter Tormey, published excerpts of those talks in a book called The Thursday Speeches.
As a young assistant working under Coach James, I took a lot of notes. I took notes on his Thursday talks. I’d keep a notebook for the entire season, starting in August camp. We’d have meetings every single day covering the entire program. A lot of details. A lot of notes. That’s part of the whole process. Ultimately you’re trying to get everyone on the train. Everybody. Both feet on. At some point the tracks are going to start shaking. A storm’s going to test you. When a coach starts a program, some people are on, some people are off, and some people aren’t even close to the tracks. You’ve got to get everybody on board. That’s how you change culture, and I got to witness that process as a player under Coach James. When you get to see it all unfold through the eyes of a player, you see how it works. When I worked under him that first year at Washington in 1976, that’s when players really embraced me because I had just played for him. I was only a year or two older than the seniors. I’d see players struggling and I’d pull them aside and tell them why he’s making them go through hell. “There’s a plan here,” I’d tell them. I think that’s why he wanted me there. I was a company man. The next year, that team went from 3–4 in the conference to 6–1 and reached the Rose Bowl.
My first year back on the staff we finished 9–3 and won the Sun Bowl, beating Texas, which was a landmark win for our program. We were even better the next two years, winn
ing 19 games combined, both ending with conference titles and trips to the Rose Bowl, ending in a loss to Michigan and a win over Iowa, respectively. We won 10 games again in 1982 and beat Maryland in the Aloha Bowl. In 1983, it was back to the Aloha Bowl after an eight-win regular season. From 1977 to ’84, we never finished lower than second place in the conference.
Coach James’ background was on defense so he sat in on our defensive meetings for game planning. He played quarterback in college, so he understood offensive football. But he trusted our offensive staff. Bob Stull was our offensive coordinator and Ray Dorr coached the quarterbacks. Both had been on Coach James’ staff at Kent State. Dorr coached three really good quarterbacks in Seattle: Warren Moon, Tom Flick, and Steve Pelluer. I learned a great amount from Dorr. I’d run my receiver meetings and then duck into the quarterback meetings and watch Ray train the quarterbacks. I’d try to absorb as much as I could. After the 1983 season—an 8–4 year with a loss to Penn State in the Aloha Bowl—Ray left the staff to become the head coach at Southern Illinois in Carbondale. Bob got a head-coaching job at Massachusetts. I loved those guys. They trained me for years. But Coach James knew, without me ever having to tell him that I wanted to coach quarterbacks.
I was hoping to get promoted. One day, Coach James called me into his office. He said, “Can you coach quarterbacks and be my offensive coordinator?” I wasn’t about to say, “What do you think?” I told him I could do both jobs. He said, “Gary, that’s hard to do, especially coaching that position. You’d be running the whole offense.” But I had to be confident. I told him I could do it. He said, “I think you can, too.” That was it. I got the job. He had to make a couple more hires, but like always, he went out and found some former graduate assistants, people who had worked for him in the past. That way they were already trained.
He could have gone out and hired a more experienced play-caller or someone already established with his own offense. But he was never concerned about how the media or the fans might perceive a staff hire. That was never important to Coach James.
I was pretty confident, but at times I asked myself, “What did I get myself into?” I’d never coached quarterbacks. I knew the reads, but the biggest thing was coaching the fundamentals of the position and all the drill work. I had my struggles early. I didn’t always sleep at night, but you persevere through those times.
We didn’t want to make all kinds of changes to the offense when I took over as coordinator. We had already experienced success in Coach James’ preferred I-formation, power offense. Our defense, under coordinator Jim Lambright, was good enough to hold most opponents to a touchdown or two. My first year as coordinator, only one team scored more than 17 points against us. Washington State, our heated rival, scored 29 against us in the Apple Cup. Fortunately, we scored 38—and clinched a spot in the Orange Bowl, where we beat Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners team on New Year’s Day and finished No. 2 in the polls.
We were 11–1—the only loss came to Pac-10 champ Southern Cal in Los Angeles—but I remember that season as being a real challenge. We were very, very conservative on offense. I figured Coach James wanted to be conservative on offense, but it was probably to a fault. Hugh Millen became our top quarterback, but we were hardly a prolific passing team. We played great defense and protected the ball. Why change the offense if we’re winning?
The next year we took a step back and won only seven games, though we beat Colorado in the Freedom Bowl. For the next few years we won enough games to keep our bowl streak going, but we slipped some in the Pac-10. In 1988, we went 6–5 and missed a bowl game for the first time in 10 years. The offense really struggled. We lost home games to UCLA and Arizona and had one-point losses to Southern Cal and Washington State. After the season, Coach James did something he’d never done as a head coach and fired an assistant, offensive line coach Dan Dorazio. Dan was a good coach, but Coach James felt like we needed a change offensively. At the time we were still running a two-back, I-formation offense, but offensive football in the college game had started to evolve elsewhere.
