Kevin Sumlin was a 39-year-old co-offensive coordinator for No. 1 Oklahoma on the night the 12-0 Sooners played Kansas State for the 2003 Big 12 championship.
“I was going to get on a plane in Kansas City with Mike Stoops the next day” and become the offensive coordinator at Arizona, he says now.
But all of that fell through when the Sooners were stunned, losing 35-7. Sumlin chose to stay with OU and coach at the Sugar Bowl.
Not moving to Tucson 15 years ago was a career-turning decision for Arizona’s new head coach, who last week was paid a lump sum of about $10.5 million, basically severance pay, by Texas A&M.
Stoops hired New York Jets receivers coach Mike Canales to be Arizona’s offensive coordinator and although no one knew it then, Canales was doomed.
Arizona’s offense was missing a quarterback (and many other things) of Pac-12 skills on a roster that had eroded so thoroughly that Arizona scored its fewest points since 1967. After back-to-back 3-8 seasons, Canales became the scapegoat of a near-impossible situation.
He was replaced after a third year, 6-6, even though he had recruited a program-changing quarterback, Willie Tuitama. But it was Sonny Dykes, not Canales, who was on the scene as Arizona restored its program and regularly filled Arizona Stadium.
On Friday morning, sitting in Rich Rodriguez’s old office — one that had been scrubbed of any trace of the old coaching staff — Sumlin spoke not of limitations, as RichRod often did, but of possibilities.
“We’ve got an attractive situation here,” he said.
In short order, Sumlin has reconnected with dozens of former players who may have felt estranged from the Rodriguez group. On Friday night, Sumlin attended a celebration for Warner Smith, the late Desert Swarm lineman of the 1990s who died of ALS three weeks ago. Tedy Bruschi was there. So were Dan White, Rafell Jones, Rashee Johnson, Brant Boyer, Paul Stamer and lot of Wildcats rarely seen at Arizona Stadium any more.
Sumlin is no stranger to Tucson. Two summers ago, he brought his Texas A&M staff to Tucson to exchange offensive coaching ideas with Rodriguez and his staff, as is common in the business. He spent several days in Tucson on vacation. He ate breakfast at the Lowell-Stevens Football Facility.
More recently, Sumlin established a relationship with former UA coach Dick Tomey. While Tomey coached in the Polynesian All-Star game last week in Honolulu, Sumlin kept in contact, especially about re-establishing a Polynesian recruiting connection at Arizona.
Sumlin laughed, saying he hoped Tomey “was keeping notes” of those prospects he coached in Hawaii last week.
To that end, Sumlin is expected to announce the hiring of defensive line coach Iona Uiagalelei this week. After 18 years on the staff at Southern California’s Mt. San Antonio Junior College, Uiagalelei is known as something of a Godfather of Polynesian football in the Inland Empire and other SoCal precincts. He is connected to former UA quarterback George Malauulu, who operates the AIGA Foundation, which specializes in the development of Los Angeles-area Polynesian athletes. Sumlin and Malauulu also met last week.
Sumlin is putting in a foundation instead of getting ahead of himself. By that, I mean he has resisted the temptation to sit down and watch tapes of quarterback Khalil Tate.
“I don’t want any preconceived ideas about my guys,” he said. Sumlin prefers to wait until he transitions from the recruiting season to spring training camp before he evaluates returning personnel.
What he’ll see in spring of 2018 is far different from what Canales saw in the spring of 2004.
