PULLMAN — Cal has never been a traditional rival of Washington State’s, but ever since the Golden Bears hired Sonny Dykes in 2013, the annual WSU-Cal game has become a closely-contested, high-scoring affair with a civil war flavor.
When Mike Leach’s Air Raid and Dykes’ Bear Raid go head-to-head this Saturday in Pullman, it will be a family reunion for a significant branch of the Leach coaching tree because Dykes, the son of legendary Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes, got his start as an offensive coordinator under Leach at Texas Tech in the early 2000s.
With those common Lubbock roots, many of the coaches at Cal and 23rd ranked WSU are friendly with each other, but perhaps the two closest friends who will be on opposite sidelines this weekend are WSU’s Clay McGuire and Cal’s Brandon Jones, offensive line coaches for their respective teams, and former roommates and teammates at Texas Tech.
The two men first met when McGuire was a junior at Texas Tech and Jones was a freshman and they’ve stayed friends ever since.
“We pretty much talk every week, but we ain’t saying anything this week,” McGuire said, half joking. “It’s always a good game between us and these guys. There’s a lot of trash talk going into the season and after the season, but there’s a lot of mutual respect going into this game. It’s a big game for them and a big game for us.”
Jones, whose wife, Latoya, just gave birth to a baby girl on Nov. 2, says he and his wife have already asked McGuire to be Londyn, their newborn daughther’s godfather.
But, Jones quips, playfully, “I might change it if I don’t like the outcome.”
McGuire and Jones were roommates during Jones’ first summer in Lubbock in 2002. McGuire was then a junior H-back for the Red Raiders, and two years after he graduated in 2004, McGuire returned to Texas Tech as a graduate assistant coach. He worked with the offensive line and helped to coach Jones, then a Rimington Award candidate and the starting senior center responsible for snapping to former Red Raiders quarterback and WSU outside receivers coach Graham Harrell.
Also on the Texas Tech football coaching staff at the time: Dykes, the co-offensive coordinator, current WSU outside receivers coach Dave Nichol, chief of staff Dave Emerick, director of football operations Antonio Huffman and former WSU receivers coach Dennis Simmons, who’s now at Oklahoma, and who’s also Jones’ brother-in-law (their wives are sisters).
After Jones graduated, he joined Leach’s Texas Tech staff as a graduate assistant and McGuire was promoted to special teams coach. They worked together for two years before Jones took a job as running backs coach at Sam Houston State in 2009.
But a year later, the two friends were reunited when Ruffin McNeill — another former Texas Tech assistant — became head coach at East Carolina and hired McGuire as his running backs and special teams coach, and Jones as his offensive line coach.
McGuire lasted two years at ECU before he got a call from Leach and rejoined his mentor in Pullman in 2012. Jones stayed in Greenville, N.C. until the end of the 2014 season, when Dykes hired him to come to Cal as the run game coordinator and offensive line coach.
These days, Jones and McGuire lean on each other for information about common opponents in the Pac-12.
“We talk quite a bit,” Jones said this week. “They played Arizona State and I gave them all the information I had, they played Oregon State and I gave them all the information I had. We grew up in the same coaching tree.
“Anybody that gets after our ass up front, I try to give them a warning. Like, I told them about Washington’s defensive front — good luck with that — and we’ll lean on him for when we play Stanford.”
This week however, it’s each man for himself.
“I’m pulling for them every week except this one,” Jones said.
Even though Jones — like Dykes — knows Leach’s offense intimately, that’s not going to help Cal this week, he says.
“The concepts are always going to be the same,” Jones said. “I can tell you now exactly what coach Leach is gonna run, but the thing is that they out-execute people. They run it so much and so well it’s hard for people to stop.”
