It's a Thanksgiving touchstone forged with touchdowns.

    With a house crowded with 20 Idaho State University football players and three family members involved in an effort that would win the NCAA Division I National Championship, 1981 will always rule a crowded field of holiday memories for the Koetter family of Pocatello.

    Father Jim was an assistant coach at ISU and his sons, Dirk and Brent, were members of the Bengal team. Jim's wife, Barbara, and daughter, Jill, had spent hours preparing a big meal for the hungry crowd.

    “The kids (players) couldn't go home so we had them come over to eat,” Barbara recalled. “Afterward we told them if they were hungry they could come back for sandwiches –  and sure enough a lot of them came back.”

    Some of those ISU players are still coming back in spirit with phone calls to the Koetter family every Thanksgiving.

    The 1981 season at ISU was one of many memorable experiences for longtime coach and teacher, Jim Koetter. Coaching is something he passed on to both his sons. Currently, Dirk is the offensive coordinator for the 9-1 Atlanta Falcons and Brent is the head football coach at Centennial High School in Boise, where one of Jim's grandsons is now a player.

    It all began after Jim moved to Pocatello with is wife to attend Idaho State University. He was a business education major and landed his first teaching job in Aberdeen the year John Kennedy became president. Two years later he began what would become a dynasty at Highland High School where he spent decades at the helm of its football team.

    Ironically, Jim would not win a state championship until he became head football coach for rival Pocatello High. They took the state titles in 1989, 1990, 1992 and 1994 under Koetter's leadership.

    Titles at Highland would come to his son, Brent,with Jim as assistant coach in 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2002. Son Dirk was an assistant football coach at Highland when they won the state championship in 1984 and head coach for the title in 1987. That was before Dirk left to become an assistant coach for the football program at the University of San Francisco. It was a move that would link him up with another assistant coach, Andy Reid, now coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and eventually take Dirk to the NFL.

    No one understands the importance of Pocatello's Black and Blue Bowl more than Jim Koetter.

    “People were a little mad at first,” he said about the switch from Highland to Pocatello. But when the father and son teamed up back at Highland, all was forgiven. When asked where his loyalties lie in the Pocatello-Highland match-ups of the last decade, the seasoned coach is diplomatic.

    “I cheer for the best team,” he said.

    Outside of his high school coaching experience, the senior Koetter enjoyed success as both an assistant coach and head coach for ISU. When head coach Dave Kragthorpe left one year after the championship season, Koetter led the Idaho State team to its last Division 1-AA playoffs in 1983. That was six head coaches ago in the annuls of ISU football.

    But Jim Koetter is quick to share credit for his success with those who coached with him.

    “Every place we've been, we've had some great staff,” Koetter said. “They did as much as head coaches did.”

    For Koetter the key to successful coaching is as simple as “Recognizing your flaws and avoiding them.”

    With a house producing two sons who went on to become players and then coaches, life in the Koetter household was sometimes tense, but Jim said his wife kept everyone grounded. Barbara also was a teacher and Jim said she is the one who helped instill the need for good academics.

    “They were good students,” Jim says about his two sons and daughter. Jill was active in basketball volleyball and track and after graduating from ISU, she devised an exercise and fitness program for J.R. Simplot Co.

    They key to success was a simple one for the Koetter family.

    “We did a lot of playing with our kids,” Koetter said. “From the time they were little we had a lot of games in the backyard.”

    When holidays like Thanksgiving rolled around, the Koetter clan would head over the fields at Syringa Elementary near their home, round up other kids in the neighborhood and organize a rigorous touch football game. Those moments obviously made a deeper impression than Jim's advice that his sons go into something besides teaching a coaching.

    Brent was out of coaching for a while and pursuing his career as a financial consultant, but when his son entered high school with a desire to play football, the allure was too much. Like his own father, he found himself coaching a child.

    “Brent probably had more athletic ability than Dirk, but they both had great work ethic,” Koetter said.

    And although he admits he had high expectation for his sons on and off the field, the experience was a positive one.

    “We were so closely aligned with what needed to be done,” Jim said.

    Asked if the competitive tension ever became too great, the old coach smiled and said, “We're still friends.”

    But, when they share phone calls this Thanksgiving you can bet the topic of conversation will eventually turn to football. It's a family tradition.