Rich Ellerson, now the head coach at Army, is a product of Salpointe Catholic High School and coached Arizona's Desert Swarm defense in the 1990s.
Longtime Arizona defensive coordinator Rich Ellerson will be inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame on Oct. 21 at the DoubleTree Hotel as part of the Class of 2018. (Tickets for the banquet are available at 520-244-8907).
Ellerson, 64, is out of coaching; he retired last year. The Salpointe Catholic grad, an all-city defensive player in 1972, is usually the man given credit for the defensive scheme that greatly helped Arizona’s Desert Swarm defenses of 1992-94 burst onto the national scene.
“The scheme we used was actually an amalgam of a lot of ideas,” he said at the hall’s press conference last week.
It might be traced to Ellerson’s defensive coordinator Don Matthews of the Canadian Football League’s BC Lions in the mid-80s. Matthews coached five Grey Cup champions and is a CFL legend.
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Matthews got his defensive ideas, in part, from former Oregon State “Great Pumpkin” head coach Dee Andros when Andros was coaching at Idaho and Matthews played for the Vandals.
After Ellerson worked with Matthews and was hired at his alma mater, Hawaii, by Dick Tomey, Ellerson said “we worked out the kinks” of the Desert Swarm’s unique double-eagle flex scheme. It required a lot of planning; the CFL deploys 12 players; Ellerson diagrammed the new defense with 11.
At Hawaii, he blended his ideas with those of Larry Mac Duff, who became the UA’s defensive coordinator, one of the best in Pac-10 history.
So, after about 20 years and a lot of trial and error, Tomey, Mac Duff and Ellerson — blessed with defensive All-Americans Tedy Bruschi, Sean Harris, Tony Bouie and Rob Waldrop — put Desert Swarm on the field.
“Dick and Larry had the courage to implement this new defense,” said Ellerson. “It was a very special thing.”
