Now That He Is Signed, Holmoe Set to Deliver

Tom Holmoe was trying to do the right thing for the right reason.

Robert Berdahl, California’s chancellor, and John Kasser, the university’s athletic director, also were trying to do the right thing for the right reason.

And everybody learned that two rights can make a wrong in college football, when so many people figure the right thing is a weakness, there to be exploited like a cornerback who runs a six-second 40 or a lineman who can’t bench-press a math book.

For more than a year, Holmoe had a contract extension in his desk, the result of his bosses believing that he was doing things the right way at Cal, making players go to class and recruiting people who tend to stay off police blotters.

For more than a year his refusal to sign it was admirable.

He didn’t deserve it because citizenship was one thing, but it didn’t pay off in bowl games. The Pacific 10 Conference standings don’t list grade-point averages and graduation rates.

“You shouldn’t reward mediocrity,” he said, though his 12-21 record as coach coming into this season was more on the miserable side of mediocrity.

“I didn’t feel at the time that I should sign it. And I thought it was a private matter.”

It became a public matter in August, when the Bears opened training camp in Turlock for their fourth season under Holmoe, who came to the job with a five-year contract. These were his players now, recruited as an assistant and then as the coach, and it was time for an accounting.

He was called one of five Pac-10 coaches in vocational jeopardy--Arizona’s Dick Tomey, Arizona State’s Bruce Snyder, Washington State’s Mike Price and USC’s Paul Hackett were the others--and Holmoe’s situation was particularly perilous because his days were numbered.

Such coaches are carrion, there to be feasted on by opponents trying to lure fast wideouts with hands or linebackers who can take on a truck, one-on-one.

Holmoe, a decent sort whose professorial demeanor belies his work as a big hitter in the 49ers’ defensive secondary in his younger days, is a good recruiter whose last couple of classes have been promising. But lately he was having to answer questions from parents, who were repeating what they had heard from other coaches at other schools.

“We were hearing it from players,” Holmoe acknowledged, and that’s one of the reasons that on Friday, just before the Bears defeated Utah, 24-21, in their season opener, he agreed to a one-year extension, through the 2002 season.

Another reason is the job at Brigham Young being vacated by LaVell Edwards, who retires after this season. Holmoe, an alumnus, was believed on the BYU short list. On Friday, that list got shorter without his name.

And still another is that he likes his bosses.

“They go against the grain of college athletics,” he said. “There’s been too much change here, and they want stability.”

Said Kasser: “If you look at our 27 athletics programs at Cal, the most successful ones are the ones where the coaches have been there for a long time.”

Cal, in effect, is showing support for a young program, for players who came to Berkeley to play for Holmoe and who would wind up confused and abandoned should he and the staff be cut adrift.

“They put emphasis on the kids, on the student-athlete, and not just the athlete,” Holmoe said.

Everybody pays lip service to the student-athlete, but extending the employ of a coach who is 13-21 going into a game Saturday at Illinois is putting a contract where your mouth is.

The usual cliches flew.

“I would want my son to play for him,” said Berdahl, saying what any university head would say, perhaps with the exception of Myles Brand at Indiana.

The chancellor also said, “There are more important things to this university than just wins and losses,” a somewhat naive, if perhaps admirable, way to look at college football.

So pressure is off Holmoe for a bit, though he didn’t feel its release until after dispatching Utah in his fourth consecutive season-opening victory. That the Bears blew much of a 17-point lead in the second half made everybody sweat.

“It would have been a tough public relations thing if we had lost after having a lead like that,” Holmoe said.

From here, he continues to recruit and to put his reputation in the hands of sophomore quarterback Kyle Boller, who showed the maturity of a one-year veteran by connecting with Phillip Pipersburg on a 45-yard pass on his first play Saturday.

Boller fumbled the snap on his first play as a callow freshman.

He has learned.

So has Holmoe.

“I was just trying to do the right thing,” he said of turning down the contract extension.

And when he learned that doing the right thing was the wrong thing, he settled the matter in the only way possible, allowing his security to bring security to kids who want to go to Cal.

PAC-10 BITES

From Rick Neuheisel, whose Washington Huskies beat Miami on Saturday to add to a Pac-10 resume that includes victories over Alabama (by UCLA) and Penn State (USC): “To say the Pac-10 is back is to say it was gone. I don’t think the Pac-10 was ever gone. . . . We took our lumps in bowl games . . . but it did serve as a chance to rally as a conference--coaches, athletic directors and even presidents.”

The Pac-10 is 12-3 against nonconference opponents in the season’s opening weeks.

From Oregon State Coach Dennis Erickson, whose team is 2-0, with victories over Eastern Washington and New Mexico, and is idle this week: “We’re not playing very well. . . . I think 3-4 years ago, these might have been good wins for us, but not now.”

Washington State is said to be trying to lure Notre Dame into a game at Seattle, knowing the Irish--like most teams that have a choice--won’t play at Pullman.