Everett grad’s team kicks off the college bowl season today
Published 12:01 am Saturday, December 19, 2009
When 48-year-old Dave Christensen arrived in Laramie, Wyo., for the first time ever in the late hours of a Saturday night last December, it immediately felt like home.
The Everett native and his family flew in from Columbia, Mo., shortly after the Missouri Tigers’ 2008 regular-season finale, and Christensen saw lights in the distance as they drove through town. When he noticed that the lights came from War Memorial Stadium, Christensen asked why the football stadium was lit up so late at night.
“‘Coach,’” Christensen remembers being told, “‘it’s because you’re in town.’ I hadn’t even thought about it: Wow, I finally made it.”
In his first year as a head football coach, the longtime assistant and Everett High School graduate certainly has lived up to his first Wyoming welcome. Christensen leads the Cowboys into the New Mexico Bowl this afternoon, the team’s first postseason appearance since 2004.
It was quite a first step for a longtime assistant who was just happy to be a head coach.
“It’s something I’ve worked for my entire career,” said Christensen, who was one of the coaches Washington State University considered before hiring Paul Wulff in December 2007. “I interviewed three other places (WSU, Akron and Central Michigan) before getting this job. They weren’t the right jobs, they didn’t want me, whatever the deal.
“There are only 119 of them in the world. Obviously, there was a great deal of pride when I got the job here.”
Christensen, who makes an annual base salary of $180,000 but can make up to $750,000 per year with incentives, took the Wyoming job before ever having set foot in the state. He served last season as the offensive coordinator at Missouri.
He led Wyoming to a 6-6 record and a meeting with Fresno State in a game that kicks off the bowl season. In all, 34 bowl games will be played between this afternoon and the Jan. 7 BCS National Championship game pitting No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Texas.
Six Pac-10 teams will play in bowl games, beginning with Oregon State’s appearance in the Las Vegas Bowl on Tuesday. Cal plays Utah in the Poinsettia Bowl the next day, while USC (vs. Boston College in the Emerald Bowl), UCLA (vs. Temple in the Eaglebank Bowl), Arizona (vs. Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl) and Oregon (vs. Ohio State in the Rose Bowl) will play in post-Christmas games.
Two other Pacific Northwest teams also will be playing in bowl games later this month.
Idaho, which boasts Snohomish County products Shiloh Keo (Archbishop Murphy High School) and Eric Greenwood (Edmonds-Woodway), ends a 10-year bowl drought with a Dec. 30 appearance in the Humanitarian Bowl. And unbeaten and sixth-ranked Boise State takes on No. 4 TCU in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 4.
It all begins this afternoon with the first-year coach who has lit up the Wyoming football program.
And Christensen couldn’t be more excited.
“ESPN is in every TV set in the country,” he told The Albuquerque Journal. “This is the first bowl game. We’re not contending with any other bowl game.
“Every football junkie in America that has Saturdays off will be excited to get up, have the honey-dos done and then sit down and watch college football.”
