The oldest man employed as a Pac-10 head football coach was Wazzu's Bill Doba. Hired at 62, fired at 67.
Frank Kush was 28 when Arizona State hired him to be the Sun Devil football coach in 1958. Twenty years later, he was a legend. Still is.
So what difference does it make that Washington's new coach, Steve Sarkisian, is 35?
There is precedent, good and bad.
Bad: In 1976, Oregon State hired the Sarkisian of the '70s, USC's Craig Fertig. That Trojan connection didn't help Fertig much; OSU didn't win more than three games in a season, and Fertig was fired when he was 38.
Good: The same year, 1976, UCLA hired defensive line assistant Terry Donahue. He was 32. The Bruins went to three Rose Bowls.
It's not the date-of-birth. It's the coming-of-age.
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Sometimes it takes a long time. Rich Brooks was hired as Oregon's head coach when he was 35. He finally won the conference when he was 53.
Sometimes it doesn't. Rick Neuheisel was 38 (he sometimes came off as 18) when he became Washington's head coach. The Huskies were in the Rose Bowl when Neuheisel was 39.
At the market last winter, Washington interviewed Texas Tech's Mike Leach and Fresno State's Pat Hill, whose combined age is 105 and whose cumulative victory total is 175. They hired Sarkisian anyway.
Given Washington's tradition and resources — the Huskies were the Oregon of the Pac-10 long before the Ducks discovered that green and yellow could be cool — it was the most daring hire of the college football off-season. Or maybe not.
"Steve comes from success," says Arizona coach Mike Stoops. "Virtually everywhere he's been, he learned from good people. His record as a Pac-10 offensive coordinator is pretty tough to beat."
Stoops and Sarkisian first crossed paths in Manhattan. It was December 1994, and it was Kansas, not New York.
Stoops was a 33-year-old defensive line coach at Kansas State. Sarkisian was a 20-year-old quarterback from California's El Camino Junior College who had two choices: KSU or BYU. A smart guy, Sarkisian chose to play at Quarterback U, where in 1996 he led the Cougars to a 14-1 record and, coincidentally, a Cotton Bowl victory over Stoops, who by then had been promoted to KSU's defensive coordinator.
Age was long ago rendered meaningless in college football. No ID required.
John Mackovic was a boy genius at Wake Forest, head coach at 34, turning a 1-10 program into an 8-4 Demon Deacon Bowl team at 35. By the time Mackovic was 51, Texas didn't think he was much of a genius and fired him. In 2003, two days before he turned 60, Arizona was sure of it. Fired again.
Maybe it's better to be younger. Dennis Erickson was more successful at 40, a first-year head coach at Wazzu, than he is at 61, a third-year coach at Arizona State.
In his first five games at Washington, given no break-in time against a schedule that included LSU, Notre Dame, USC and Stanford, Sarkisian looks not like a risk but more like a "war daddy," as he was called by USC standout lineman Jeff Byers.
The Huskies have a new energy, and you don't need a 55-inch HD screen to see it.
"I expect our sidelines to be electric," Sarkisian said on the day he was introduced to UW fans in January. On Monday, referring to the Arizona-UW game, he said he expected Husky Stadium to "be rocking."
After a calamitous 0-12 season, the Pac-10's sleeping giant has awakened with a most unlikely coach reworking college football's hiring guidelines.
At 35, Cal's Jeff Tedford was an assistant coach at Fresno State.
At 35, Stanford's Jim Harbaugh was an unpaid assistant at Western Kentucky.
At 35, Oregon's Chip Kelly was coaching guards and tackles at New Hampshire.
At 35, Sarkisian has shown that there is a difference between Washington's thirty-something football coaches.
Whereas Neuheisel came off as disingenuous and slick with a lot of unnecessary chatter, Sarkisian seems above the pettiness. Perhaps it comes from learning the hard way: Sarkisian's first attempt at college athletics, as a USC baseball player, failed; his modest Canadian Football League career ended after three seasons; and his first job in the adult world, in the software business in SoCal, fizzled when the company folded.
He grew up in a hurry.
A few weeks ago, Husky athletic director Scott Woodward told Seattle reporters that the football program lacked "braggadocio." And then the Huskies shocked USC.
The victory spoke for itself.
