Paopao Shows You Can Come Home Again to the UW

He spent nine seasons with the Huskies before Jimmy Lake didn't retain him.

Jordan Paopao launched his coaching career and worked just short of a decade for the University of Washington football staff, first as a graduate assistant for Steve Sarkisian and then as the tight-ends coach for both Sarkisian and Chris Petersen.

Yet at the end of the 2019 season, Jimmy Lake took over as the Husky coach and fired Paopao along with offensive coordinator Bush Hamdan while keeping the rest of Petersen's staff intact.

Paopao, of course, has had the last laugh for that abrupt career interruption -- four-plus years later, he's working at the UW and Lake is not.

However, the job the second time around in Montlake for Jedd Fisch's staff has never been more demanding. Whereas he previously refined the talents of NFL-bound tight ends in Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Will Dissly, Drew Sample and Cade Otton, with many of them overlapping, Paopao finds himself trying to rebuild a Husky position group that consists of senior Quentin Moore and a bunch of guys who haven't played much or at all.

Considering the inexperience at hand, Paopao acknowledges the UW may have to find some help in the transfer portal, which reopens on Monday, while it waits for others such as sophomore Ryan Otton and freshmen Decker DeGraaf and Charlie Crowell to become comfortable and consistent as Husky tight ends.

"I do think we're going to look at the portal and and see who the guys who are available or guys who are going to jump in there," Paopao said on Saturday. "Ultimately fit is going to be most important."

For now, the Huskies will rely on the 6-foot-4, 255-pound Moore, who's appeared in 28 games and started four outings over three seasons in Seattle. He's known largely as a solid blocker who now needs to show he can catch the ball with regularity. Moore has 7 career catches for 71 yards and a 2-yard touchdown pass against Oregon that decided the Pac-12 championship game against Oregon.

Much more filled out this spring, the 6-foot-6, 243-pound Otton, Cade's younger brother, has played in just two UW games while dealing with assorted injuries, including pulling a hamstring muscle in his first Husky practice in 2022.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pound DeGraaf enrolled early and is participating in spring ball, while Crowell will arrive for fall camp. Others in the mix are walk-ons in 6-foot-4, 217-pound senior Owen Coutts, recently converted from wide receiver, and 6-foot-3, 220-pound junior Wilson Schwartz, who returned to the Huskies after sitting out the past two seasons. One player no longer involved is 6-foot-6, 244-pound sophomore John Frazier, who traded numbers from 91 to 89 after Fisch complained he was wearing a non-tight end jersey. Frazier left the team over the weekend.

All of this means Paopao has to do one of his better coaching jobs to get the Huskies up to speed at tight end.

"I do think when you don't have as much veteran experience, so to speak, I think it's super important for young guys, new guys, to get reps, and to really be able to culminate some experience," he said.

In particular, Coutts is a tall guy who runs well and presents an intriguing addition to a position group that needs reinforcements. He caught a difficult end-zone pass on Saturday that brought offensive player streaming on to the field to celebrate with him.

"Owen, for a big body and his natural ball-catching ability is too much matched for him not to be able to have an opportunity to showcase his skill set in what he can do to in terms of being a red-zone target and threat with his ability to run," Paopao said.

Once he wasn't retained by Lake, Paopao spent two years as the UNLV tight-ends coach while the UW football program bottomed out before he joined Fisch in the same role for the past two seasons at Arizona.

"It's just an incredible place," Paopao said. "It means so much to my family, all the guys I've been super fortunate to coach. It's unbelievable to be back."

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