Turning it around:
Paul Wulff and Tim Brewster

How do you take a college football program from worst to first?

Getty Images (Brewster) / Courtesy WSU (Wulff)

Two men on different sides of the same coin, but in all likelihood not for long.

Last season, the Minnesota Golden Gophers were 1-11. Granted, six of those losses came by a total of 23 points, but they also dropped a game to North Dakota State. This season, up to the November 1st weekend, they're 7-2. Their final three games: rebuilding Michigan, an underachieving Wisconsin team and a similarly underachieving Iowa squad. It's possible that head coach Tim Brewster could finish the season 10-2, a nine-game turnaround in a BCS conference.

Some 2,000 miles to the west, Washington State Cougar alum Paul Wulff has dispensed with the notion of "not going home again" and now leads the Cougs after eight years at Eastern Washington. So far, not so great: they're 1-8 headed into a game against Arizona on November 8th, including back-to-back losses of 69-0 (USC) and 58-0 (Stanford).

Brewster and Wulff are similar guys: interesting, driven and coaching in conferences essentially dominated by one team—but at a program with a positive football history. Since Brewster knows how it feels to be seven games under .500 and five games over, we decided to interview both coaches and compare their thoughts on the difficult process of turning around a struggling program. We did it in a previously-used ESPN The Magazine format of "Things You Should Know" (example here). You can read the entire interview with Tim Brewster here; you can read the entire interview with Paul Wulff here. If you click 'Read More,' you'll get a back-and-forth of their thoughts on rebuilding programs. It's important to note the interviews were conducted at different times.

TIM BREWSTER: 1-11 TO 7-2
PAUL WULFF: 1-8 TO ???

ON RECRUITING

WULFF:
"Even though we only had about a month to recruit when I was hired last year, and there was basically no one committed, we did pretty well with the availability we had. The recruiting efforts in the past weren't, frankly, up to standard in terms of recruiting top-tier kids, so we've got huge holes in depth, huge holes in terms of guys that are physically ready to play that are playing. The way we fix it is with time and really good recruiting. We've got a bunch of young coaches in here that are great recruiters and love Washington State, so it's easy for them to do it."

BREWSTER:
"With all the teams running a spread in the Big 10, they make you play in space. You need kids that are bigger, stronger and faster than the kids we were getting. Last year we went 1-11, but we had the 17th-best recruiting class in the nation and the third-best in the Big 10. You have to sell what you have. For us, it's a few things: getting the program back to that championship level, our city—Minneapolis is beautiful and kids coming here love it—and a new stadium we'll be playing in. We sell the hell out of that. Out of 45 visits, we had 31 kids sign on Signing Day. That's around 72 percent. That success ratio is off the charts. Recruiting is the absolute name of the game in college football: you gotta focus on it 24-7-365 if you can."

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LESSONS FROM THE PAST

BREWSTER:
"I was with Mack Brown for 13 years. He's the godfather to one of my sons. He's my guy. I called him up after their loss to Texas Tech on November 1st. From him, I took how he has his finger on the pulse of college football. He's amazing. The way he recruits, organizes everything, runs the program—nobody does it better than Mack. He taught me it's not always about Xs and Os. You want to be able to out-diagram another coach, sure, but take this example. After Mack, I was in San Diego and I was coaching guys like Antonio Gates and LaDainian Tomlinson. You have those guys, sometimes it doesn't matter who is calling plays better."

"In San Diego, with Marty Schottenheimer, I learned the value of toughness. Marty used to say to me, 'Hey Brew, winning isn't hard.' I'm saying back to him, 'What? Yes it is!' He says, 'No, it's not hard once you learn how to prepare.' There is nobody I know tougher than Marty and he instills that in his football teams. That's what I'm trying to do here. At the most basic level, I want a hard-nosed, physical football team."

"After that, I got the call from Mike Shanahan in Denver. He says 'Hey Brew, I want you to come work with me.' This is like getting a call from God. To me, Mike is the finest football coach in the world today; certainly he is from an offensive standpoint. You sit with him and watch him work an offense and dissect weaknesses in the other team by formation and motion, you learn so much. But the biggest thing I got from him was this: he's a stone-cold killer. You see him out there before a game and he has this steely-eyed gaze which says 'I can beat you.' He conveys that to his teams in such an amazing way. A Denver Broncos team before a game, no matter who they're playing, no one in that uniform thinks they're losing. I love Mike. He's my guy."

WULFF:
"Kids can play early, but we still love that redshirt year, and frankly, a lot of guys need it bad. At Washington State, when we're playing good football, there's a high element of experience and 5th year players. I go back to the run when we were the best team in the conference from 2001 thru 2003 in terms of wins. How did they get there? You go back to the '98 Rose Bowl, and a senior-dominated team, and they had great talent and maturity. Well, after that they said we're going to give Coach Price a long deal and allow him to build it the right way. Well, they went out and recruited solid high school kids and redshirted them. Then, they went out and were in last place or close for three straight years. But as those kids grew up, you had dominant teams, and not just for one year. That philosophy stopped when Price left. It just does. You go back to trying to plug holes, quick fixes. A good example of how it works is Jim Grobe. He brought in kids, redshirted all of them, didn't kill them in practice, lifted them, and they become great players."

ON EMBRACING THE CHALLENGE AND THE ATMOSPHERE

WULFF:
"I ask recruits if people from WSU are different, and they all say, 'Yeah, they're all so outwardly excited about the place. So invested emotionally.' In the middle of nowhere? Can't find something to do? No way. We've got 20,000 kids your age, and they aren't leaving. You don't want to leave on a weekend! It's the greatest atmosphere there is. Game day? When this place is rocking, and with the stadium work finishing up, it's one of the best game day atmospheres in the country. The fans are different here. The fans are crazy, they're passionate."

BREWSTER:
"When I took the job, I got serious heat around here because I came in saying I wanted to win the Big 10 and take Gopher Nation to the Rose Bowl. To me, though, why are you waking up every morning and coming in to coach if that's not your goal? The only limitations to your success are the ones you put on yourself. For me, you ask me which program it's hardest to recruit against the Big 10—listen, of course there are great coaches in the Big 10 and tough programs to recruit against. I want to be recruiting against Pete Carroll, Urban Meyer, Nick Saban—those guys are the best of the best. Let's throw down head-to-head for a recruit and see who wins."

ONE QUICK THOUGHT FROM EACH

WULFF:
"The SEC is a great conference, but the reality is they only play six or seven league games. We play nine, and nobody else does that. We have the toughest schedule in the country, and I don't care what anyone says. Just like 'Bama can't take 'Ole Miss for granted, USC can't take OSU. Those are brutal games. We always play one or two strong teams in addition. We need to be smart about that. Play that one tough one, but get a couple others you should win. We've got scheduling built in that is tough, man. We got Notre Dame next year, in the middle of the year."

BREWSTER:
"It takes time to build programs, but I can't walk that line with patience. I'm an impatient guy. Someone asked me recently, 'When do you want Minnesota to start winning?' I said, 'Yesterday.' "

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