The Last Boy Scout

Isaiah Stanback dropped back to pass on third and 10 against the Fresno State Bulldogs on Sept. 16 at Husky Stadium. It was a game that wasn't going the mercurial quarterback's way, as the opposing Californians had bottled up the Dawgs' passing attack for much of the first half and locked the Huskies in a 14-14 third-quarter tie.

Since becoming the Huskies' starting quarterback last season, Stanback had weathered complaints from media and fans alike for trusting his sprinter's speed more than his rocket arm. He wasn't seeing a play open up before him the way a star quarterback ought to, went the criticism.

Tyrone Willingham, the Huskies preternaturally calm second-year head coach, teaches his quarterbacks to "work with what the defense gives you"—in essence, to turn lemons into lemonade. And on this third down, despite the fact that Fresno State had his receivers well covered, Stanback was all of a sudden drinking lemonade. Instead of making a break for it on his own, as his critics might expect him to do, Stanback rolled left, stopped, and rifled the football 15 yards to receiver Marcel Reece for a crucial first down.

From Husky Stadium's vertigo-inducing press box, it was hard to miss the brilliance of Stanback's decision, a symbol that, finally, the lightbulb had flipped on in the quarterback's cortex, and that the Dawgs might begin performing like the perennial Husky powerhouses of old. The glimmer of hope was there, at any rate, and the Huskies went on to squeak out a win in a game they'd been expected to lose.

Asked what he thought about the third-down play, Willingham responded as if it were an average Stanback moment, something the Garfield High School graduate did on just about every snap.

"He executed the fundamental law of being a quarterback," Willingham said, in his tightly controlled, engineerlike, enigmatic way. "Take what they give you." (After suffering a season-ending foot injury against Oregon State four weeks after the Fresno State game, Stanback won't be taking anything more in a Husky uniform.)

That's the essence of Willingham's public face: He answers questions in a way that is as tight-lipped as a State Department spokesperson—to the point where Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Jim Moore has dubbed him "Paint Dry Ty." In short, everything former head coach Rick Neuheisel was, Willingham is not.

This is probably a good thing. While Neuheisel guided the Dawgs to a Rose Bowl victory in 2001 and had the program seemingly poised for a return to its rightful throne among the country's top powerhouses, the "Slick Rick" reputation that followed him from his previous gig at the University of Colorado manifested itself in the form of recruiting and gambling violations that helped set the proud Husky program back half a century. Willingham was hired before the 2005 season to do nothing less than restore the program's integrity and re-establish the Huskies as a perennial Top 25 team. How fast must this turnaround occur? Willingham's five-year contract—three years remaining after this one—is probably a pretty generous window, for Husky boosters are not known as a patient lot.

Despite his standoffish reputation, Willingham maintains: "The truth of the matter is I'm very open. I find it difficult to give more information than I have."

Yet when Willingham busies himself juggling questions, a half-smile forms and his eyes actually twinkle like he's about to become Tyrone the Ad-Libber. But then he doesn't follow through on what he's thinking. It's as if what he's pondering is too subtle for words.

You could sense this during Willingham's press conference after a come-from-behind 29-19 victory (the Huskies trailed 16-0 at one point) over UCLA at Husky Stadium on Sept. 23. After the game, I asked him: Why was the Husky offense sputtering so badly in the first half (total rushing: minus 8 yards), yet so on fire in the second?

"Sputtering?" Willingham responded, the smile creeping out. "You are being very kind to describe it as sputtering. I would've used a different term."

Once the television cameras started rolling, Willingham called his offense "struggling"—and moved on to the next question.

The 52-year-oldWillingham is built like a middleweight wrestler and favors a preppy wardrobe that suggests an Ivy League literature professor. He was a walk-on quarterback at Michigan State, starting four games in 1973 as a freshman before seeing little playing time the rest of his career. After college, he moved into coaching, serving as an assistant to Dennis Green at Stanford and with the NFL's Minnesota Vikings, where Willingham coached the team's running backs. He then returned to Stanford as head coach in 1995, succeeding the legendary Bill Walsh.

Willingham is one of five African- American head coaches in Division I football (last year, it was three out of 118 schools). Asked when that ratio might improve, Willingham says it won't.

"It never will because of man's nature," he says. "Man has to have someone beneath him. In America, it's a racial line. In the Middle East, I guess it's a religious one."

On matters of the gridiron, Willingham's strong suit is answering strictly what's put before him, factually and philosophically, by turns.