Bruins Get First Look at New Cardinal Look

To play college football, he had to start as a non-scholarship player at Michigan State. To coach football, he had to start as an assistant at Central Michigan.

To be a head coach, he had to start as the successor to a genius, Bill Walsh.

Good luck, Tyrone Willingham.

As it turns out, Willingham, against these odds, has fared quite well.

Combining a disciplined but inspirational style with a talented roster, Willingham has compiled a 4-1-1 record halfway through his first season as head coach at Stanford. His Cardinal heads into today’s game at Palo Alto against UCLA (4-2) with a national ranking of No. 23.

With quarterback Mark Butterfield at the controls, Willingham has put together an offense that ranks third in the Pacific 10 Conference in scoring at 30.7 points per game.

Impressive?

Consider that:

--Stanford’s record through five games, 4-0-1, was the team’s best since the 1951 squad that went to the Rose Bowl.

--The Cardinal’s current record of 4-1-1, following a 38-28 loss to Washington, is still the best start since 1991.

--Stanford has already won more games than it did last season under Walsh and as many as it did under Walsh the year before.

Legends aside, Willingham has not really had such a tough act to follow. It has been a couple of years since anybody has referred to Walsh as a genius. In his second tour of duty with the Cardinal, he couldn’t sustain the brilliance he had shown his first time around, and then with the San Francisco 49ers. After going 10-3 and beating Penn State in the Blockbuster Bowl in his first year back at Stanford, Walsh managed to go only 7-14-1 in his last two seasons. There were grumblings that he had lost touch with his players.

Enter Willingham. Usually soft-spoken but always tough, the new head coach can get his message across with a stare. The message has been delivered. The players know what is expected of them and have responded well, despite the installation of a rigorous conditioning program.

Willingham doesn’t like to talk about himself. When asked about following Walsh, he is quick to praise his predecessor and discourage any talk of trying to carve out his own identity.

“I’m not worried about trying to carve out anything,” Willingham said. “I’m trying to focus on the job at hand. And the job at hand, as I understand it, is to win football games and develop the young men here at Stanford as total people.”

Perhaps no one on the Cardinal has developed as impressively on the football field as Butterfield. Not highly regarded in his recruiting class, Butterfield had thrown only 51 passes in three years at Stanford while waiting for starter Steve Stenstrom to move on.

Now that Stenstrom is gone, Butterfield has quickly established himself as one of the Pac-10’s top quarterbacks. He is ranked fourth in the conference in passing this week, having completed 60.5% of his throws for 1,285 yards and 10 touchdowns with five interceptions.

“He has come out of nowhere,” UCLA Coach Terry Donahue said. “He was not someone who was ballyhooed by Stanford as their quarterback of the future. He looks like he has good skills. And he’s smart. You know he’s smart if he’s at Stanford.”

Willingham likes Butterfield’s toughness.

“He’s been very gutty, a street fighter-type player for us,” the coach said.

Complementing Butterfield is a balanced running attack that is averaging 159.6 yards a game. Between them, Anthony Bookman, Mike Mitchell and Greg Comella have accounted for seven rushing touchdowns.

Receiver Mark Harris is tied for third in the conference with 32 catches.

Stopping this offense figures to be a tough job for a UCLA defense that will be missing middle linebacker Donnie Edwards and defensive end Phillip Ward and will get only limited action out of defensive tackle Travis Kirschke. Edwards has a sore vertebrae, Ward an injured knee and Kirschke an injured ankle.

So a lot of the burden will fall on the Bruin offense in general and tailback Karim Abdul-Jabbar in particular. He is the conference’s leading rusher with 734 yards and a 122.3 yard-per-game average.

Freshman quarterback Cade McNown, coming off his worst performance of the season last week against Arizona, will try to regain his grip on the starting job.

Few envisioned McNown even coming as far as he has this season. But then, the same could be said of Tyrone Willingham.

UCLA Notes

The Donnie Edwards case is closed, as far as the NCAA is concerned. Edwards was suspended for last week’s game against Arizona, because of a violation involving a sports agent. That suspension came, however, only after the university had assured the NCAA that Edwards had recovered sufficiently from a compression fracture of the vertebrae to play. But after engaging in a contact drill this week, Edwards was ruled out of today’s game. “It’s up to the school and the coaches to decide to play him,” NCAA spokeswoman Kathryn Reith said. “As long as we had assurances from [team] doctors that he was able to play, we have to rely on that information. We don’t anticipate doing anything further.”

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TODAY’S GAME

UCLA BRUINS vs. STANFORD CARDINAL

* Site: Stanford Stadium.

* Time: 12:30 p.m.

* Records: UCLA 4-2, 1-2 in Pacific 10; Stanford 4-1-1, 2-1.

* TV: Channel 7.

* Radio: XTRA (690), KWNK (670).

* GAMES TO WATCH....C6