COLORADO SPRINGS — There was a lot of looking ahead by the six coaches who attended the annual college football kickoff luncheon Wednesday, but Sonny Lubick, the former coach at Colorado State, wasn’t forgotten.
CSU assistant coach Larry Lewis, who represented new Rams head coach Steve Fairchild, quickly put Lubick’s name into the conversation in his time at the podium.
“You don’t replace Sonny Lubick. You try hard to bring back the tradition he started,” Lewis said.
Air Force’s Troy Calhoun, who faced the same dilemma last year when he replaced longtime AFA coach Fisher DeBerry, also pointed to Lubick’s success.
“What you’re going to see at CSU real soon is a program that will be one of the top two or three in the Mountain West Conference,” Calhoun said. “Remember the run they had just a few years ago with Sonny Lubick. They’re completing a new indoor facility up there and they have tremendous support from the administration.
“It’s going to happen again. They’re going to contend on a consistent basis.”
Lewis played the role of a good assistant. Asked if he was tempted to put his boss, Fairchild, who returned to New York for his daughter’s high school graduation, on the spot by predicting a high finish for the Rams, Lewis said: “There’s not going to be any predictions from me. I know better than that.”
Oh, the power, and maybe the confusion, of the Internet.
John Wristen, the head coach for the newly reinstated football program at Colorado State-Pueblo, knows the Internet can carry messages far and wide. However, a lot depends on the attention by the viewer.
“Last winter when we were putting our program together, I got a lot of calls for Sonny Lubick,” Wristen said. “I’d tell the caller that I was Coach Wristen, but they’d say they wanted to talk to Coach Lubick. Just the other day I got a call from a potential player who wanted to talk to Coach Fairchild.”
Can you hear Hawk now?
Dan Hawkins is taking his family to Machu Picchu, the sacred Incan ruins in the Peruvian Andes. There will also be an Amazon excursion during the trip. But the Colorado coach will still be thinking about work.
“I’ll be checking my cellphone every five minutes to see if I can get through,” Hawkins said at the luncheon. “Every 100 feet up the mountain you’re wondering who’s going to school, who’s throwing today.’ . . . I’ll be standing on the top of Machu Picchu with aluminum foil trying to get cell reception.”
The family vacation does not excuse the coach’s sons — CU’s Cody and Boise State-bound Drew — from all thoughts of football. Hawkins said his sons plan to take a football on the trip.
“They’ll get a little work at 14,000 feet. We’ll see how running the steps at Machu Picchu compares to Folsom Field,” Hawkins said.
Step by step.
While the goal remains the Big 12 championship and a national title, Hawkins remains level-headed going into season No. 3 at CU: “We keep paddling and paddling hard. . . . It’s really naive to assume you won two (games in 2006), then you won six, now you’re going to win eight or nine. That’s not the way any of us needs to be thinking.”
Footnotes.
Calhoun said he hoped plans for a new indoor practice facility at Air Force would come to fruition in the next two years. A group of former AFA athletes has formed an endowment group to fund the project. “They’re going to be a tremendous fundraising arm, and one of the projects they’ve chosen to embrace is an indoor facility,” he said. . . . Northern Colorado coach Scott Downing had a schedule change proposal for Calhoun, seeing that Air Force opens against Southern Utah and UNC opens at Purdue.
