Wulff familiar with ISU faces
There should be quite a run on renewed acquaintances Saturday afternoon when 25th-ranked Eastern Washington kicks off its Big Sky Conference football schedule against Idaho State in Pocatello, Idaho.
First-year ISU coach John Zamberlin and three of his assistants spent time on the staff at Eastern. Zamberlin, defensive coordinator Brian Strandley and safeties coach Steve Amrine have all worked either under or alongside Eagles head coach Paul Wulff.
“It should be fun,” Wulff said of meeting up with his old friends in Holt Arena before the game. “There are definitely a lot of connections between the two coaching staffs.”
Zamberlin, who left Central Washington to replace Larry Lewis as the Bengals’ head coach in mid-December, was an assistant for two years at Eastern, serving under Dick Zornes in 1993 and Mike Kramer in 1994. Wulff, who is in his eighth year as the Eagles’ head coach, was a volunteer assistant on Zornes’ last EWU team in 1993 and was promoted to the full-time position of offensive line and strength coach by Kramer the following year.
Strandley, a four-year starter and defensive standout at Idaho (1991-94), spent the 2006 season at Eastern as Wulff’s defensive line coach. And Amrine, who earned his undergraduate degree from EWU, was a student assistant for the Eagles from 1993-95 and worked with both Wulff and Zamberlin.
In addition, Bengals defensive coordinator Mike Orthmann, another EWU alumnus, spent the 1992 season as a graduate assistant under Zornes at Eastern. Orthmann left the following year and was replaced by Wulff.
Even Zamberlin’s decision to take the ISU job impacted the Eagles, because Beau Baldwin – who spent the previous four years as Wulff’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Eastern – left the program to take over for Zamberlin at Central Washington.
Eagles deal with injuries
Along with having already lost three free safeties to season-ending injuries, EWU will probably also be without the services of starting defensive tackle Lance Witherspoon and backup tight end Nathan Overbay for Saturday’s game.
Witherspoon is listed as questionable with an ankle injury suffered in last Saturday’s 41-31 non-conference win over UC Davis, and Overbay is out indefinitely after separating his shoulder in the same game.
Limping to the altar
Weber State safety Beau Hadley knew he was cutting it close when he scheduled his wedding for Friday, Aug. 31, the day after the Wildcats were to open their season on the road against Boise State.
The team was not scheduled to leave Boise until Friday morning, but Hadley had arranged to make the four-hour drive back to Ogden, Utah, immediately after the game in order to make his morning wedding.
As it turned out, the time crunch was the least of Hadley’s worries, according to an item on the school’s Web site.
The sophomore starter broke his tibia during the second quarter of the Wildcats’ 56-7 loss to the Broncos and missed the rest of the game. But he still managed to make his wedding and went through the entire ceremony wearing a leg splint on his broken non-weight bearing bone.
Hadley will probably miss at least four more weeks of the football season because of his untimely injury.
Grizzly pleads not guilty
Montana’s suspended cornerback Jimmy Wilson pleaded not guilty in a Los Angeles courtroom earlier to week to murder charges stemming from the shooting death of his aunt’s 29-year-old boyfriend over the summer.
The incident took place in Lancaster, Calif., on June 3.
The Associated Press reported that Wilson, from Pasadena, Calif., remains in custody in a Los Angeles jail on $2 million bond and is scheduled to appear in court again Thursday for a pretrial hearing.
Wilson surrendered to authorities on June 12 and was suspended from the Montana football team a few days later.
Quick kicks
With a win over Idaho State on Saturday, Eastern could equal its win total of last season when it finished 3-8. … Idaho State has registered eight sacks in two games this fall and is on pace to finish the season with 48 – or 27 more than it had last year. … Montana State drew a home-opening record crowd of 14,217 to last Saturday’s 61-7 rout of Dixie State – its largest for a home game not involving Montana. … The 10 sacks registered by Sacramento State in last Saturday’s 35-24 loss to Portland State broke the single-game school record by three.