SEATTLE – They say after the last football game, Keith Gilbertson looked like a man desperately in need of some happiness.
Maybe he can find it now.
Maybe with the pressure off, he can go out and have some fun these last three weeks of the football season.
Lord knows, he deserves it.
This was supposed to be his dream job. Some dream job.
It didn’t have to be this way. He didn’t have to take this job. He could have said no when they asked him to step up and replace the fired Rick Neuheisel as coach of the Washington Huskies.
That was in August of 2003, not long before the season was to begin.
Gilbertson accepted it, though, because he felt a sense of loyalty to the university.
He loves the place, you know, loves it even though he didn’t go to school there. Loves it like most of us love our old high schools.
Besides, he said, football coaches are always telling their players to “step up, take a shot and go like hell.”
So that’s what he did. He took one for the UW.
He had grown up watching the Huskies play, had sat in the cheap seats in the end zone cheering on his heroes.
“(Husky football) has been part of my family for three or four generations,” he said.
That’s what makes this divorce so hard. It’ll be like leaving part of his family behind. The Husky family. The coaches and friends he’s made over the years.
He won’t be able to walk down that tunnel into a packed stadium on a sunny autumn afternoon. To hear the crowd explode as the Huskies come running onto the field. To feel the electricity in the air.
That feel hasn’t been there for the last year or so. And that’s why Keith Gilbertson won’t be coaching the Huskies anymore after the Apple Cup game against Washington State later this month.
He could be angry about it. Could be but says he isn’t.
He says he wants what is best for the university. And apparently what athletic director Todd Turner and he mutually agreed was best was for Gilbertson to step down as head coach at the end of the season. So Gilbertson did “what I felt was the right thing to do.” He resigned – before he was forced to resign.
You knew this was coming. A 1-7 season doesn’t sit well with Husky fans. Not after a 6-6 record with no bowl game the year before.
He took over a program that was mired in a mess.
His dream job? Yes, he said, it could have been. But not the way he got it. Not with a dark cloud hanging over the program. Not with investigations looming. Not with distractions that seemed to be around the program on a daily basis a year ago. Not with rumor and gossip about whether he was fit to be the guy to lead the Huskies back to the kind of glory years they had when Don James was the coach and Gilbertson was his offensive coordinator.
“The way I got this job … was not a dream job situation,” he said at a press conference Monday afternoon.
No, it was more like a nightmare.
He deserved better.
He had given a lot to this place. Had served the Huskies as a graduate assistant. Had coached the offensive line and then been the offensive coordinator for the 1991 national championship team. Then had returned as assistant head coach to Neuheisel in 1999.
Then came 2003 and the ugliness that followed.
And Gilbertson stepped up and did the UW a favor by taking the head job. “While I was not here when he accepted the head coaching position, I know this has been a difficult two-year tenure for him,” Turner said.
No kidding. And this is the thanks he gets.
I don’t know if Gilbertson could have resurrected the program or not. But two years isn’t enough time for any coach, especially with the kind of talent he inherited. The players simply weren’t very good, and even Vince Lombardi, genius that he was, needed good players to win.
“Lombardi would have had a tough time with this (situation),” said Khalif Barnes, the best lineman on the team who has missed the last three games with a broken wrist.
Gilbertson is a football coach, first and foremost. That’s what he loves to do – teach kids how to play the game. And if he can look them in the eye while he’s showing them how to block and tackle, all the better.
If he could just go out every day and work with players, he’d be the happiest man in the world.
It’s the other stuff that he isn’t so keen on.
Some guys crave the spotlight, like to see reporters scribbling down their every word, enjoy schmoozing with the alums. Gilbertson can do all of that, and he can be very good at it. But it’s not his favorite thing.
Today, though, it’s a big part of a college coach’s job. He’s got to deal with the media every day, answer a lot of the same tired questions every day.
I don’t know how coaches do it. I’d be inclined to tell some reporters to take a long walk off a short pier.
Gilbertson, who has a wry sense of humor, joked about the “precious time” he spends with the media at his press conference Monday. I think he truly does enjoy some of it, but the incessant day-after-day-after-day … that gets old.
That’s one thing that’s changed since he first got into coaching more than three decades ago. Another is the vast amount of information that’s out there via the internet and the radio talk shows. And much of that information is hearsay.
He recalled that when he was head coach at California there was a story circulating that he played golf every Friday before a Saturday game. “That’s B.S.,” he said. “I never did it, not one time. That kind of stuff is hard to control.”
And today if some unflattering gossip is out there about a coach, it might impact a kid’s decision to go play for that coach.
All of this plus the losing had to be grinding away at Gilbertson. That’s not to even mention his bad hip that’ll have to be replaced after the season.
My guess is that he’ll coach again, maybe as an offensive coordinator, which he is very good at, and it could be either in college or the NFL. What he needs is to get back to doing what he’s best at – coaching. Teaching players on a one-on-one basis how to get better.
Forget all the frills, the limelight and just let him coach.
I remember a day back in the late 1980s. I was in Pullman to do a story on Cougar head coach Dennis Erickson. That afternoon, we went to a bar called the Sports Page for a beer after practice. The head coach at Idaho, eight miles up the road, also joined us.
Within minutes, Erickson and the Vandal coach were scribbling plays on a napkin.
The Vandal boss, of course, was Gilbertson, an old friend of Erickson’s from their Snohomish County days.
I remembered that scene when Gilbertson said Monday “the best part of my day is when I go down that tunnel to practice.”
He has 12 practices left with the Huskies.
He intends to enjoy each and every one of them.
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