Safety Tony Bouie (far right) and linebacker Sean Harris (top) were part of Arizona's 1990 recruiting class.

It’s football signing day, and the fun of it is to get caught up in all the hope, all the rankings. Somewhat sadly for Arizona, those rankings are expected to be fairly average.

Whatever.

The thing is, you just never know how these classes are going to work out. (Related: Cats get three signing day surprises.

Several seasons ago, I wrote a story for the Tucson Citizen that revisted what is almost inarguably Arizona’s greatest recruiting class ever. I reached into the archives for the story from February 2005, which is posted below in its near entirety (taking out parts that are now irrelevant).

It is, to me, nearly impossible to believe it has been 20 years since these guys signed, but, anyway, here is the story …

* * *

In 1990, Dick Tomey signed 24 players in a class that had some sizzle — including Parade All-Americans Mike Ciasca and Chuck Levy — but was largely relegated to the middle of the Pacific-10 Conference by recruiting analysts.

The headline in the Tucson Citizen read: “UA recruits get ‘average’ tag.”

Average?

“There was a lot of attitude in my class,” said Rob Waldrop, a defensive tackle who became the cornerstone of the Desert Swarm defenses.

“You couldn’t tell us that we couldn’t do something. We knew we were going to be better than a lot of people who were already there, and I think that rubbed some of the older guys wrong sometimes. But we knew we would change things.”

Individually, the group is without peer in the history of UA football and, judging by the postseason honors, would rank as one of the best in the Pac-10.

The class signed in early 1990 featured:

**Two national award winners: Waldrop (Outland Trophy, Football Writers Association of America defensive player of the year) and place-kicker Steve McLaughlin (Lou Groza Award).

**Four All-Americans: Waldrop, McLaughlin, free safety Tony Bouie and punter Josh Miller.

**Five first-team All-Pac-10 players: Waldrop, McLaughlin, Bouie, Miller and linebacker Sean Harris.

**Two second-team All-Pac-10 players: Wide receiver Terry Vaughn and offensive lineman Mike Heemsbergen.

The depth of the class was also impressive, with starters such as offensive linemen Mike Ciasca, Pulu Poumele and Mu Tagoai, defensive end Richard Maddox, defensive back Mike Scurlock and several others, including Vincent Smith, a mammoth transfer from Colorado.

“Anybody would be hard-pressed to point to any class at any school during the period we were at Arizona and say that that class had a better result,” Tomey said.

Collectively, this group would provide the main thrust to Tomey’s best days in his 14-year UA career, including a 16-3 victory over No. 1 Washington in 1992, a co-Pac-10 title in 1993, a 29-0 shutout of Miami in the 1994 Fiesta Bowl and the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 1994 season preview issue.

How did Arizona pull it off?

The recruiting pitch was simple.

Tomey had just completed his third season and was coming off a 17-10 Copper Bowl victory over North Carolina State, only the second bowl win in school history.

“You know, they weren’t overselling anything. That was the neat thing,” said Ciasca, who was rated the top offensive lineman in the country by SuperPrep magazine.

“Michigan, USC, Florida State … they were selling tradition, ‘we’ve done it, we’ll do it again.’ One of the things that stood out in my mind was the chance to be the first to start the history, to not just be a spoke in the wheel.

“It was all the same pitch to everybody. We all bought into the fact that we wanted to be the first.”

Tomey’s plain talk appealed to Waldrop, even if the coach might have taken the regular-guy approach a bit too far.

“Tomey came into my house on a recruiting visit, opened the fridge and pulled out a carrot cake and starting eating it,” Waldrop said. “Who was I to argue? I mean, he must have been comfortable.”

Ciasca led a large Tucson contingent that included Harris and his uncle (but more like a brother) Lamar, who were considered “at-risk” academically but earned degrees. Ciasca’s teammate, Joe Lohmeier, suffered a broken leg in his senior season of high school, but Tomey visited him in the hospital and assured him he still had a scholarship.

In all, six local high school players signed with the Wildcats, most of whom weren’t heavily recruited.

“I think back then, diamonds in the rough were what we were looking for,” said former UA assistant coach and recruiting coordinator Bill Morgan, now the Arizona athletic department’s compliance director.

“We had a good feeling about so many in that class. There was a kind of a satisfaction when it was over. And then we got them here in August for camp and some of the luster goes off and you say, ‘Hey, he doesn’t look as tall as when we were recruiting him.’”

Waldrop and Vaughn were a couple of the instant hits, playing as true freshmen. Others took longer to develop.

