Lake Promised to Follow the Recipe, Yet He's Burned a Few Dishes
Thanksgiving had just passed, as had a 2019 Apple Cup victory, but Jimmy Lake was still in the proverbial kitchen cleaning up when he uttered what would become a much-repeated proclamation.
Promoted to replace the suddenly retired Chris Petersen as University of Washington football coach, Lake drew a few easy laughs at a hastily called news conference at Husky Stadium to announce all of these abrupt changes when he came up with a cooking-based metaphor for success.
"I know the recipe, I've seen the recipe and I'm going to copy the recipe."
Well, 22 months, nine Husky games and one global pandemic later, Lake has burned more than a couple of dishes, pulling them out of the oven smoking and charred.
He's prompted an overly impatient section of the UW fan base to repeatedly push back from the table and clamor for all new ingredients, in particular an offensive coordinator it might find suitable.
His most hard-core critics even have taken it upon themselves to throw out Lake replacement names, with Cincinnati's Luke Fickell, the American Athletic Conference reclamation project from Ohio State, the most frequent heard.
Nine games into the Lake era.
Fickle and Fickell.
In his most famous opening movie scene, Clint Eastwood got off easier than this.
The transition from one Husky football coach to the other has brought a number of unforeseen obstacles, with Lake's first season delayed by a surging COVID-19 health crisis and abruptly ended by a team outbreak. He's had to deal with his defensive coordinator leaving for Texas, multiple NFL opt-outs, plenty of portal transfers, including kicker Tim Horn last week, and a spate of injuries or illnesses involving headline players.
As Lake used the bye week to reflect on a laggard second campaign, the Huskies sit at 2-3 — their worst start to a season in more than a decade, matching Steve Sarkisian's five-game sample in 2010 to begin his second year as the man in charge of UW football.
With Petersen abruptly resigning, Lake appeared to be a natural successor, someone entrenched in the program eagerly ready for a promotion and certainly well-positioned to minimize the distractions that normally would come with a transfer of power.
Yet a Lake background check showed an interesting blemish on his resume to consider. He was fired once before by the UW in 2004, as part of Keith Gilbertson's coaching staff that was responsible for a disastrous 1-10 season that helped send Husky football tumbling into its darkest abyss. And now, 15 years later, he was being hailed as a supposed program savior.
Which will it be: Coaching redemption from the earliest days of his career or a repeat Montlake dismissal stymieing his aspirations?
Lake's critics have not been kind at all nor patient with his moves or perceived lack of action. They've assailed his two recruiting classes as feeble, with them falling several notches below Petersen's annual grades. The replacement coach has had more decommitments (3) in six months than his predecessor dealt with in six years.
Detractors have stamped his coordinator coaching hires as unimaginative reaches, with John Donovan and Bob Gregory jettisoned from their previous offensive and defensive leadership positions at Penn State and California, respectively. These two appeared to be embraced in their roles by the UW basically because they were available and relatively inexpensive.
A season-opening 13-7 upset at the hands of an FCS Montana team did nothing but ratchet up the criticism of Lake to a disturbing level. His team didn't play physical on either line that day against the lower-division school, and people assumed rough stuff would be part of this coach's trademark.
The question surfaced immediately: Was Lake in over his head as a head coach and much better served as a defensive coordinator and/or defensive-backs groomer? Was he another Jim Lambright, a good idea at the outset but someone who wouldn't last long as the boss?
It's not like Lake didn't have ample personnel to work with when he took over from Petersen. His current team initially boasted 20 of 22 returning starters before five wide receivers abandoned the program, including a pair of first-teamers, who were either displeased with Donovan's run-first offense or their limited playing time, and two back-up quarterbacks, including touted freshman Ethan Garbers to UCLA, who headed elsewhere for similar reasons.
Lake's Huskies were deeply wounded by the springtime loss of playmaking All-Pac-12 edge rusher Zion Tupuola-Fetui to an Achilles tendon rupture, ensuing surgery and concentrated rehabilitation, though ZTF might be close to coming back, possibly as soon as Saturday against UCLA.
One set of familiar initials battling against another.
As the bye week served its purpose by enabling Husky coaches to get after loose ends and forget what just happened, Lake collectively sent all of his available assistants out on the road to recruit new talent for the first time, something the pandemic previously prevented. Typical of the way things have gone for him, he wasn't able to utilize everyone on his staff.
Tight-ends coach Derham Cato was looking down at his play sheet or some such similar paperwork during last weekend's Oregon State game when he was blindsided and knocked down on the sideline during a punt play. Cato ended up in the Corvallis hospital with some sort of serious leg injury and he's restricted from traveling.
Nearly two full years ago, Lake had no idea of the roadblocks and obstacles he would encounter as the next Husky football coach, seemingly coming at him all at once and from all directions. He had promised that he was equipped to handle whatever came his way.
"I'm a very aggressive, attack-mode personality," he said during that upbeat Husky program takeover in the news conference in the James Center. "So now here we go, I'm the head football coach."
With the fan base so vociferous after his collective 5-4 program start, Lake has to wonder how long he can hang on to this overly demanding job, and whether it ultimately will reward and glamorize him or torture and discard him.
Certainly Lake must be flipping through those recipe cards that were left behind by his well-accomplished predecessor, looking for something, anything, that tastes good again.
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