Where Jimmy Lake Ranks Among his Power 5 Peers and Why

Eighteen months into the job at the University of Washington, Jimmy Lake has become the Area 51 of Power 5 football coaches.

Works behind closed doors. Maintains top-secret stuff. Probably knows a little more than most about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

OK, CBS Sports just ranked him No. 51 — which seems like a distant orbit — among the 65 coaches who are holding down the biggest jobs across the college game,

While that may sound like an unfavorable position when compared to most of his peers, Lake has coached in exactly four games as a head coach.

He clearly still needs to earn his spurs.

Offer a bigger sample size.

So what do we really know about this Lake guy after a year and a half?

He still holds the unique position of being fired as part of Keith Gilbertson's Husky coaching staff in 2004 and returning exactly 10 years later in the same role as Chris Petersen's defensive-backs coach at the UW, and five years after that becoming Petersen's coaching replacement.

In a decade and a half, Lake went from coaching reject to supposed football savior at the same school.

Find another coach who's done that — usually it's the other way around.

Lake can be alternately charming and impatient, depending on whether or not you ask him why someone didn't show up for practice and for what reason.

Lake was hailed as the right guy at the right time to replace the suddenly disinterested Petersen.

Yet it didn't take long for his eager-to-pounce critics to emerge and pan his offensive attack for being null and void, his coordinators for not being innovative enough and his first hand-picked recruiting class for being low on rankings and bodies.

In response, Lake will tell you he is running a pro-style offense straight out of the NFL that is being used by a majority of Pac-12 schools.

For coordinators, he resurrected both John Donovan and Bob Gregory, who were eased out in those jobs elsewhere. Gregory, the former Cal defensive coordinator a long time ago, was promoted so the Huskies wouldn't have to change their defensive schemes to suit some new guy coming in.

As for Donovan?

He brought the latest NFL knowledge with him to Seattle. Whether that computes to offensive success to satisfy the hardened Husky peanut gallery is unclear, but Donovan appears to be a noticeable upgrade over Petersen's final OC, Bush Hamdan.

As for that sparse recruiting class, it came with a 5-star quarterback. Some coaches would tell you that a player at that position of that magnitude is enough to make an entire class memorable and all of the other rankings moot.

Lake, who signed just 15 guys, then went out and used scholarships on transfers from Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Michigan and Colorado State, doing some innovative recruiting that currently doesn't get graded.

He remains a demanding, high-energy guy who likes to pipe music through his entire practices for energy purposes and doesn't want to hear you question his artist selection.

What's wrong with the Spinners?

Lake has gone to great lengths to try and instill a tougher vibe among his players. They're not Our Kind of Guys anymore, the Petersen trademark, which the fan-base naysayers took to mean as boys scouts.

The Husky coach is a minute detail guy, able to talk specifics about anyone on the roster, but he's more than willing to fire off some unrepeatable language just to be heard if things aren't going well.

Lake is a determined motivator, able to pull his troops out of a 21-0 halftime funk against Utah and lead them to a 24-21 comeback victory, one of the biggest turnarounds in program annals.

You get the impression that when he played defensive back at Eastern Washington University, he was one of those guys who absolutely wanted to take your head off and he wouldn't do well with today's targeting penalties.

From a media standpoint, Lake sometimes goes a little too far in withholding pertinent information, but that's what the government guys do down in Nevada with all those parked UFOs.

Yet at the same time, he was as candid as any coach could be before this most recent month of spring football practices in an off-the-record session with reporters with the premise, of course, that none of it left the room.

As he relaunches his team this next fall, Lake will find himself under considerable pressure to make something happen in a big way in his second season. It's his doing.

Unlike all Husky coaches before him who visited Ann Arbor, and that includes Don James, Lake will go into Michigan with people expecting him to win there, not hoping he does.

He has 17 starters available after it initially was 20 before transfers and an injury thinned the ranks some. He has a half-dozen serious honors candidates who could translate into high NFL draft picks.

All-Americans and first-rounders.

He has the biggest and most experienced Husky offensive line ever.

Speed and more speed.

He holds up a favorable schedule, one that brings Pac-12 contenders Oregon and Arizona State to Seattle and doesn't include USC or Utah.

Lake's pressing responsibility will be to bring it altogether.

At this point, he probably could care less where anyone ranks him or what they think of him.

There's nothing classified about that information either.

You can access the bottom half of the CBS Sports ranking of the Power 5 coaches here and the upper half here.

Pac-12 Coaches/CBS Ranking

14) Kyle Whittingham, Utah

16) Mario Cristobal, Oregon

21) Herm Edwards, Arizona State

24) David Shaw, Stanford

38) Justin Wilcox, California

39) Chip Kelly, UCLA

48) Clay Helton, USC

51) Jimmy Lake, Washington

54) Karl Dorrell, Colorado

56) Jonathan Smith, Oregon State

58) Nick Rossovich, WSU

64) Jedd Fisch, Arizona

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