A mid-life crisis can be a tricky situation to navigate. The anxiety, depression, regret, second-guessing, maybe a sudden surge in machismo can lead one to indulge in primal instincts they feared to be long gone. It can lead to a dark turn to the finer goods of the material world, a nice convertible in the driveway in the hope that some of that virility that used to erupt out of your pores with the force of a broken dam can be brought back with a nice wax job and a high-speed cruise down the local interstate.
Thankfully for John Graham, a defensive-minded coach at a sudden impasse, his solution was a simple switch to the other side of the ball. An invitation to work side-by-side with a brilliant offensive mind and a team of coaches in lockstep with one another.
“Where those guys go out and buy sports cars or motorcycles or get tattoos, I got to go switch over and coach offense,” says Graham, now in his second season coaching Eastern Washington’s tight ends after a seven-year run as its defensive coordinator. “What better place to coach offense than here?”
Graham’s question was likely a rhetorical one. While there may be more high-paying coaching gigs around the country where Graham could lend his specific expertise in constructing a high-scoring outfit, there aren’t many that have been consistently as successful as the one in Cheney, Washington.
Since Beau Baldwin returned to Cheney to take over the program in 2008, the Eagles won an FCS title in 2010, made three trips to the national semifinals, upset a pair of Pac-12 teams and routinely sit near the top of the nation in passing yards, total offense and points scored. The boom is primarily thanks to an offense melded together with a Frankenstein-like amalgamation of concepts, but one that owes its roots to the single-back, spread system favored by Greg Olsen, Baldwin’s coach at Central Washington in the early 1990s.
While quarterbacks have come and gone, posting numbers that might fry the circuit boards of now defunct college football video games, the coaches that Baldwin has surrounded himself have essentially remained static: Graham is in his ninth season on staff and eighth as associate head coach, Aaron Best is in his 16th season; Nicholas Edwards, a former All-American receiver, is in his third, and the Eagles are in their first year without Zak Hill, who was their passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach for seven years.
“We’ve had continuity on our whole staff,” said Baldwin, who has coached two Walter Payton award winning quarterbacks during his stints as EWU’s offensive coordinator and head coach. “We’ve had a few changes here and there, but overall comparing to other places we’ve had as much continuity as anyone.”
The most recent change was to bring in Troy Taylor in replacement of Hill, who first signed on with Hawaii before taking a gig at Boise State 48 days later. At the same time Eastern was finding the end zone with dizzying regularity with Vernon Adams at its controls, Taylor was testing out various cutting-edge offensive concepts at Folsom High School, just a few miles northeast of Sacramento. He composed an offense that allowed current Washington Huskies quarterback Jake Browning to smash California passing records. During his senior season, Browning threw for 91 touchdowns, bumping his three-year total to 229.
Taylor lasted one more year at Folsom before Baldwin invited him to join his staff. It might sound laughable considering Eastern averaged 34.6 points and threw for more than 350 a game while juggling two quarterbacks, but Baldwin thought the offense was getting stale, the ideas he and his staff were incorporating weren’t producing what Baldwin wanted to accomplish.
Based in the single-back principles Baldwin operated when he was the quarterback and Graham was a defensive back at Central Washington, the Eastern offense has borrowed ideas from Olsen and the famed Air Raid created by Hal Mumme. This construction was made possible by the cohesion that formed within the staff. Discussions could turn into arguments, but that rarely happened. Instead, it was more common that one coach might have an idea another was about to propose.
“We’re probably not going to disagree as much on the forefront because the things that are brought up are stuff we know each other are going to like,” Best said. “It’s the same thing with a family, if you’re getting along all the time that’s not a constructive family. If everyone is just a yes-coach, or a yes-mom, yes-dad type of person, that’s not what you want. You want heated arguments and points being driven home because that’s how you learn. … We don’t have very many of those, but when they do arise we work through them just like everybody else.”
Added Graham, “We don’t have to spend a lot of time coaching coaches. Most of our energy and effort goes to getting our players better because our coaches have been together and know what the system is.”
So when Hill left and Baldwin was directed by Washington coach Chris Petersen to take a look at Taylor, the rest of the staff more or less went along with Baldwin. They had developed a trust in the head man who created a fertile environment for them to think up ideas that could improve the program. Graham remembers driving in a car with Taylor when the coach came up for his interview and Taylor started asking questions about Eastern’s operation.
“I said, ‘You’re not going to work for a better boss who is going to allow you to do what you do,’” Graham remembers.
About 10 months since he was brought on board, that’s essentially what Taylor has done. He’s changed the way Eastern signals in its plays, allowing the offense to get the call quicker so it can line up and go. He has spread Eastern’s receivers further along the line of scrimmage, limiting the schemes opposing defenses can use. And he has revamped Eastern’s quarterback run game. All of it to the favor of sophomore quarterback Gage Gubrud. In his seven starts the former walk-on already owns six of the top 11 single-game total offense outputs in school history. Gubrud has thrown for 2,351 yards and 23 touchdowns, is the team’s leading rusher and was recently named the STATS National FCS Offensive Player of the Week.
“He’s tried to simplify things without being simplistic,” Graham said of Taylor’s influence. “He’s allowed the quarterback to be more of a free thinker, just to go out and play.”
Taylor’s acclimation to Eastern, a staff full of Washington natives committed to Washington now forced welcome a California man into the operation, could have been a difficult one. As Best put it, it’s not always easy to bring a new face into a group of friends — or coaches.
“He’s probably thinking, ‘Boy, I have to figure these guys out because they know each other way more than they know me or I know them,’” Eastern’s offensive line coach said.
There was one thing that made the process easier: the group’s trust in Baldwin. The success Baldwin has fostered with his confidence in coaches who could have bolted for other jobs that offered more money has produced a program that is back on track after a difficult 2015 season. The Eagles are third in the nation, their only FCS loss coming in an overtime shootout at North Dakota State just a week after the they upset Washington State in Pullman.
“Everything he touches seems to turn to gold the last nine years of his coaching career and until it turns bronze I’m going to believe it’s going to turn gold,” Best said of Baldwin. “That’s what any man would think.”
