Cable Links Idaho Past With Future
Sometimes it seems like riding a life ring in a hurricane, but you have to admire the buoyancy of University of Idaho football.
The scenery is nothing if not liquid. At the moment, the Vandals find themselves lame-ducking a segue from membership in the Big West Conference to a way station in the Sun Belt to points unknown, possibly even unmapped. Their own playing address is kind of a wherever-we-hang-our-helmets deal, and the turnstile count has become every bit as important as the final score. As it’s been for three decades, there’s a coaching search every 4.29 years.
And yet with each change of coaches, the Vandals seem to refine the notion of security, if not stability.
Although Tom Cable certainly exudes stability.
He has that old offensive lineman’s way about him - that low center of gravity both physically and emotionally, that value in which work is regarded as the fun part. He is another link in the Idaho lineage, to be sure, but he does not come on like a briefcase guy or a Jeff Foxworthy charmer or a candidate for Jobhoppers Anonymous, all of which the Vandals have employed - and thrived with - over the years.
John Goodman plays him in the movie - made-for-Cable, as it were.
He is, of course, an Idaho grad, but then so was the guy who came before him - the first, as it happened, to hold the job since sometime before World War II. The difference, and it may be of no particular significance, is that Cable - sort of a utility lineman Dennis Erickson had pulled out of his old backyard in Snohomish - was one of the grunts who pushed the rock up the hill and then sent it rolling down the other said.
From four winning seasons in 40 years, the Vandals became winners, well, every year.
And Tom Cable is very definitely a man of that time.
“I got in my car to come to college and I was 17,” Cable recalled. “All he really said was, `You go out there and do your best and grow up.’ I had five and a half hours to think about that. And, really, that’s what college is about. Being a scholarship football player and all that is great, but this place made me responsible, it made me a man and it’s allowed me a chance to succeed in this world.
“I don’t know how you can ever think something like that isn’t great.”
Cable had just presided over his first Silver-and-Gold spring game Friday night, watching his first-stringers run it up on the other-stringers. It was business, but also funny business - Cable ordering defensive end Ryan Knowles out to field a kickoff, which caromed farther off his pads than it had traveled in the air, and the beleaguered Silver coaches trying to sneak a receiver on the field in mid-play.
With a third of the team inactive due to injury or inattention to academics, conclusions were mostly irrelevant. The connection Cable made this spring, however, was not.
He has been through transitions before as an assistant and has learned that job one is “building trust.”
“You just don’t know what they’ve been taught before,” he said. “I know Chris Tormey and he’s a good person and a good coach and he did a fine job, but when you put your own twist on things, there’s going to be some changes and there has to be an exchange of trust.
“You hope that by the time you get to the first game, you’ve got it. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Where I came from last year, Colorado, we went through changes when coach (Gary) Barnett came in and we didn’t handle it until about the fifth game of the season. And it showed. We were a different team after that than we were earlier in the year.”
While the Buffaloes were trying to find an identity, the Vandals were ceding some of theirs. Even with 18 starters back from their Humanitarian Bowl team, they stumbled in the last month of the season, including a galling loss in Pullman to Boise State.
“I know they’re proud here of what they did two years ago, and there are still a lot of kids in the program who were part of that,” Cable said. “I also know they’re disappointed in what happened last year. There is definitely some hunger here.”
Cable seems a likely candidate to tap into that, if only because he remembers a different kind of hunger in the program in which he played.
He is certainly not without vision. Already he has stressed that the Vandals must get “more massive on the line of scrimmage.” It is hard to think of lineups with Rick DeMulling on one side of the ball and Wil Beck on the other as not being massive enough, but the fact is the Vandals are playing a Pac-10 schedule next fall - and in the future - as much as they’re playing a Big West one.
You know what they say. Go big, or go home.
“This isn’t Florida State or Michigan,” Cable said, “but our program goals are no different: get a degree, and get a ring.”
But it’s obvious Cable has another goal, too: Staying in touch with what Idaho has been. Whatever has changed in the town and the program in the past 18 years, he was ecstatic to find upon his return here that some things haven’t.
Specifically, the people.
“My Vandal parents, Don and Betty Bennett, are still living in Genessee,” he said. “That’s something the NCAA doesn’t let you do anymore, but when I came here, they would give you a host family and at times during the playoffs when you couldn’t go home, they’d have you out for Thanksgiving dinner. Or even if you just needed a family to talk to, you could call them up.
“And the guy I worked for in the summers, John Moore at John’s Radiator - it was John’s Saw Shop then. He’s one of those guys who’s the salt of the earth - what Moscow, Idaho, is all about. He was raised here, stayed here, built a business, put three kids through Idaho.
“He’s special. If things get crazy, and the phone’s ringing off the hook, and I need to, I can get out of the football office and go over to the radiator shop and just talk about whatever. Nobody’s calling me to do this or that.”
A life ring in a hurricane. Looks as if both Cable and the Vandals have found what they want.