“The first time I saw Josh Miller punt — and we laugh about it to this day — he was awful,” Tomey said.

Much of the class signed in 1990 was rushed into duty as redshirt freshmen in 1991, when injuries decimated the starting lineup. By early 1992, it was all systems go, and an 8-7 loss at No. 1 Miami — when the Wildcats were four-touchdown underdogs — signaled that the class had arrived.

“Something happened on that trip,” Waldrop said. “Everyone just let loose. We lost, but we destroyed them statistically. That is where a lot of frustration came out.”

It was this class that propelled Arizona to the second-most overall victories (71) in the Pac-10 during the 1990s.

“I think that the run in the 1990s is probably underappreciated in Tucson, but as time goes on it will be looked at as a real outstanding decade of football for Arizona,” Tomey said. “And, no question, this class really helped get it going.”

Related links from the TucsonCitizen.com Sports Network:

Brad Allis, Wildcat Sports Report: Cats mostly fill their needs, Part I

Brad Allis, Wildcat Sports Report: Cats mostly fill their needs, Part II

It was the week before the 1998 Holiday Bowl, and Arizona coach Dick Tomey was riding a theme.

Arizona defenders bring down Nebraska's Shevin Wiggins in the 1998 Holiday Bowl/Tucson Citizen photo

That “N” on the Nebraska helmet?

“He kept telling us the ‘N’ stood for ‘Not today,’” remembered Brandon Nash, a receiver/special teams player on the 1998 Wildcats who is now a local sportscaster.

“Every time we saw that helmet, he wanted us to think, ‘Not today, not today.’ You look back at that now, and it sounds so corny, but that has stuck with me forever and it was very motivating back then.”

It worked.

Dec. 30, 1998, was not Nebraska’s day.

It was Arizona’s.

The Wildcats won 23-20 in a thrilling Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Arizona scored two touchdowns in the final quarter, including a 1-yard plunge by Kelvin Eafon with 6:08 left.

On Nebraska’s next possession, freshman quarterback Eric Crouch, who would go on to win the 2001 Heisman Trophy, threw deep over the middle on third-and-11 from the UA 46.

Arizona’s All-American cornerback Chris McAlister made a leaping interception, and UA secured the victory by running off all but the final 34 seconds.

That was so fitting. McAlister started the season with a kickoff return for a touchdown at Hawaii, and he basically ended the season with another big play.

“This is the happiest and saddest time of my life,” McAlister said after the game.

“This was a tremendous win for the University of Arizona, and that makes me very happy. But I’ll never get to strap on my helmet as a Wildcat again … and that’s the sad part. I can’t believe it’s over.”

The interception put the final touch on a 12-1 season — the school’s best-ever record — and the Wildcats finished fourth in both major polls.

“That game felt different than any game I played in at Arizona,” said quarterback Keith Smith, who now lives in southern California.

“It kind of felt like what I thought the Super Bowl would feel like. It was like the lights were brighter. It was different.

“It was definitely fun to play in. It was probably the most fun I had in a football game.”

The lights were a little brighter. At the time, it was ESPN’s most-watched bowl game ever. No Holiday Bowl since then has been as highly rated.

“To this day, anywhere I go, walking around here in California, they bring that game up,” Smith said. “They can tell me more about the game than I can.”

UA took a 9-0 lead on three field goals from Mark McDonald, but Nebraska led 13-9 at halftime, with its touchdown coming on a 45-yard pass to Shevin Wiggins.

Arizona would have led, but McAlister had a 78-yard punt return for a touchdown called back because of a questionable block-in-the-back penalty against Derek Hall. Tomey called it an “awful call.”

Hall said after the game that the official later told him that it might have been a clean block.
“And (he) kinda winked at me,” Hall said.

The score stayed 13-9 until the fourth quarter, when Smith hit Brad Brennan on a 15-yard touchdown pass.

“The first thing I think about in that game is Brad Brennan’s catch,” Smith said. “There was a lot of pressure at that point of the game.

“We kind of looked at each other, and he broke off his route into a skinny post. I knew I had to zip it in there, and I threw it as hard as I could.

“He split two defenders and was excited to come out of that thing alive.”

UA’s defense had dared Crouch to throw all game, devoting an extra linebacker to play across Nebraska’s interior offensive line for run support. UA held the option-based attack to a measly 87 rushing yards.

Crouch, who was the Huskers’ leading rusher with 28 yards on 15 carries, completed just 12 of 28 passes.

“Nebraska was always a team you wanted to play, wanted to beat,” Smith said.

