There is no off-season in football, just weeks without games. Idaho State is in that season right now, but that hasn’t stopped the news cycle surrounding the Bengals. For example:
— It was reported earlier this week that Dan Hawkins, the head coach at UC-Davis and the father of Bengal head coach Cody Hawkins, was stepping down from his coaching post. Rumors began circulating that Cody Hawkins was applying for the head coaching job at Davis, where he assisted his father as offensive coordinator before he came to Idaho State at this time last year. Cody flatly denied any interest in the UC Davis job, which is widely expected to go to former Davis assistant Tim Plough.
“I haven’t,” Cody Hawkins said when asked if he applied for the Davis job. “One-hundred percent I haven’t. I didn’t even think about it. I’ve known for years that as soon as my dad retired, Plough was going to be the head coach. That’s part of the reason I came here, because I love Plough and respect him, and I knew whether it was one year, four years or five years, Plough was going to be the head coach. He deserves to be the head coach there.”
Plough, now the tight ends coach at Cal, was widely considered one of the up and coming offensive minds in the game when Boise State hired him to be their offensive coordinator two years ago. But he was fired in the middle of last season and replaced on an interim basis by Dirk Koetter.
And for folks who are concerned about how committed Cody Hawkins is to the Idaho State job, he said, “When I had the opportunity to come here it was because I had the opportunity to come here for a while, not just because it was a job.”
— As to what Dan Hawkins, 63, is going to do now that he’s no longer coaching, Cody says it’s not moving to Boise, as was reported earlier this week. Hawkins no longer has a home in Boise, unlike that story reported, although his daughter lives there and he certainly has a place to stay while visiting. In fact, Cody Hawkins says his dad, while staying in Davis, California, is going to be spending a lot of time visiting family. Cody’s siblings live in Boise, North Carolina and Portland, Oregon, and he fully expects Dan to be racking up frequent flyer miles to visit his kids and grandkids.
“He (Dan) still has juice to coach, but where his priorities are, he’s thinking, ‘I don’t have as much time as I used to have,’” Cody said. “He’s like, ‘I want to be able to go to Little League baseball games and I want to be able to come watch your (ISU) games.’”
Cody added, “It was such a crazy thing talking to my dad. Football has been such a family thing for us for such a long time. When he was at Boise State, it was a family thing, we were at every game. Then when we were at Colorado (where Dan coached and Cody played), I was with him the whole time and the family would come and see both of us. And then when I was still young in my coaching career and he was doing ESPN, he would come to my games. And then we coached overseas together. And then we were at Davis together. Now there’s no together. He loves coaching, he’s still got juice, he just misses the family.”
I asked Cody if Dan would ever consider serving as an assistant coach or an adviser to him at ISU, and he said, “He’s always been an adviser for me. He was an adviser this year. I talked to him every day. He will not be a full-time staff member here. I mean, if at some point there became a way down the road where he could have an official title so he could do some stuff for us, maybe. But in the immediate future, I mean he’s going to be in Davis.”
Dan still has passion for the Davis program and plans to continue to support the school in raising money for the name, image and likeness program, to get a few more support buildings built and to help support the athletes there, Cody said.
— Speaking of coaching staffs, the ISU players are in the process right now of evaluating Cody Hawkins and his staff. All the players have been given surveys asking them questions like, “What are the three best parts of our program we need to continue to emphasize?” “How can your position coach improve your meetings?” “What areas can I (Cody Hawkins) do better as a leader.”
All the responses are anonymous and Hawkins is looking for true two-way communication from his players.
“It’s not just the coaches telling players, ‘You’re fast, you need to work on your releases,’” Hawkins said. “It should be a two-way evaluation with me from a culture, organization, program standpoint.”
Hawkins felt his coaching staff did a good job this past season when the Bengals exceeded expectations by winning three Big Sky Conference games, but he knows that what happened last season won’t be good enough next year.
