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Schmidt Is One of the Coaches Entrusted with Restoring Husky Toughness

He once was an All-America linebacker who won a national championship.
Dan Raley|
Schmidt Is One of the Coaches Entrusted with Restoring Husky Toughness
Schmidt Is One of the Coaches Entrusted with Restoring Husky Toughness

As people get better acquainted with the new University of Washington football staff, one of the prevailing themes about many of these guys is their flat-out toughness.

Last year's Huskies got hit in the mouth and didn't respond at times. That probably isn't going to happen again. Win or lose, UW players now understand they need to be hardened to the task at hand or get weeded out.

While Kalen DeBoer presents a calming, even-keel influence to UW football, his defensive assistants such as Chuck Morrell, William Inge, Inoke Breckterfield and Eric Schmidt drew everyone's rapt attention during spring practice with their overly serious approach. 

They spoke with a noticeable growl and could stare a hole through you. After a 4-8 season, players seemed to welcome this demanding style.

"You want to separate yourself?" Schmidt was overheard barking at one Husky in spring ball. "Play harder than everybody else."

The thing about the Schmidt and the aforementioned defensive coaches is each one was a highly successful player at different levels of college football. Hard-hitting defensive players. Captains. Award winners. 

At Iowa, Inge shared in handing the UW its worst bowl loss. At Oregon State, Breckterfield gave the Huskies fits as a defensive lineman and won the Morris Trophy.

A North Dakota native, Schmidt was a senior, a team captain and an All-America linebacker for the University of North Dakota's 2001 national championship team.

Schmidt has been entrusted with elevating the UW edge rushers and specials teams back to elite levels. There's no reason this shouldn't happen.

The new coach has been given plenty of resources to work with in pass rushers Zion Tupuola-Fetui and Bralen Trice coming off the corners, and return man Giles Jackson shooting up the middle of the field. 

ZTF was one of the nation's leading sack artists two years ago and Trice and Jackson collectively have touchdown runs of 72, 95 and 97 yards on the college level.

To be fair to Schmidt's edge-rusher coaching predecessor, the popular Ikaika Malloe, he didn't really have a chance to succeed as a coach last year once he lost his starters in ZTF and Ryan Bowman, both previous All-Pac-12 players, to season-ending injuries. 

It's Schmidt's turn to pick up the pieces and he's already received some coaching attention. Offering a vote confidence in his ability, Big Game Boomer, the prolific college football list-maker, recently named Schmidt as the 50th special-teams coach in his top 50 grouping.

Ready to prove himself, Schmidt comes to Seattle after coaching stops at North Dakota, Southern Illinois and Fresno State, where he worked with edge rushers, inside linebackers and defensive linemen.

This marks his first Power 5 assignment, a welcome coaching promotion and, even with realignment bringing plenty of confusion, a moment to pause and acknowledge.

"It's a special place," Schmidt said of the UW. "Just like anything else, as a player, as a coach, you want to work and work and work so you can get yourself to a place where the machinery is in place and they have the resources to be able to to win, like you have some advantages. We're really excited."

Schmidt and DeBoer coached together at Southern Illinois for four seasons, with the former leaving enough of an impression that DeBoer coaxed him first to join him at Fresno State, then at the UW. 

One was a North Dakota guy, the other from South Dakota. They shared similar coaching values that involve demanding a lot out of their players but doing it the right way. They hit it off as coaches so it was not unlikely that they would reunite. 

"Everybody has names that you have for certain positions if you’re ever going to get a job like this, and he called and I was ready to jump on board," Schmidt told the San Joaquin Valley Sun while at Fresno State. "I think if it wasn’t Kalen DeBoer for me, that was a huge selling point just to be able to go work for him."

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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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