“We were confident. We said, ‘We belong on the field with these guys. They should be excited to play us.’”

Arizona’s team was filled with NFL talent — including three who are still in the NFL — cornerback McAlister, receiver Dennis Northcutt and tight end Brandon Manumaleuna. Offensive lineman Edwin Mulitalo had a long pro career.

Several others played in the NFL, including first-round running back Trung Canidate, defensive end Joe Tafoya, linebacker Marcus Bell, linebacker DaShon Polk, tight end Mike Lucky, offensive lineman Yusuf Scott, tight end/H-back Paul Shields and receiver Jeremy McDaniel.

Several others played professionally somewhere — such as quarterbacks Smith and Ortege Jenkins, Eafon and defensive lineman Daniel Greer — or made it to NFL camps.

No doubt, Arizona’s program was rolling. It had 17 returning starters for the 1999 season and was such a hot property that ABC picked the Cats to open at Penn State in the Pigskin Classic.

Alas . . .

The Penn State game was a 41-7 disaster, and the Wildcats faded in 1999 and 2000, missing out on the postseason and leading to Tomey’s departure.

“It would have been nice to build on that momentum and do better things after that,” said center Bruce Wiggins, who was a sophomore starter for the Holiday Bowl team.

“But we’ll always have ’98.”

The hiring of John Mackovic in 2000 sank the program lower. Then came Mike Stoops. His massive rebuilding project took a significant step with last season’s Las Vegas Bowl victory over BYU.

And now another step — an 8-4 regular season and, 11 years later, a rematch with Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl.

The Wildcats can only hope that the “N” on those helmets still stands for “Not today.”

Writer’s note: My first version of this story originally appeared in the Tucson Citizen in August 2008. I tweaked a few things and added a new ending.

Dick Tomey gave Arizona football fans Desert Swarm, Tedy Bruschi, a team of Joes, Mike Streidnig up the middle, the I-bone, Chris McAlister, the Leap by the Lake, playing with your hair on fire, the Fiesta Bowl, the Holiday Bowl, Rob Waldrop, the fumblerooski, the Sports Illustrated cover, the tie that felt like a win, “Burn the Boats,” wins you’ll always remember, losses you can’t forget and teams that fought like the dickens.

Tomey at San Jose State/Photo courtesy of San Jose State sports information

That’s only part of how I remember him.

I got to thinking about all this last night because the news leaked that Tomey, at 71, will announce his retirement Monday as the head coach at San Jose State, bringing an end to 46 years in the coaching profession. Bless him.

I still remember meeting Tomey for the first time. It was the spring of 1991, and I was a way-too-green 23-year-old football beat reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, recently plucked off the copy desk.

I was in his little office at McKale Center. I mean, if Mike Stoops thinks he and his assistants have it bad now in their relatively palatial add-on to McKale, they should have seen how little head room there was before he arrived.

Anyway, I sat on the couch, Tomey pulled up a chair and, to his credit, I never once saw him roll his eyes or look at his watch as I asked my silly questions, tediously going through every position group.

I have always thought that a lesser coach, a lesser man, could have chewed up a rookie reporter, been intimidating, made the job unbearable or made it something other than fun.

It never happened.

Over the next several years — from a 38-14 loss at Ohio State to start the 1991 season to the 23-20 victory over Nebraska in the 1998 Holiday Bowl — Tomey and I developed what I would consider a good working relationship.

That didn’t stop me from criticizing some decisions and it didn’t stop him from pulling me aside or calling me at home (on Thanksgiving!) to say some of my stories were “horsesh–” — which must be his favorite curse word — but if there was thing I learned from Tomey it was this:

Say what you have to say … and then let it go.

It works in football, more so in life.

I actually learned a lot from Tomey. Most of what I think a coach should be, how he should act, how he should respond to adversity, how he should motivate, came from him.

But it is his common decency — or, perhaps his uncommon decency — that I most appreciate and admire.

When he was hired at San Jose State in late December 2004, he said he “unceremoniously left Tucson,” which is another way of saying he resigned under pressure, which is another way of saying he was fired.

But he never stopped being a Wildcat.

Just as I can’t forget my first meeting with Tomey, I know my most recent encounter with him will resonate forever.

Tomey and about 150 other Wildcats spanning five decades traveled to Phoenix in February of 2008 to attend a fundraiser for Tony Bouie, an Arizona All-American safety in 1993 and 1994 who was fighting stage-four lymphoma. (He is doing fine now.)

