The Study of Spirals : Dunivant Has Been Teaching Quarterbacks at Burroughs for 28 Years

His players call him Huck, which is short for Huckleberry Finn, whom he resembles with his straw hat sitting atop his slender, tall frame. This football coach looks like he belongs on a field, all right. A cornfield.

But there is a more befitting sobriquet than Huck for Bob Dunivant. Just call him the quarterback coach.

He has been head coach mostly, but his desire and his obsession is to mold a good, intelligent athlete into one of his quarterbacks. There is no flash in the stratagem, and no complexity. A first-day Army recruit could understand it.

The early line on Dunivant says he will not become a national football legend. The passing game was invented and shaped long before he began coaching. But he is at least a legend for coaching passers at Burroughs High, where he started in 1958.

“The quarterback seems to be like the coach--the one responsible if you lose, the one responsible if you win,” he said.

“We try to get a coach on the quarterback. Most of the time I’ve had that responsibility. I don’t know why, really. I do know we’ve had some good ones, and yes, I think I’ve had something do with it.”

No bragging there. Just the facts. On his rosters there has been no John Elway or Tom Ramsey, like luckier coaches had at Granada Hills and Kennedy, just a line of guys who were good and solid:

In 1972-73, there was Curtis Ihle. He is still the school’s career passing leader with 3,215 yards. He completed 227 of 393 passes for 26 touchdowns.

In 1979, there was Tom Tunnicliffe. He transferred to Burroughs from neighboring Burbank High in part, he said, to learn from Dunivant. His 2,353-yard season at Burroughs ranks him second on the school’s all-time list. He completed 177 of 238 passes (74%) for 22 touchdowns.

Dunivant primarily prepared him for college. “It’s very important to have proper training before you go off to college,” said Tunnicliffe, who went on to become the career passing leader at Arizona. “He was almost leaning toward the Bill Walsh approach--creative, flexible--and that made college easier. I feel fortunate to have been able to play with him for one year. I wish it had been more.”

In 1986, there is Jeff Barrett. He said he was so bad last year during Dunivant’s brief retirement that he was embarrassed to watch game films. In six games this year, Barrett has completed 70.6% of his 102 passes for 1,143 yards. He’s just a junior.

“I feel I was just good last year,” Barrett says. “Under him, I’m a lot better. He is the difference.”

There are no secrets.

“I think the fact that Dunivant runs a college style helps,” said Hart Coach Rick Scott, whose team (5-1) plays Burroughs (5-0-1) at 7:30 tonight at College of the Canyons in a game expected to be a wide-open passing show. “You see the time patterns, the disciplined athlete who sits back in the pocket.

“He gets the kid with athletic ability and teaches discipline, and it shows. You go in some areas and find a kid who is just a good athlete and there’s no discipline. His passing philosophy is advantageous to his program because his kids have both.”

Dunivant’s own spiral education really began when he caught 41 passes for Fullerton College as a gangly, 6-2, 185-pound All-America wide receiver.

“That’s when I became a student of the game,” he said. “Even then, we’d go to meetings just to study football.”

Later, in 1956-58, he caught passes for San Jose State. Dick Vermeil was the quarterback.

“That guy is the epitome of what a coach does if he wants to succeed,” Dunivant says. “He taught me a lot about the game.”

Paul Hackett of the Dallas Cowboys, a widely admired offensive expert who helped guide the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl three years ago, has taught him even more, he says.

“Every clinic he’s put on, I was there. Everything he teaches, I believe. His overall philosophy is timing. Taking the ball from center, dropping back, planting, throwing on the right foot,” Dunivant said.

The words sound off in a rhythmic cadence to his players, who hear and practice the steps over and over until they become as instinctive as coming in out of the rain. Ask one of them and they repeat, almost word for word, the steps.

To measure the ingredients of Dunivant’s quarterbacks, all the cliches apply: coachable and competitive, athletic and astute.

“But probably the most important thing we teach here is how to handle the pressure,” said Dunivant. “To stay in the pocket and not be flighty. . . . Coaching is teaching.”

Dunivant, then, has been a fine teacher. And if the late George Halas of the Chicago Bears is considered the father of football’s forward pass, Dunivant must at least be considered one of its nephews.