As Beau Baldwin searched for a replacement for longtime passing game coordinator Zak Hill, Eastern Washington’s veteran head coach received a phone call. On the other line, Washington head coach Chris Petersen gave Baldwin a name for a potential replacement that seemed out of left field.
“He flat out said, ‘I’m not telling you about one of my buddies, I’m giving you a name of one guy who doesn’t even know I’m calling. You have to check him out.’ I felt that was a bit interesting,” Baldwin said in an interview the last week of August.
Petersen suggested Baldwin look at Troy Taylor, the co-head coach and offensive guru of Folsom (California) High School’s record-setting offense. Petersen got to know Taylor while recruiting blue chip quarterback prospect Jake Browning. Baldwin had heard of Taylor because almost every Division I school in the West recruits the greater Sacramento area. When Baldwin looked up Taylor’s credentials, he was blown away.
EWU offensive coordinator Troy Taylor/by EWU Athletics
As Folsom’s co-head coach, Taylor helped mentor two quarterbacks who earned National Player of the Year honors in Browning and current Cal Poly starting quarterback Dano Graves. As a senior in 2014, Browning set a national record by throwing 91 touchdowns, bringing his career total to a national record of 229 in just three years as a starter. In his career, Browning threw for an astounding 16,775 yards, a California state record. He was the first high school player to ever throw for 60 or more TDs and for 5,000 yards in three straight seasons. Last season, he started as a true freshman for the Huskies, throwing 16 touchdowns, notching seven wins and winning three straight down the stretch, including victories over rival Washington State and against Southern Miss in the Heart of Dallas Bowl.
During his time at Folsom, Taylor compiled a 58-3 record, winning four sectional and two California State Division State titles. Baldwin’s interest piqued. Once Baldwin sat down with Taylor — a star quarterback at Cal in the 1980s who was a fourth-round draft pick by the New York Jets in 1990 before spending time as an assistant at Colorado (1995) and Cal (1996-2000) leading up to a hiatus from college coaching for 16 years — Baldwin knew he had his guy.
“The main thing we had at Folsom that I’m trying to bring here is the mentality of cutting it loose,” Taylor said. “We want to attack and get the defense on their heels and attack them with as many concepts as we can while keeping it as simple as you can for our players to play as fast as we can. We are trying to play fast and get a lot of snaps off.”
“Whenever you are hiring, you can go a couple of different routes,” Baldwin said. “You can teach them what we do, how we do it. Or you can bring someone in like Coach Taylor who is going to challenge some of the things we’ve done before even if you have done some successful things. Coach Taylor has opened our eyes to new ideas.”
Baldwin himself is considered an offensive mastermind, the architect of an EWU offense that has consistently been the best in the FCS for the guru’s 13 years in Cheney. Baldwin has built his prolific passing attack by continuing to diversify. In 2010 with future NFL Draft pick running back Taiwan Jones on his roster, Baldwin installed elements of the single-back offense. In 2012 and 2013 with a collection of All-America receivers, Baldwin implemented vertical stretch and “Air Raid” elements. Now with Taylor in the fold, the Eagles are using every inch of space in the field, putting stress on the entire defense and in turn opening up running lanes for the quarterback.
“It’s a little bit different with his ideas but it is great to hear new, fresh ideas, things we haven’t heard,” said EWU wide receivers coach Nick Edwards, a former EWU All-America pass catcher. “I’m learning a ton in the pass game concept-wise. The way he likes to attack things, the way he thinks, the way he’s always trying to find new ways to tweak things and make it an effective play are fascinating. His mind offensively is really, really sharp.”
“We spread the field out really well and it’s really hard for the defense to cover all of the field,” added sophomore quarterback Gage Gubrud. “We try to make sure we have guys on all parts of the field at all times. When the field gets spread out like that, if they do end up covering everybody, there’s typically a lot of room to run for the quarterback.”
Cooper Kupp with family and head coach Beau Baldwin/EWU Athletics
Any hesitancy about how Taylor might mesh with such a successful program — EWU has won four of the last six Big Sky Conference championships and owns the league’s last FCS national title won in 2010 — went out the window with Gubrud’s debut running Taylor and Baldwin’s concepts last week against Washington State.