After a day of $300-a-round golf at the Arizona Biltmore Golf Club, most of the group and other guests ate dinner outside and participated in an auction. Near the end, Tomey got up and spoke for a few minutes on what it meant to be a Wildcat.

Earlier, he had told me, “You coach to win, but you also coach to have a team that feels strongly about one another and is brought together for a lifetime. This is illustrative of the fact that this bunch of guys, and the people who coached them, succeeded in that endeavor. That’s really what it is all about.”

As the evening wrapped up, Tomey led everybody in singing “Bear Down, Arizona,” and, journalistic objectivity be damned, if you didn’t have goosebumps, you didn’t have a heartbeat.

When he leaves San Jose State at the end of the season and retires to his home in Hawaii,
he’ll have been a Rainbow Warrior, a Wildcat and a Spartan across a successful head coaching career.

He’ll have been a lot of other things along the journey and meant a lot of things to a lot of people … even to a little ol’ sportswriter.

Washington will play Arizona next Saturday on a two-game losing streak, including Saturday’s thrilling-to-watch overtime loss at Notre Dame.

Now, do those two losses make Washington angry and hungry? Or it has it deflated the Huskies’ confidence after they beat USC?

Washington junior quarterback Jake Locker was so upset after the loss that he asked to not speak to media for the first time ever.

Last week, Scott Terrell of our partner UAsports.net figured it was best to root for Notre Dame because “I’m playing the ‘I hope the Huskies face the Cats riding a two-game losing streak with their confidence in the toilet’ card,” he wrote.

Doesn’t matter to me. It’s hard enough to predict games without trying to predict a team’s emotional mindset. Let’s just call next week’s game in Seattle another major tussle … and go from there.

That’s the way the Pac-10 is. With the exception of its game against Washington State, Arizona can expect to play seven more games like the one against Oregon State — hard-fought, physical, down to the wire.

You either make a handful of plays and win.

Or you don’t and lose.

The Huskies could have/should have beaten Notre Dame — how in the world did the officials take a late TD away from Washington on a replay ruling? — and will be kicking themselves for getting stuffed repeatedly at the goal line.

I wouldn’t expect any hangover. A night game Saturday at Husky Stadium will be the cure.

“If you take anything for granted, you’re going to get slapped around,” UA coach Mike Stoops said during the bye week. “We understand. We’re not good enough to beat anybody unless we’re at our absolute best.”

I’m writing this as the USC-Cal game is beginning, and one of those teams — who were Nos. 1-2 in the league in my mind before the season began — will have two league losses later tonight. That is the brink of elimination in the Pac-10 race. (No three-loss team has ever won the conference.)

But look who’s on top: Stanford. The Cardinal is 3-0 after Saturday’s 24-16 win over UCLA. As UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel said last week about Stanford’s physical play: “You better put on your big-boy pads.”

Former UA coach Dick Tomey, whose San Jose State team has lost to USC and Stanford this season, was asked about the Trojans last week on a podcast at the Tucson-based radioexiles.com. Tomey instead talked about the Cardinal.

“We played Stanford, and I think Stanford may well be a better team,” Tomey said. “Stanford is a very good team.”

Stanford has its toughest challenges ahead, but will be a tough out. Same thing about the Huskies next week. Same thing for most teams every week. I hope Arizona got a good rest during its off week.

* * *

Next Saturday’s game at Washington is set for 7:15 p.m. and will be shown locally on Fox Sports Net Arizona, although the announcers will be from Fox’s Northwest crew. UA’s home game against Stanford will either start at 12:30 p.m. (on ABC) or at 4:30 p.m. (on Versus).

* * *

Washington lost starting free safety Justin Glenn, a redshirt freshman, to a broken fibula against Notre Dame. The Huskies might also be without their starting strong safety against Arizona. Nate Williams suffered a concussion against the Irish. Big-play receiver D’Andre Goodwin also suffered a concussion.

* * *

I was surprised at this stat, given how mediocre Notre Dame has been recently: Including the overtime victory against Washington, the Irish have won nine consecutive games against Pac-10 teams not named USC.

Anyway, Notre Dame’s streak against the Pac-10 dates to an Oregon State victory over the Irish in the 2004 Insight Bowl. For what it’s worth, the Irish have won 14 consecutive regular-season games against non-USC competition from the Pac-10.

Granted, most of the opponents haven’t been the best Notre Dame has to offer, but this is a team that has lost to Syracuse, Air Force and Navy in recent seasons. Here is the list of Notre Dame’s Pac-10 conquests in its nine-game streak: