A coach’s anguish over UA’s struggle

Mike Stoops is beating himself up, and you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to sense it. It is a pain far greater than kidney stones.

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It is the pain only a young coach, 40 games into his head coaching career, can describe. And yet Stoops can’t put it into words.

“There are no explanations and no excuses in this game,” he said Monday. “Everyone wants one, but there are no good ones.”

He said if he had any answers for the UA’s unexpected problems he would “be a millionaire.” He is so consumed by his club’s awkward, ineffective start he has forgotten he is indeed a millionaire. (His career earnings at Arizona will exceed $3 million by year’s end.) Stoops has not tapped into a network of trusted coaching associates, not his Kansas State mentor, Bill Snyder, nor his Rose Bowl coach at Iowa, Hayden Fry. Both men went through similar anguish, almost identical reconstruction projects, in their early coaching days.

“I haven’t talked to another coach all year,” Stoops said. “I don’t think you feel like talking to a whole lot of people.”

Stoops has not been a man to alibi; not in past years when his club lost on late-game fumbles to Washington State and Oregon, or when his quarterback kept getting knocked out.

“It’s not a pity party,” he reiterated Monday. So he keeps it inside.

A year ago, former Colorado State football coach Mike Lude stopped by Stoops’ McKale Center office and introduced himself. I’m no psychoanalyst, but it might have been good therapy had Stoops locked the door, shut off the phone and spent a few hours asking Lude how to deal with the anxieties that are eating at him.

“I told Mike that there are three guys in this town who have gone through the same things he’s going through,” said Lude, who later was athletic director at Auburn, Washington and Kent State. “I told him we were willing to talk.”

Lude, Jim Young and Larry Smith are retired Tucsonans who between them rebuilt once-woeful football programs at Colorado State, Purdue, Tulane, Army and, twice, Arizona. And that doesn’t count ex-UA head coaches Jim LaRue and Bob Weber, both of whom live here and follow the Wildcats from afar.

Instead, Stoops suffers in silence. He does not seek outside help, except for that from his brother, Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops.

It might behoove UA athletic director Jim Livengood to intercede and announce, very publicly, that his embattled football coach will henceforth meet with Lude, Smith and Young regularly. Perhaps they can bounce ideas off one another, maybe have a quick lunch, and put together four dynamic football minds to discover what Arizona is missing.

It is a wonderful resource that goes untapped.

In the mid-1990s, with Arizona’s offense struggling, Livengood instructed Dick Tomey to take consultation from Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil.

At Livengood’s direction, Tomey then hired the guru of all college football offensive coordinators, Homer Smith. Arizona soon went 12-1.

A year ago Monday, to bridge some midseason woes, Livengood and Stoops concocted and made public a novel idea that would allow former Wyoming and Houston head coach Dana Dimel to help Mike Canales operate Arizona’s offense.

Arizona rallied to win four of its final six games.

Lude became Colorado State’s head coach when he was 40. He inherited a team that had lost 16 consecutive games.

“I piled 10 more onto that streak, taking it to 26,” Lude says now.

“A year later we went 3-7. What’s that, 3-and-17? I was a young guy and everyone was biting at me. Oh, how the Lord works in mysterious ways, because I survived it.”

Over the next three seasons, Lude coached the Rams to 5-6, 4-6 and 7-3 records. It wasn’t poetry and nobody went to a bowl game. But it was a long way from 0-26.

A few years later, as the athletic director at Kent State, Lude hired an unknown young coach, Don James, and ultimately, when they were together at Washington, helped one another to five Rose Bowls and a co-national championship. At Auburn from 1992-94, Lude hired another young coach, Terry Bowden, who went 20-1-1 before Lude retired.

Lude is a man whose opinions and insights remain the gold standard in college football. What would he tell Stoops?

“I would say to Mike: ‘Don’t lose confidence in yourself or your system; trust in what got you this far,’” he said. “Don’t let all of the outside chatter get to you.

“Ultimately, Mike will get better results when he recruits better players, but until then, he must teach well, practice effectively and don’t let anyone, his players or his staff, see that he’s feeling pressure.”

Pressure?

On Saturday, Arizona plays at USC. As Stoops says and Lude knows, don’t expect any pity.