At the I-AA level, Dennis Erickson was having great success with the one-back offense, a system that would later help spark the rise of the spread. Erickson coached at Idaho and would later take the one-back offense to Washington State and Miami. His coordinator and close friend was an old colleague, Keith Gilbertson, who coached with me on the Washington staff as a grad assistant in 1976. Gilbertson was from the Seattle area and later replaced Erickson as the head coach at Idaho. In three years, Gilby won 28 games, each time making the I-AA playoffs. After his third season there, Coach James and I convinced Gilby to join us at Washington as offensive line coach. He had a great offensive mind and he helped reinvent our offense and installed a version of the one-back attack.
That’s the beauty of Coach James. We needed something different, and that’s why we brought in Gilby. He and I were good friends and we didn’t worry about conflicts. I still called the plays, but he’d give me suggestions with things he saw. It was a great move on our part. A lot of coaches wouldn’t bring in someone to make a move like that, but I suggested it. Coach James wanted to do it, too. It really worked out. Gilby told me years later he was a much better offensive coordinator than he was a head coach. I told him I was probably just the opposite. We had a good laugh over that.
In 1989, with our new offense installed, we set single-season school records for rushing and total offense and, more important, got back to a bowl game. We finished 8–4 and won six of our final seven games, including a Freedom Bowl victory over Florida. (The day after the game, Florida officially named its new head coach for the next season—a guy named Steve Spurrier.)
In 1990, we turned the offense over to a redshirt sophomore quarterback who had gotten a taste of playing time the year before. We recruited the gifted southpaw out of Southern California and he continued our string of passers who would make a living on Sundays. He was the best of the bunch: Mark Brunell.
• • •
Starting with Warren Moon in the late ’70s, Coach James built an assembly line of great quarterbacks at Washington. Moon, of course, would become a Pro Football Hall of Famer. After Warren, Tom Flick guided the Huskies for a couple seasons then bounced around the NFL for a few more. Steve Pelluer would finish his career No. 2 all-time in passing yards at UW and was named the Pac-10’s player of the year in 1983. He’d play several years in the NFL as a backup and starter in Dallas and Kansas City.
I took over as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in 1984, when Hugh Millen emerged as our starter—as a walk-on junior college transfer. Hugh threw the tightest spiral I’ve ever seen. It was absolutely unbelievable. He was a big, tall walk-on. He was just a really talented thrower and he won some big games for us, including the 1985 Orange Bowl. He’d have a long career throwing passes in the NFL.
Next up was Chris Chandler, a really talented athlete from Everett, Washington. He was an especially good golfer. What he wasn’t was a great practice player, at least not early in his career. One day we were meeting in our quarterback room and I told him he needed to start practicing better. “You know, Coach,” he told me, “I’m just not a very good practice player. I’m a gamer.”
Uh-oh.
As a coach, I had to learn how and when you say something so everyone gets the message the right way. I had to deliver a message to Chris, but not around the other quarterbacks. When the meeting broke up and everyone left the room, I kept Chris around. “First of all,” I told him, “if you ever tell Coach James, ‘I’m a gamer,’ it’s going to be a real quick meeting with him. If you don’t start practicing well, you’ll never, ever play a down for him. Ever. You can sit there and tell me you’re not a good practice player, but guess what? You’re never going to play if you don’t do something about that.”
I remember him giving me this look like, “You’re actually serious?” I sure was. Chris would never play for Coach James with tha
t mentality. But that conversation seemed to really change his attitude. He was a great kid and a really good athlete. He just needed to commit himself to the practice field. When he did, he became a great player. By the time he finished his college career in 1987, he’d thrown 32 touchdowns, second all-time at Washington. He’d have the longest NFL career of my Washington quarterbacks and play for seven franchises in 17 seasons. His best years came in Atlanta when he led the Falcons to the Super Bowl in 1998.
Cary Conklin came next. He was from Yakima on the west side of the Cascades. He was another big strong-armed kid, a lot like Hugh. Conklin wasn’t the most consistent passer, but he was behind center in our bounce-back year in 1988 and led us back to the postseason. Cary had played some as a true freshman backup in 1986—the rare freshman quarterback to see the field for Coach James—but we planned to redshirt him in 1987 when Chandler was clearly our best option. But nine games into the season, Chris got hurt at Arizona. We told Cary at the beginning of the year, “If there was ever a time we needed you, we’d have to activate you and pull your redshirt.” Well, we needed him to finish the Arizona game. It was just one game, but he made a statement to the team with his unselfishness. Chandler resumed his starting role to finish the season, though Cary replaced him in a crucial Apple Cup win over Washington State that preserved our consecutive bowl streak at nine.
Cary had to use his whole year of eligibility for that late stretch, but the amazing thing was he and his parents never said one word. That was their duty. They knew it. It was so different than the approach some kids and their families take in today’s game. He played because that’s what the team needed. He probably would have been a better player over time if we could have protected that year of eligibility, but he never questioned our decision. He became the starter in 1988 and took off under our new offense in 1989, setting a single-season school record for passing yards on our way to the Freedom Bowl.