Road to 1991 Perfection: National Title Chase Brought Close Friends Together

Dennis Erickson and Keith Gilbertson grew up together, coached football together and had to share a college national championship.

Dennis Erickson and Keith Gilbertson, a year apart, met for the first time in junior high school. One was from Everett, Washington, the other from nearby Snohomish. They were coaches' sons and became close friends.

After having success as players at Montana State and Central Washington, they turned to coaching careers and had a lot of success. They went off in different directions until the 1991 season pulled these guys into the same college football universe. 

Their teams, Miami and Washington, became national championship contenders. That year, their teams turned into powerful, unbeaten teams and wound up sharing the overall title, each capturing one of the major polls. They couldn't play each other and decide things once and for all because the Huskies were locked into the Rose Bowl and facing a Big Ten opponent.

There was no way to determine who was better. Not then. Not ever, even though former Husky quarterback Billy Joe Hobert says he still would be willing to gather a bunch of 50-year-olds from these teams together and get after it. 

"It would have been one of the greatest games in college football," Erickson mused the other day.

This is another in series of vignettes about the UW's 1991 national championship team, supplementing the conversation for the pandemic delayed and shortened season. We're in week 10 of this throwback series, where the Huskies traveled to Oregon State, looking to clinch a Rose Bowl berth and the then-Pac-10 title. They did, manhandling the Beavers 58-6.

Erickson, 73, was the head coach for Miami, Washington State, Wyoming, Oregon State, Arizona State, Idaho, the  San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks. 

Now retired, Erickson lives near Coeuer d'Alene, Idaho, where one of his neighbors and frequent golf partners is Gilbertson, 72, who served as the head coach for Washington, California and Idaho.

In 1991, Erickson coached the Hurricanes to their second national championship in three seasons. Gilbertson filled the role as offensive coordinator and architect of the Husky offense in helping bring the UW its only national title. 

That season, they watched each other's games on TV from their different time zones. They chatted by phone during the week when time permitted. They were respectful and complimentary of each other's teams, in particular their respective defenses, which were mirror images with their blazing speed. 

"Everybody was fast," Erickson said. "Washington, if I remember, was a lot faster at linebacker than they had been. Our linebackers were as good as anyone in the country. All four of them played in the NFL."

Erickson and Gilbertson each relied on the spread offense in 1991 to ring up a lot of points, sharing in similar philosophies for using one-back formations and flooding sides of the field with wide receivers. 

They later coached together for the Seahawks in 1996-98, with Gilbertson joining Erickson's staff as an offensive assistant. They would coach against each other in 1999-2002, when Erickson took over at Oregon State and Gilbertson returned to the UW as offensive coordinator for Rick Neuheisel's teams. 

As for sharing the 1991 national championship, these two men never really addressed it. Yet as competitive as they were, both guys quietly felt their teams would have won. (We address that in a future episode near the end of this throwback series.) Gilbertson is shown in the second video below discussing the Huskies' intensity to be great that season.

In 150 years of college football, which has morphed from voting in poll champions to the two-team BCS playoff to the four-team CFP, teams have shared the title 29 times, with up to four teams doing that all at once. 

After Miami and the UW tied in 1991, unbeatens Michigan and Nebraska each was recognized as the national champion six years later and once-beatens USC and LSU shared the title in 2003.

The Hurricanes and Huskies, however, got everyone talking about doing something different.

"I think we had a lot of people in college football thinking, 'Hey, maybe we should have a playoff,' " Erickson said of the '91 stalemate. "That particular game itself, that particular year, it started a thought. To me it would have been really big."

 

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