Road to 1991 Perfection: Oh Brother, Mack Played for UW, Not Miami

The University of Washington and Miami football teams slugged it out for the 1991 national championship that entire season.

With no college football playoff system in place yet, each school received a piece of the pie when the Huskies topped the coach's poll and the Hurricanes received the writers poll No. 1 ranking. They were co-champions.

A few years earlier, Miami and the UW waged a spirited recruiting battle for the services of wide receiver Damon Mack, a highly regarded wide receiver from Gardena, California.

Mack had all sorts of intense in-house pressure pushing him to play in South Beach. His brother Troy let his feelings be known.

"My brother is, and has been, an avid Miami Hurricanes' fan forever," said Mack, who talks about his recruitment in the first video. "My brother was pushing me out the door to go there. Go, go, go."

Damon took a recruiting trip to Miami, where Jimmy Johnson was the football coach at the time. He was greeted by Michael Irvin, then a Hurricanes senior wide receiver.

Mack watched a parade and sat through a banquet that honored the Miami football team. It was all very persuasive.

He picked the Huskies.

Mack did so because it felt good to be part of the UW's re-emphasized pipeline to Los Angeles talent, after watching other highly regarded SoCal recruits such as Eugene Burkhalter, Corey Brown and Terrance Powe head north. He joined a recruiting class that included accomplished wide receivers Orlando McKay and Mario Bailey.

"It was just a better fit," Mack said. "My brother was really disappointed."

This is another in series of vignettes about the UW 1991 national championship team, supplementing the conversation for the pandemic-delayed season. We're in week 9, which brought a showdown on the road with USC and a homecoming for nearly half the roster.

Mack was one of nearly 40 Los Angeles-area players who were part of that '91 Washington football team, duly inspired to return home and take on the Trojans and they beat USC 14-3.

"We had to grind that thing out," he said. "It was a just a good, hard ebb-and-flow, back-and-forth game that we were able to pull out."

The center of attention that afternoon was fellow L.A. product Beno Bryant, who scored both Husky touchdowns on runs of 55 and 7 yards and rushed for 158 yards on 26 carries.

"Talk about a ball of energy," Mack said. "That guy kept the whole locker room laughing all the time. He was the jokester. That game you could see his focus. He wanted to perform at home. He wanted to perform in front of his people and his crowd, and he was locked in."

Mack, who works in the insurance industry, was a Husky reserve receiver during that high-water season before becoming a starter in 1992. He remembers catching his first career pass, a 13-yarder, earlier against Toledo from quarterback Mark Brunell, who was coming off knee surgery.

It was an obscure moment in a 48-0 rout, but an unforgettable memory for him.

"I just sort of blacked out from the ball being there and me getting up off the ground," he said. "It was, 'Oh, wow, my first catch,' and it was great. I remember it being special because Mark and I came in together, and he fought so hard to get back."

Mack came away from that season with a national championship ring, a lifelong connection to his Washington teammates — and never-ending grief from his Miami-loving brother.

"He is still adamant they would have beat us that year," said Mack, who shared some of his UW memories in this second video. "So we're always a house divided."

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