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Pardee Is Right Man in the Right Place at the Right Time

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The Washington Post

One of Jack Pardee’s University of Houston assistants called his boss into an office the other day, turned out the lights and started a film projector. “Got a kid I’d like to show you,” the assistant said, his Cheshire cat grin hidden in the dark.

The film was dark and a little grainy, as you might expect since it was more than 30 years old. And there, on the screen, was a scrawny return man fielding a kickoff for Texas A&M; University, eight yards deep in his own end zone, and boldly running forward, into the teeth of the opposition, finally getting slammed down a few yards short of his own 20.

Jack Pardee had a good laugh when he saw that film, though he also recalled that his shoulder ached for weeks from the impact of the hit. But soon enough, Pardee was back to the future, plotting strategy for last Saturday’s game at Arizona State, where the highly regarded played their second game of the young season, Pardee’s third season as their head football coach.

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Pardee has always preferred not to live in the past, and that has not changed since the days when he played six-man, high-school football in West Texas, then went on to star for the Aggies, the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins before embarking on a coaching career that has been nothing short of spectacular almost everywhere he went.

And now, Pardee is back in what he considers home. His son Ted, all arms and legs as a 7-year-old ballboy at the Redskins training camp 10 years ago, is a thick-necked sophomore reserve linebacker on the Cougar team who even wears his dad’s old No. 32. Pardee’s wife Phyllis, a twirler for the TCU Horned Frogs way back when, has returned to her hometown. Four other grown children are scattered from Richmond to the West Coast. “I don’t think my dad could be any happier,” said young Teddy.

Well, of course he could. He would prefer that his Houston football team be allowed to play in a bowl and appear on national television this season, but that’s not going to happen. The Cougars are on NCAA probation for transgressions committed before he took the job three years ago.

Pardee had spent the previous season working for the Green Bay Packers as a scout, that being the year the United States Football League folded, with Pardee the head coach of the Houston Gamblers. He was the man who brought the run-and-shoot offense to professional football, but now the runners and shooters were all out of jobs.

Still, a man with Pardee’s impressive credentials could not be out of work for very long, and when Houston President Richard S. Van Horn came to pick a coach, “there really was only one decision to make,” he said.

“He just had an impeccable record as a player and a coach,” Van Horn said the other day from Norman, Okla., where he is now president of the University of Oklahoma. “But the most important thing to us was the fact that he had an unblemished record of integrity. He wants his players to get an education and to graduate. And he was committed to operating within the rules. He was a perfect fit.”

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Well, almost. Pardee came into town and started hustling for a staff and for players. It was common knowledge that Houston was being investigated by the NCAA for transgressions that included paying money to players by longtime coach Bill Yeoman and his staff. Not big money, mind you, because Houston has always been the undernourished commuter school with mostly hand-to-mouth financial support.

The oil business helped fill the coffers at Texas A&M;, Southern Methodist and Texas. But not here on this sprawling campus filled with parking lots, modern architecture and hundreds of moss-covered oak trees and bordered on one side by a freeway, on another side by railroad tracks and on another by a dreary slum neighborhood.

In any case, the threat of NCAA sanctions kept some high-quality athletes away, and when the NCAA finally announced the probation last season, the throat-cutting by rival recruiters intensified. “During the investigation, they’d tell the kids, ‘Don’t go to Houston, you’ll never play in a bowl, you’ll never be on TV,’ ” Pardee said the other day. “That was the hardest part. The investigation was a hammer hanging over our head. It’s much easier to deal with reality than speculation. Now at least we know what we’re up against, and we can live with that.”

And prosper, as well, though it took a while for this unpretentious coach at this unpretentious school. After the Cougars opened the Pardee Era by losing six of its first seven games in 1987, they turned the season around by stomping Texas 60-40 that year and finishing 3-0-1 down the stretch. Last year the Cougars were 9-2 and just missed a Cotton Bowl trip (the bowl ban was for this season), settling for a visit to the Aloha in Hawaii.

And they opened this year with a 69-0 thrashing of Nevada-Las Vegas, good enough to earn them the No. 1 ranking ahead of Miami and Notre Dame in USA Today’s computer rating system based on strength of schedule.

