(NOTE: Information from this article was previously published on Aug. 29, 2021)
When Jedd Fisch took the field for the first time with Arizona back in 2021, he wasn’t just making his UA debut but also as a head coach. And considering the roster he had at his disposal, that first result wasn’t too shabby.
Too bad it wasn’t indicative of how that first season would go, as the Wildcats ended up starting 0-8 before snapping a school-record 20-game losing streak a few months later en route to a 1-11 campaign.
That was by far the worst debut season for a UA head coach in the modern era, and also marked the second consecutive coach to lose their opener. Before that, four straight coaches won their first game.
Another debut is on the horizon, as in just over three weeks Brent Brennan will coach his first game with the Wildcats since he was a graduate assistant in 2000 in the final year of the Dick Tomey era.
Dating back to 1969, when Arizona was in the Western Athletic Conference, UA coaches are 4-5 in their debuts. And scoring has been limited in those openers, with an average of 17.6 points per game and none more than the 31 scored by the Wildcats in Jim Young’s premiere in 1973.
Below is a breakdown of how Arizona’s first games under new coaches have gone, along with what happened after that:
1969 — Weber falls flat after promotion
Bob Weber had served as offensive coordinator under previous coach Darrell Mudra, who left to coach Western Illinois—a Division II school at the time, to give you an idea of how the Arizona job was viewed. Weber’s first game in charge produced a lone touchdown in a 23-7 loss at Wyoming, part of an 0-4 start to a 3-7 campaign.
Weber went 16-26 in his four years with the Wildcats, never posting a winning record, and was the first Arizona coach to be fired since Ed Doherty was canned in 1958.
1973 — Young shines instantly
Brought in from Michigan, where he’d been Bo Schembechler’s defensive coordinator, Jim Young had a breeze of a debut in the form of a 31-0 win at Colorado State. Arizona started 5-0 and finished 8-3, sharing the Western Athletic Conference title with ASU (whom it lost to in the regular-season finale).
Young followed that up with back-to-back 9-2 records, putting him on the radar of bigger programs. After a rebuilding year in 1976 he left for Purdue and later Army, getting inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999.
1977 — Mason can’t manage
Its coach having been poached by another school, Arizona kept the coaching carousel moving by hiring Cincinnati’s Tony Mason off an 8-3 season as an independent. The Wildcats began Mason’s first season with a trip to Auburn, losing 21-10 en route to a 5-7 record.
Mason only had one winning record in his three-year run in Tucson, that coming in 1979 when Arizona went 6-5-1 with a loss to Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl that would prove to be the coach’s final game. He retired not long after.
1980 — Smith starts slow
A 9-3 record at Tulane helped get Larry Smith the Arizona job, but going from an independent program to one in the Pac-10 proved an uphill battle early. The Wildcats’ 15-13 loss to Colorado State in Smith’s debut was the first of four consecutive home defeats in a 5-6 season.
It was nothing year-over-year improvement for Arizona under Smith after that, though, maybe too much. The Wildcats had winning records in the league and overall each subsequent season, topping out at 9-3 in 1986 with an Aloha Bowl win over North Carolina.
Smith rode the wave of that last season over to Los Angeles, where he was hired by USC and coached six seasons there and then another seven at Missouri. He was the last UA coach in any sport to leave for another college head coaching job until 2021 when soccer coach Tony Amato (Florida) and baseball coach Jay Johnson (LSU) jumped for those SEC paychecks.
1987 — Tomey loses low-scoring affair
Defense was Dick Tomey’s bread and butter during his 14 seasons at Arizona, so it’s no surprise the Wildcats were in a rock fight in their first game under the program’s winningest coach. A 15-14 home loss to Iowa marked the start of Tomey’s tenure, one of six games in which Arizona would hold its opponents to 17 or fewer points.
A few bounces here and there and Arizona could have had a much better record than 4-4-3 that season, tying two of its last three games.
Arizona’s best two seasons in modern history—a 10-2 record in 1993 and the 12-1 mark in 1998—came under Tomey, who was forced out after the 2000 season when the Wildcats dropped five straight following a 5-1 start.
2001 — Mackovic peaks early
Out of coaching since being fired at Texas four years earlier, John Mackovic’s arrival in Tucson drew mixed reviews. A 3-0 start in 2001 won over some people but not the ones who were well aware the wins at San Diego State, Idaho and UNLV came against teams that would go 8-25.