“Our staff has to get better,” he said. “I have to get better…. My No. 1 job when I got here was to get better. The easiest thing to do to get better was to treat people well. If we lost every game this year, but we treated people well, I would have said it’s been successful because the attitude in the field was so awful when I got here. It can’t really get any worse than it was.”
Hawkins is not anticipating any changes in his coaching staff, although he’ll be making some tweaks in coaching responsibilities. He’d also like to hire a full-time director of football operations to free up Jesse Thompson to focus solely on special teams coordination.
Hawkins is always aware of ISU’s spot in the coaching pecking order and he knows if opportunity at a larger school comes knocking, he could well be replacing coaches in short order.
— Recruiting takes center stage this weekend as the Bengals host visitors and coaches try to get final decisions from recruits still on the fence and try to lock down those who have already made commitments.
Hawkins says it will likely be a relatively small class for ISU this year. The Bengals have only five scholarship seniors, and he expects a few other players to leave the program, either through the transfer portal or by simply giving up football. He’s thinking the signing class will range between 10 and 13 players.
ISU already has commitments from seven recruits, all of them high school players. Hawkins can’t talk about any of the commitments until they officially sign later in December, but two high school players have already made their Bengal commitments known publicly: Eagle quarterback Davis Harsin, the son of former Boise State coach Bryan Harsin, and Pocatello High School linebacker Devin Rodriguez. Both have announced their commitments on social media.
With an emphasis on linemen, Hawkins says offensive line coach Mark Weber is the only coach on the staff with a free pass to get on an airplane and close a commitment in the next couple of weeks. Weber already has two commitments and is close to two more, Hawkins said. All the rest of the staff will be recruiting locally over the next couple of weeks — in Idaho and northern Utah.
The first signing period is Dec. 20-22. Hawkins said ISU will announce recruits who sign then, but will hold off on having a signing celebration until after the second signing period, which begins Feb. 7, so he can give all the recruits equal billing.
— The next big day on the recruiting calendar comes Monday, Dec. 4, which is the first day that schools can talk to players who have entered the transfer portal. Hawkins doesn’t plan to utilize the portal a great deal because he believes most players in the portal are looking to move up and ISU is not typically seen as “up” for Division I caliber players.
But the Bengals could be negatively impacted by the portal as schools begin eyeing some of ISU’s better players. While the schools cannot contact the players in the portal until Monday, they are already circling prospects with name, image and likeness money in hand.
“A lot of guys have called me about our guys, wanting to do character backgrounds because they’re not stupid,” Hawkins said. “They know who the good players are and they can talk to their high school coach and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this much NIL money.’ They’ll talk to them and they’ll call me to do a character background thing because they know I’ll shoot ‘em straight.”
Hawkins doesn’t enjoy giving references to other schools so they can potentially poach his best players, but he says it’s the right thing to do.
“I want them (the other schools) to stay away, but I also want to do what’s best for the kids…,” Hawkins said. “I tell everyone in our program, ‘Hey, it’s easy to have a black and white, hey you get in the portal you’re gone line,’ but I want to treat our players how I would want somebody to treat my kids. Which means, until we build this thing to the point where it’s head and shoulders above other places and give kids a reason to stay, we’re going to lose good players — and we’re going to keep some really good players.”
— On a final note, I asked Hawkins how the absolute season-ending beat down by Idaho came about. He said it was a combination of factors: ISU played what he felt were the four best teams on their schedule in the last four weeks of the season, leading to fatigue; Idaho had a point to prove to the playoff selection committee; the Bengals had nothing material to play for; and the Bengal players and coaches were emotionally tapped out as a result of the UC-Davis narrow loss the week before the Idaho game.
“After the Davis game, our dudes were bummed — and I was exhausted, I was emotionally exhausted,” Hawkins said. “Losing that (Davis) game, it took it out of them…. We had guys who were emotionally and physically exhausted and we didn’t do a good job of preparing them.”