They are doing it with the same run-and-shoot Pardee employed so successfully in his stint with the Gamblers of the USFL, and a pro style 4-3 defense Pardee has always played and coached.

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“I’ve always tried to find the right way to win with the talent you have available,” Pardee said. “In Chicago, I had Walter Payton, and you don’t have to be a genius to know that you give it to Walter Payton. When I came to the Gamblers, we had a great quarterback (Jim Kelly) and a lot of little guys who could catch the ball (including Redskin Ricky Sanders). Everybody’s always looking for the great athlete, the 6-3, 215-pounder like Charley Taylor. But there are a lot of good athletes out there if you don’t put such stringent physical requirements on them.

“When we came to this program, we knew that to have a chance to compete, we couldn’t do the same things Texas and Arkansas and A&M; were doing. We couldn’t jam the ball down anyone’s throats with what we had. We didn’t have a big line and a great runner. But we had a lot of kids who could fly, and now we’re staying with it.”

The man in control of all those fabulous flyers -- four receivers and more than occasionally the set back go down field -- is a softspoken junior quarterback from Dickinson, Texas. Andre Ware is his name, and passing is definitely his game.

Originally recruited by Yeoman as a veer quarterback, Ware started playing regularly as a freshman until he broke his arm in midseason. But after three years, “I feel real comfortable with it,” Ware said.

Last year Ware set conference records with 25 touchdown passes, 39 completions in one game and 471 yards in another. Against UNLV, he threw for five touchdowns in the first half, another Southwest Conference mark, and completed 30 of 48 passes for 396 yards.

Pardee also is learning about the college game. His first year, his playbook was probably too thick and he had to remind himself that he also was coaching students who had to go to class. So he adjusted.

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He’s simplified things, scheduled team meetings whenever he could and made sure he had an assistant coach live in the team dormitory and another academic coordinator to make sure his players were going to class.

“He’s wonderful to play for,” Ware said. “He’s laid back, he doesn’t beat anything into you and he treats you like a man. It’s a pleasure to play for him, but you always know that if he tells you something, you better believe it because he means it. And he really wants to win.”

Some have speculated that Pardee really wants to get back into the National Football League. His last experience there was a bitter one, essentially fired by Jack Kent Cooke in 1980 over so-called philosophical differences with then-Redskins general manager Bobby Beathard.

Pardee does not like to dwell on that situation, though now, years later, he will admit that he might have made a mistake leaving the Bears for the Redskins in the first place. But he loved Washington, had a beautiful home and some land outside Middleburg, Va., and thought “I could spend the rest of my life there.

“That was the only job I ever lost in my life,” Pardee said. “I just went back there too soon. ... Looking back, I should have stayed in Chicago ... The owner (Cooke) didn’t hire me. He wanted it structured the way he wanted it. When I run something, I want to run it the way I want to run it.”

There has been speculation here that Pardee will not be at Houston very long. When Jackie Sherrill was fired at Texas A&M;, Pardee’s name was mentioned. There will always be talk about him going back to the pros, and even Pardee admits that he wonders why, after he left in 1980, no NFL owner ever called with a head-coaching job.

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“You wonder what criteria people have to hire a coach when you see some of the guys who have been hired,” he said, without naming names. “But I’ve never been a part of that fraternity. I was never being groomed or brought along.

“All I know is the good Lord has always provided for me. I’ve never had a set road. When one thing ends, another door seems to open. There’s no conspiracy against Jack Pardee, I’m sure not that paranoid to think that people are out to get me.”

No, Pardee has other priorities. He’s already licked cancer, once in 1964 when a melanoma on his arm almost killed him; again in 1986 when he needed surgery to remove a growth in the back of his neck.

“You can’t imagine how happy I am to be here,” Pardee said. “I enjoy the lifestyle, my wife is home. The school has been very good to me, and I’ve got a great bunch of kids to work with. Sure there are problems, but nothing you can’t solve. I’d like to have more depth, I’d like not to have to recruit so many junior-college kids. I’d like to go to a bowl and be on TV. But it will come.”

For Jack Pardee, it always has.

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