The Dawgfather

After a restless night's sleep, Don James awoke at 6:30 am on January 2, 1992 in a 14-floor suite at the Anaheim Marriott. It had been just 12 hours since James' Washington Huskies completed a perfect season with a thorough dismantling of the Michigan Wolverines in the Rose Bowl, and yet the coach and his wife, Carol, spent much of that night and early morning anxiously awaiting results from the final tabulation of the college football coaches' poll.

There was reason to fret: the Miami Hurricanes, who also completed a 12–0 season on New Year's Day, had already been declared the national champion in a vote of media members for the Associated Press poll. (It was the closest vote in the history of the wire service poll with Miami receiving 1,472 votes to claim No. 1; the Huskies received 1,468 points to finish No. 2.) As dawn approached on January 2, results from the CNN/USA TODAY coaches' poll had yet to be announced, and James believed that the delay was a bad omen for Washington. "We didn't get it," he said to Carol. "Nobody's got to nerve to call and give us the news."

Finally, at 6:41 am the phone rang. It was Bob Roller, an advertising executive representing the coaches' poll, and he had good news. Washington, he told James, was No. 1 in the coaches' poll — the Huskies were national champions.

James cried at the press conference later that morning. "It's just a great day in the life of a football coach," he said. "I'm emotional now ... It's so difficult to express the feelings I have for these kids. For them to not get a piece of this would have been a tragedy."

The Huskies' perfect 1991 season had a perfect ending for the most successful coach in UW history. He was affectionately nicknamed "the Dawgfather" and, to this day, more than two decades after his abrupt resignation as head coach, Don James remains synonymous with the dominance that the Huskies had when they reigned over the Pacific-10 Conference for much of his 18 years as head coach. "When all is said and done, Don James has no peers," said Don Heinrich, the Huskies' All-American quarterback from the 1950s who later became close with James. "He has taken a school that plays in the rain and brought it to a national power and success in bowl games. It gives him the recognition of what kind of coach he is. He ranks with the great ones. I equate him with Bear Bryant, who, in my opinion, was the top banana."

Funny story about James and Bryant, Alabama's Hall of Fame coach. In the 1960s, when James was an assistant coach at Florida State and Bryant was in the middle of his reign at Alabama, they had a chance meeting at the Miami airport one day. "We were walking at the Miami airport, and Don turned to me [and whispered], 'Carol, there's Bear Bryant,'" Carol recalled in a 2016 interview. "And as we got closer to him, he saw us and said, 'Well, hi there Don James, how are you?' And he shook his hand. And they talked for a couple minutes, and when he walked away he said, 'Carol, I think I've arrived in coaching.'"

It was a seminal moment for the young coach. Some three decades later, James received the Bear Bryant Award as college football's Coach of the Year after leading the Huskies to that perfect season in 1991. "When he got that award," Carol said, "it was really meaningful to Don. It meant a lot to him."

And yet James was not the first choice to become the UW coach in 1974. He wasn't the fourth choice either. The search to find the successor to longtime coach Jim Owens lasted nearly a month. It was December of 1974, and UW athletic department administrators considered about 120 candidates for the job. That list was whittled down to about a dozen serious candidates, a handful of whom were brought to Seattle for interviews.

California Bears coach Mike White and former Green Bay Packers coach Dan Devine were among those who turned down UW's initial offers. The 41-year-old James, who had just completed his fourth season in his first head coaching job at Kent State, was largely unknown in the Northwest. When Don and Carol arrived in Seattle to formally interview for the job on December 20, 1974, the marquee at Husky Stadium greeted them with the message: "Welcome Don Jones." Oops.

Don was offered the job two days before Christmas. A few days after the holiday, James flew from Ohio out to Seattle. A couple...