Inside The Huskies

Breckterfield Latest New UW Assistant Coach Given National Accolades

He shows up fairly high on a ranking of his peers across the college landscape.
Dan Raley|
Breckterfield Latest New UW Assistant Coach Given National Accolades
Breckterfield Latest New UW Assistant Coach Given National Accolades

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Washington Huskies

It might carry about as much importance as a grocery or laundry list because it doesn't last long before it gets wadded up and tossed aside.

However, the offseason ranking of college football coaches by position area is a conversation starter during this summer down time, even more so if more than one of your staffers gets singled out.

Such is the case for the University of Washington's Inoke Breckterfield, who turns up 26th on Big Game Boomers' listing of top 50 defensive-line coaches, released on Monday. 

The man known as Coach Nokes already came with a built-in reputation when he arrived in Seattle to join Kalen DeBoer's staff — for having coached the great Aaron Donald at Pittsburgh. 

Maybe more than any other new UW assistant coach, Breckterfield is a known quantity throughout the college football landscape after having worked at Wisconsin, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Weber State, Montana and Pitt.

He is a dour, demanding person with little patience for anything but extra effort and he's now entrusted with fixing a porous Husky D-line.

In the bigger picture, Breckterfield is one of six new Husky assistant coaches who have drawn attention to themselves through these Big Game Boomer comparisons as they set some roots in the Northwest.


UW wide-receivers coach JaMarcus Shephard (6th nationally) clearly has a following, as does Ryan Grubb as a quarterback's coach (7th) and offensive coordinator offensive coordinator (23rd).

Add to them Husky running-backs coach Lee Marks (46th) and UW special-teams coach Eric Schmidt (50th).

As good as they might be, Chuck Morrell and William Inge would have trouble making a national defensive-coordinators ranking because they share the job. Maybe they can make breakthroughs as safety and linebacker coaches.

Nick Sheridan, the new UW tight-ends coach, similarly won't show up on a list because he has new duties and his previous assignment did not end well. He was Indiana's offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach who got fired. 

That leaves holdover offensive-line coach Scott Huff and new defensive-backs coach Juice Brown to prove themselves.

Overall, it's a veteran crew, contrary to Jimmy Lake's staff which had a lot of young coaches interspersed or coordinators getting old in the tooth or fired.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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