Adam Jude - 100 Things Washington Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die

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Foreword by Damon Huard

There was no doubt about it: I was always going to be a Husky. I never wanted to be anything else. The Don James Era was in full effect when I was growing up in Puyallup, Washington. I was 11 years old when the Huskies went down to Miami and shocked the Oklahoma Sooners in the 1985 Orange Bowl. It was a fun time to be a young Huskies fan.

As I got older, I went to summer camps at U-Dub in junior high and in high school I went to Washington games with fellow Puyallup Vikings Billy Joe Hobert, Tom Gallagher, and Joe Kralik. We all dreamed of one day wearing the purple and gold. Those three guys signed and had solid careers with the Huskies, and I was very fortunate and blessed to get that opportunity from Don James, too.

I was the scout team quarterback on the 1991 national championship team. That Husky defense was the best Ive ever seen. They didnt care that I had that little red (no-contact) jersey on. They welcomed me to college football the only way they knew how. They hit me; they hit me hard. They let me know who was boss.

But it was awesome practicing against those guys every single day. Going up against Steve Emtman, Donald Jones, Jaime Fields, Dave Hoffmann, Chico Fraley, Tommie Smith, and Dana Hall certainly helped me in my development as a college quarterback. Those names just roll off the tongue because they were all such great players, and it was such a great team.

And then you just think about that offensive line and those two tackles, Lincoln Kennedy and Siupeli Malamala. I mean, those guys were monsters. And then you look at Beno Bryant, Jay Barry, and Napoleon Kaufman running behind them, and Mario Bailey making plays out wide. The competitive fire and spirit of Billy Joe Hobert that year has been underappreciated through the years. It was a tight team, a tight unit.

We had an amazing freshman class in 1991, too. We told ourselves, You know, were going to go 600 here. Were not going to lose a game. Thats honestly how it felt in my mind.

Playing at U-Dub was an incredible experience for me. Certainly, we had some highs and some lows as a program after the 91 season, but going through some of those trials and tribulations taught me so much and helped me survive for more than a decade in the National Football League.

Since 2010 I have joined Bob Rondeau as the color analyst for gameday broadcasts and in 2013 I returned to the program as director of external relations after being a major gifts officer during the stadium campaign from 2010 to 2013. Its a fun time to be a Husky again. Just as Don James won the right way three decades ago, Chris Petersen is doing it the right way here again. Inside the program theres an incredible sense of accountability. You can feel it. You feel a great sense of obligation and opportunity to do your job and do it wellwhether youre a player, whether youre an administrator, whether youre an equipment guy. The head coach has set the standard. This is how to do it. Your role is to follow . And you dont want to let that coach down. It was that way with Coach James, and its that way again with Coach Petersen.

There is no doubt about it. The Huskies are back on the map, and I am honored and excited to be part of the program once again.

Damon Huard

1. The Dawgfather

After a restless nights sleep, Don James awoke at 6:30 am on January 2, 1992 in a 14 th -floor suite at the Anaheim Marriott. It had been just 12 hours since James Washington Huskies completed a perfect season with a thorough dismantling of the Michigan Wolverines in the Rose Bowl, and yet the coach and his wife, Carol, spent much of that night and early morning anxiously awaiting results from the final tabulation of the college football coaches poll.

There was reason to fret: the Miami Hurricanes, who also completed a 120 season on New Years Day, had already been declared the national champion in a vote of media members for the Associated Press poll. (It was the closest vote in the history of the wire service poll with Miami receiving 1,472 votes to claim No. 1; the Huskies received 1,468 points to finish No. 2.) As dawn approached on January 2, results from the CNN/ USA TODAY coaches poll had yet to be announced, and James believed that the delay was a bad omen for Washington. We didnt get it, he said to Carol. Nobodys got to nerve to call and give us the news.

Finally, at 6:41 am the phone rang. It was Bob Roller, an advertising executive representing the coaches poll, and he had good news. Washington, he told James, was No. 1 in the coaches pollthe Huskies were national champions.

James cried at the press conference later that morning. Its just a great day in the life of a football coach, he said. Im emotional nowIts so difficult to express the feelings I have for these kids. For them to not get a piece of this would have been a tragedy.

The Huskies perfect 1991 season had a perfect ending for the most successful coach in UW history. He was affectionately nicknamed the Dawgfather and, to this day, more than two decades after his abrupt resignation as head coach, Don James remains synonymous with the dominance that the Huskies had when they reigned over the Pacific-10 Conference for much of his 18 years as head coach. When all is said and done, Don James has no peers, said Don Heinrich, the Huskies All-American quarterback from the 1950s who later became close with James. He has taken a school that plays in the rain and brought it to a national power and success in bowl games. It gives him the recognition of what kind of coach he is. He ranks with the great ones. I equate him with Bear Bryant, who, in my opinion, was the top banana.

Funny story about James and Bryant, Alabamas Hall of Fame coach. In the 1960s, when James was an assistant coach at Florida State and Bryant was in the middle of his reign at Alabama, they had a chance meeting at the Miami airport one day. We were walking at the Miami airport, and Don turned to me [and whispered], Carol, theres Bear Bryant, Carol recalled in a 2016 interview. And as we got closer to him, he saw us and said, Well, hi there Don James, how are you? And he shook his hand. And they talked for a couple minutes, and when he walked away he said, Carol, I think Ive arrived in coaching.

It was a seminal moment for the young coach. Some three decades later, James received the Bear Bryant Award as college footballs Coach of the Year after leading the Huskies to that perfect season in 1991. When he got that award, Carol said, it was really meaningful to Don. It meant a lot to him.

And yet James was not the first choice to become the UW coach in 1974. He wasnt the fourth choice either. The search to find the successor to longtime coach Jim Owens lasted nearly a month. It was December of 1974, and UW athletic department administrators considered about 120 candidates for the job. That list was whittled down to about a dozen serious candidates, a handful of whom were brought to Seattle for interviews.

California Bears coach Mike White and former Green Bay Packers coach Dan Devine were among those who turned down UWs initial offers. The 41-year-old James, who had just completed his fourth season in his first head coaching job at Kent State, was largely unknown in the Northwest. When Don and Carol arrived in Seattle to formally interview for the job on December 20, 1974, the marquee at Husky Stadium greeted them with the message: Welcome Don Jones. Oops.