One of college football’s great travelers is the toast of his newest town.
Everett native Dennis Erickson is 6-0 in his first season as the head coach at Arizona State, adding to a resume filled with wins and baggage.
Few college coaches can elicit so much emotion on both ends of the spectrum as Erickson, who is now in his ninth stop as a head coach in college and pro football. He has held jobs at Idaho, Wyoming, Washington State, Miami, the Seattle Seahawks, Oregon State, the San Francisco 49ers, Idaho again, and now Arizona State. Along the way Erickson has made plenty of friends — and enemies.
Depending on who you ask, Erickson can be viewed as: A coach taking advantage of opportunities, or a man with no loyalties who will ditch a school and his players for the next gig; a guy with a knack for finding talent, or a guy who recruits criminals; a guy who lets his kids play, or a guy who lets them play dirty.
The one thing that is certain about Erickson, however, is that he wins. He has a 154-65-1 career record in college football and a pair of national titles (both at Miami). Erickson, a 1965 graduate of Everett High School, has been named the Pacific-10 Conference Coach of the Year twice — while at Washington State in 1988 and Oregon State in 2000, when he was also named the Sporting News’ national Coach of the Year.
When he took over at Oregon State in 1999, the Beavers had not had a winning season since 1970. They were 7-5 that year, and went 11-1 the following season with a Fiesta Bowl blowout win over Notre Dame.
Washington offensive coordinator Tim Lappano has seen Erickson work first-hand for years. Erickson gave Lappano his first college coaching job while at Idaho, and Lappano also worked under Erickson at Wyoming, Washington State, Oregon State, and both NFL stops.
“He’s got an uncanny ability to get the most out of his players,” Lappano said. “Players play for him, and he gets them to believe that they can win, and he gets them to believe that they can win right now. At Oregon State, I think it was even tougher than at Arizona State. At Oregon State, he got some lesser talent guys to step up and really believe they can win, and you start winning a couple of games, then you start playing better than you are.”
Erickson’s teams have long been criticized for dirty play, and this year’s Sun Devils are second in the conference with 73 penalty yards per game.
“They take a lot of chances and they’re aggressive,” said Washington receiver Anthony Russo, who was trying to pay a compliment to the ASU defense, but couldn’t help pointing out one of their flaws. “That’s an Erickson-type team, aggressive. But a lot of penalties, too.”
Arizona State linebacker Robert James said Erickson doesn’t like his players getting flagged, and certainly doesn’t encourage dirty play, but that he does let them enjoy the game.
“He lets us get excited, he lets us play our game,” said James, who leads the Pac-10 with 59 tackles. “He lets us get out there and have fun and get excited, but at the same time he doesn’t like the penalties.”
As an example, James pointed to a play in last week’s game against Washington State. After cornerback Justin Tyron was flagged for taunting during an interception return for a touchdown, Erickson had words with his player on the sideline.
“When Tyron ran in the interception, he got on him about that, but he wasn’t all in his face,” James said.
Erickson didn’t seem overly concerned with the 61 penalty yards his team had last week, but wasn’t happy with Tyron’s taunting.
“We had six or seven (actually eight),” he said. “I just don’t see that as a problem. The one I was upset with was the unsportsmanlike penalty that we had, which, he knows it and I know it, and I don’t think you’ll see it again. Sometimes you get excited in games, and that should never happen, but sometimes that happens. You’re playing on the road, you’re catching a little flak there, and he makes a play, and he’s pretty excited about it. But it’s inexcusable because it hurt our team.”
Erickson’s supporters would laud him for finding talent where others had missed it, while his critics would say he brings in undesirable characters from the junior college ranks. Either way you look at it, he does have an eye for talent.
“He gets good players,” Washington coach Tyrone Willingham said. “That is the biggest thing. I think that helps. And he is a good coach. I don’t want to minimize that, but even the best of coaches with bad players struggle.”
And once he gets that talent, Erickson is known for getting it to perform. Everywhere he goes, players have talked about Erickson making players believe in themselves. His stop in Tempe is no different.
“He’s a good coach,” James said. “He expects nothing but the best. You play for somebody like that, you want to become a good player.”
This year’s Arizona State team has been good and resilient. The Sun Devils trailed both Colorado and Oregon State by double digits before coming back to win big. Against Washington State they had to battle the entire way to escape with a win in Pullman. Erickson says that is only partially the coaches’ doing.
“You try to set the tone as a coaching staff, try to instill confidence that they’re doing the right thing and that we’re doing the right thing, but then you’ve got to have some good things happen with that resiliency,” he said. “And we’ve been fortunate enough to have that happen. We’ve got awfully good seniors that have been successful that are pretty darn good leaders for us, and that helps.”
Of course the cynics now will ask the question, where to next, Dennis? After making a celebrated return to Idaho last season, Erickson upset the Vandals faithful by taking the Arizona State job after only one season. He also left Wyoming after only one season early in his career to take the Washington State job.
Those who know him, however, say that’s just Erickson chasing his dreams.
“I don’t think he wanted to end his career at Idaho, I really don’t,” Lappano said. “He has had so much success in college and I really think he feels like he can win another national championship at Arizona State… He obviously hurt a lot of people at Idaho. He gets in trouble when he says, ‘This is it.’ Then a job like Arizona State or something comes open, that’s just him. It’s a challenge and he wants to go do it. I know they were disappointed at Idaho, but he’s a competitor, and I guarantee it wasn’t for the money, it was for the challenge, and he thinks he can win a championship there.”
Who knows, maybe Erickson will win it all at Arizona State, or maybe he’ll move on to another challenge. Either way, he’ll be sure to make friends and enemies, and win plenty of games along the way.
Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on University of Washington Sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com/huskiesblog.
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