LARAMIE — Wyoming linebacker Brian Hendricks grew up practically wearing Rams horns. He starred at Burlington High School hearing stories of Colorado State lore from his father and grandfather who played there.
So when Brian bucked tradition and signed with Wyoming, he placed himself firmly in the seat of family scorn. Now here he is four years later, and Brian is sitting in the catbird seat. He’s riding high over his neighbors to the south.
That’s right. For the first time in 30 years, Wyoming has the best college football team on the Front Range.
“That’s great,” Hendricks said. “The senior class has a lot of Colorado kids on it. That’s a great thing because when we came to Wyoming, we got a lot of guff.”
No more. His critics can look it up. Not since 1981, when coach Al Kincaid and his wishbone quarterback, Phil Davis, went 8-3, was Wyoming unquestionably the best team in the region.
Of course, this year that’s a little like being the best surfer in Nebraska. Colorado is a Friday loss at Utah from its first 11-loss season, CSU is 3-7 with a coach on a seat that’s set on charbroil and 6-5 Air Force must win at CSU on Saturday for a bowl berth.
Young quarterback steps right in
However, the Cowboys didn’t get to this pedestal by default. Just as their freshman quarterback earned stardom, they earned it too. They’re bowl-bound at 7-3 overall, 4-1 and tied in the Mountain West for second place with seventh- ranked Boise State (9-1, 4-1), which they visit Saturday.
“Within the team, it’s not surprising,” Wyoming senior guard Nick Carlson said. “There’s a certain buzz, a certain chemistry that was different. It’s hard to put my finger on it. You could feel something was different. It was something positive.”
Actually, it’s not hard. Carlson must merely find a roster and put his finger on the name Brett Smith. Keep in mind, Wyoming opened the season without a single quarterback who’d ever taken a major-college snap.
Yet one year out of West Salem High in Salem, Ore., Smith’s 2,226 yards passing (along with 15 touchdowns and five interceptions) have already broken Andy Dalton’s conference record for a freshman quarterback.
The son of a former quarterback at Oregon, Kevin Smith, Brett Smith is a quarterback right out of Wyoming central casting. He graduated early and took charge of the veteran team nearly from the minute he set foot on campus last winter.
When he’s not also running for 518 yards and 10 touchdowns, he’s getting in the face of opponents and the occasional official.
“He always has everyone’s back,” Carlson said. “You don’t normally see a quarterback jump in front of a lineman. There was a cheap shot one of our O-linemen took in a game (at Air Force), and he told the refs to make sure that his linemen are to be protected as well as he is.”
The kid doesn’t even like to slide. When he finally did it in the 25-17 win at Air Force on Nov. 12, he went to offensive coordinator Gregg Brandon and said, “Coach, I hate that!”
“The hardest thing I’ve had to do with him is hold him back,” Brandon said. “He wants to take on linebackers, run over D-linemen. I said, ‘Brett, maybe you did that in high school, but they were all half your size. These guys are going to crush you.’ He’s learned.”
Snub by home state good for ‘Pokes
It may be a stretch to say that Smith’s emergence saved the season, but it’s close. In January, sophomore QB Austin Carta-Samuels texted coach Dave Christensen saying he was leaving.
Christensen didn’t try to change his mind. Bring up Carta-Samuels’ name around the athletic department and you get a series of rolled eyes, stifled coughs and, mostly, “No comment.”
This was guy who was Mountain West offensive freshman of the year in 2009. But then the Cowboys went 3-9 with the 116th-ranked offense in the country last year, and he upped and walked on at Vanderbilt.
“He didn’t perform to his expectations and maybe it was the first time he had experienced adversity,” athletic director Tom Burman said.
Christensen won’t let Smith talk except after games. The one question begging for an answer is how did Oregon’s 6A Gatorade player of the year, who’s 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, has 4.6 speed and is No. 2 in the conference in total offense with 274.4 yards a game, slip to Wyoming?
Oregon asked him to walk on. Oregon State came in on him late after he first committed to San Jose State.
“They get caught up in how many stars Rivals gives them instead of making their own evaluation,” West Salem coach Shawn Stanley said, “of looking at what they see on film and talking to a kid in person.”
Smith, however, is getting help. Besides a defense that’s second nationally only to LSU in turnover margin at plus-1.5, Christensen’s spread offense is kicking in. In his third year, he hired Brandon, who coached at Wyoming under Paul Roach from 1987-90 and was whiling away in the United Football League.
Brandon made a full commitment to the spread, and Christensen became more involved. The offensive staff is all wired to it, from running backs coach Jason Ray, who played for Christensen when he ran the spread as coordinator at Missouri, to receivers coach Derek Sage, who learned it under Oregon coach Chip Kelly when they were at New Hampshire.
“Now I don’t have to coach the coaches,” Brandon said.
Sticking with game plan
Christensen’s resolve came in another form. He found it in his second home in Arizona, where last Christmas he took his team’s 3-9 record, reams of data and even more self-loathing and locked into serious analysis for 10 days.
What went wrong? What can he change? Then he remembered something. It was at Toledo when he was offensive coordinator under current Missouri coach Gary Pinkel and they had taken the same offense that Don James used when they coached under him at Washington.
Toledo was early in that transitional period from bad to good and then it dipped, about where his Wyoming program stood.
“(Pinkel) said, ‘Do we have to change what we’re doing?’ ” Christensen said. “My comment at that point was, ‘Coach, I don’t know any other way. And I know this works.’ With that, we didn’t change a thing.”
And with that, they changed the perception of Wyoming football. They’re the best team around. Suddenly, Wyoming isn’t the cold, windy outpost it once was.
“My freshman year I remember redshirting and went down (to CSU) to play,” Hendricks said. “I never heard so many people yell at me for going to Wyoming. I still don’t regret it.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or