In Pullman, Gubrud completed 26 of his first 27 pass attempts and 34-of-40 overall. He threw for 474 yards and five touchdowns, including finding three-time All-America wide receiver and reigning FCS Offensive Player of the Year Cooper Kupp 12 times for 206 yards and three touchdowns. When Wazzu did man up on Kupp, Shaq Hill (seven catches, 119 yards) and Kendrick Bourne (seven catches, 87 yards), the running lanes for Gubrud were wide open. The McMinnville, Oregon native scored a 31-yard rushing touchdown that proved to be the deciding score in EWU’s 45-42 win at Martin Stadium.
“The concepts he has and his ability to get every single receiver in the right place at the right time and to have the quarterback deliver the ball or make the correct read is second to none,” said Graves, the 2010 National Prep Player of the Year after piling a then-state record 85 total touchdowns under Taylor’s tutelage at Folsom High and now Cal Poly’s starting QB. “Other coaches would always ask how guys got so wide open. He can plan schemes to do that. It’s not by accident. He’s truly an offensive mastermind.”
“You see a mix of two different minds together,” added Kupp, who broke David Ball’s 10-year-old record with his 59th career touchdown catch in Pullman. “Coach Taylor fits so well with what we do at Eastern. I’ve never seen someone…Coach Baldwin is a very competitive person and Coach Taylor came in and he might be the most competitive person on our coaching staff. That’s amazing.”
The Washington State victory, EWU’s second over a Pac 12 school in four seasons, marked the first step to rectifying last season’s failures. Between 2010 and 2014, EWU won four Big Sky championships, advanced to the Final Four of the FCS playoffs three times and won the 2010 national title. Despite lofty preseason expectations, EWU never recovered from Vernon Adams’ stunning transfer to Oregon before his final season of eligibility.
The Eagles started 0-2 with losses at Oregon (61-42), and No. 14 Northern Iowa (38-35) before outlasting No. 11 Montana State 55-50 in a shootout to remember in Cheney. From there, Eastern scraped out wins for five weeks, needing a comeback to beat hapless Sacramento State 28-20, a missed two-point conversion to survive Cal Poly’s barrage 42-41, a last-second field goal to defeat perennial cellar dweller Northern Colorado 43-41, and a missed last-second field goal to upend upstart Weber State, 14-13.
UEW wide receiver Cooper Kupp in 2015/by EWU athletics
“You hear people say a win’s a win but it’s not,” Kupp said. “It counts as a W but you look at Northern Colorado, we miss a field goal there at the end of the game and that’s an L. That’s a complete switch and we have a losing record. There can be one play here or there that changes the whole outcome. Eventually it caught up with us at the end of the season.”
During the last three weeks of 2015, it all came crashing down. Northern Arizona ran the ball down the Eagles’ collective throats in a 52-30 win in Cheney. Montana blew the doors off EWU, notching six sacks and forcing five turnovers in a 57-16 win in Missoula. David Jones rushed for 152 yards and two touchdowns as Portland State outlasted their rivals with a 34-31 win on the Inferno.
“The Washington State win took a lot of work, grit and mental toughness for our guys,” Baldwin said. “That first game win coming off a season in which we didn’t finish like they wanted to, this was nine months of build up.”
The lackluster finish robbed EWU of its normally formidable off-season respect. The Eagles were picked to finish fourth in the Big Sky despite winning more games this decade than any other school in the conference. Now after another Pac 12 victory and a revamped offense infused with a shot of new ideas, Eastern Washington are back in the top 10 and the Eagles look primed to chase championships once again.
“We did not want to go 6-5 again, I’ll tell you that,” Gubrud said. “That was really disappointing for us. That’s not the type of team we are. We came out with a different mindset and had a meeting after the season in the winter and said things are going to change. We took everything to another level and it’s really going to benefit us for the rest of the season.”
Eastern Washington looks to continue its hot start with a showdown against five-time reigning FCS national champion North Dakota State in the Fargodome on Saturday.
