Yale Gets it's, (3rd, 4th, 5th?), Choice
Tom Williams
The Hartford Courant is reporting that Yale has hired Jacksonville Jaguars assistant Tom Williams as its new head coach.
The paper says he will be formally introduced tomorrow at 2pm.
At 38, Williams is the latest in the trend of younger coaches being hired at all levels of football over the last few days.
While he comes directly from the Jaguars and played briefly in the NFL, the overwhelming majority of his experience is at the college level. He started coaching under Bill Walsh at Stanford where he was also a player during the Cardinal's last glory days of the early 1990's.
(The last real purely NFL-bred Ivy coach was Columbia's Jim Garrett. I'm not sure we'll ever see that kind of coach getting hired again).
Most media reports say at least three other Yale choices turned down the job, and we'll probably never know the real reasons why.
In any case, we welcome Mr. Williams to the Ivy world and wish him luck against everyone but Columbia.
posted by Jake @ 8:50:00 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I think it's great that Yale has also hired an African American coach. A Yale football alum had told me a few weeks ago that the Yalew football establishment had been favorably impressed by the inroads being made by our own Coach Wilson and that they thought he had been doing a great job upgrading our program.
CU got what they asked for when they hired coach Garrett but they soon realized they couldn't handle it. He told them he'd run it like a D1 program and they liked hearing that at first, but CU got cold feet very quickly when he lived up to his word. Total shame that it ended the way it did and of course more salt in our wounds when John, Jason and Judd all had their respective successes at Princeton. John was a total class act, great guy and liked by all of us, too.
We had a team vote the day after Coach Garrett was fired and it was something like 55-6 in favor of keeping him, and trust me many of the players did not love the guy. We just all knew he was going to build something big and we wanted to be part of it
Good to have another black coach in the Ivies. Blacks are way under-represented in college and NFL.
Garrett: I still feel bad for the punter.
Judd Garrett, along with Chris Zingo, must rank as one of the top football players in the Ivy League.
Those are very gracious and generous words from Anonymous #2 at 8:04 AM. It's so easy to look at the unfortunate incident after the Harvard game and say that Garrett's brief tenure was all his fault.
My congratulations to the members of that Columbia team who gave Garrett a vote of confidence even though "many of the players did not love the guy." It's a testament to any player when he recognizes that the medicine is good for him even if it doesn't taste good.
Jake..didn't one of our ass't coaches intern recently with the Jags? If so, that probably helped indirectly in getting Williams focused on Ivy league opportunities....
Pete Murphy (the punter) was a great guy and a great, great athlete. He was also a super baseball player at CU. He was also very quiet and kept to himself and coach Garrett was trying to get the fire out of him.
Murph and Henry Santos were in a very close competition for QB that year, too, and once Henry won the job many of us felt Garrett had it out for Murph. It was like Garrett took it personally and was on a mission to draw more emotion out of him. Clearly he crossed the line but inside the team we all knew what he was doing.
Murphy was a decent athlete-not great-with a great arm. He never had a shot at that job as there was no competition after Santos spent the summer before his senior year at the Garrett's Jersey shore house training with them. We absolutely would have won at least one title with Jason and Judd.
I forgot that Henry had spent the summer at Camp Garrett, but I still think coach G wanted more out of Murph.
Murph had a cannon for an arm and could run like a deer.
Post a Comment
<< Home