Reality set in when Pac-10 play began, with Arizona dropping its next five and finishing 5-6. That was its best record under Mackovic, who went 4-8 in 2002 and then was fired after a 1-4 start to 2003 that included to LSU, Oregon and Purdue by a combined 136 points.
Mike Hankwitz coached out the string, going 1-6.
2004 — Stoops squeaks by
Previously the defensive coordinator at Oklahoma under brother Bob, Mike Stoops inherited a near-bare cupboard from Mackovic and that showed in consecutive 3-8 records in his first two seasons with Arizona. Even his debut game showed how difficult the rebuilding project was going to be, as the Wildcats struggled with FCS foe Northern Arizona (but didn’t lose, so at least there’s that.
The 21-3 win was a four-point game entering the fourth quarter before Mike Bell scored his second rushing touchdown and Kris Heavner connected with Syndric Steptoe on a TD pass. Arizona then lost seven in a row, starting 0-5 in conference play before winning two of three including an upset of ASU.
Stoops didn’t post a winning record until 2008, doing so three years in a row, but a 1-5 start to the 2011 season saw him get canned midseason. Interim coach Tim Kish went 3-3 in place of Stoops, blowing out UCLA in his debut and also knocking off ASU in Tempe.
2012 — RichRod wins in OT
It didn’t end well, but there’s no denying Arizona had one of the best runs in program history in its first three seasons under ex-West Virginia and Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez. Even if the very beginning wasn’t that spectacular.
Sure, Toledo has been one of the more consistently good non-power teams this decade, and was coached by future Iowa State coach Matt Campbell, but needing an extra period to beat a Mid-American Conference team at home didn’t breed much confidence. The Wildcats squandered plenty of chances to win in regulation in the 24-17 victory, racking up 624 yards of offense thanks to big games from Matt Scott, Ka’Deem Carey and Austin Hill.
Promises of RichRod’s prolific offense were much more apparent the following week in a 59-38 home upset of Oklahoma State, one of six games in which Arizona would score 40 points that season including in the epic 49-48 comeback win over Nevada in the New Mexico Bowl.
Arizona won 26 games in RichRod’s first three season, including 10 in 2014 while claiming the Pac-12 South Division title. But that was followed by a 17-21 record in his last three years with the 2017 squad dropping four of five after a 6-2 start.
2018 — Sumlin stinks it up
Despite a .662 win percentage and six consecutive winning seasons, Texas A&M paid Sumlin a lot of money not to be its head coach anymore. Arizona thought the Aggies’ loss was its gain, swooping in and making him the first African-American football coach in school history.
Sumlin inherited a potent offense led by superstar-in-the-making in quarterback Khalil Tate, who was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated during training camp. But when the Wildcats made their debut at home against BYU that attack look neutered, with Tate transformed into mostly a pocket passer.
The UA lost 28-23, its 326 yards the fewest since November 2016, and set the tone for a 5-7 campaign that culminated with an epic collapse at home to ASU. Sumlin’s 2019 team also started with a loss, at Hawaii, before winning four in a row only to lose the rest of its games that season.
An 0-5 performance in 2020, capped by the embarrassing 70-7 home loss to ASU, sealed Sumlin’s fate.
2021 — Fisch flounders in Vegas
When Arizona and BYU scheduled a 3-game series back in 2013 there’s no way anyone could have predicted each contest would feature a different head coach for the Wildcats. Or that all three would serve as a debut for one team’s head man.
BYU’s Kalani Sitake got his still-going tenure started in 2016 with an 18-16 win in Glendale, then he set the tone for Sumlin’s doomed tenure with the victory in Tucson in 2018. Now came another neutral-site tilt against a new coach, with Fisch having a national TV audience and a massively pro-BYU crowd in Las Vegas.
The final score was 24-16 Cougars, extending the UA’s losing streak to 13 games, but after falling behind 21-3 midway through the third quarter the Wildcats rallied to get within one score going into the final period.
Fisch showed plenty of moxie early on, going for it on 4th down on the Arizona side of the field on the opening possession. There just wasn’t enough talent to pull out a win, something that was seen over and over again that season and particularly a few weeks later when NAU shocked the Wildcats at Arizona Stadium.