Infamous Hayden Fry defensive coordinator Bill Brashier, who oversaw Iowa’s defence for 17 years, passed away on Friday at the age of 93.
In 1979, Brashier joined Fry at Iowa from North Texas and oversaw some of the finest defences in Big Ten history. Under Brashier, the Hawkeyes three times led the Big Ten in defence and won three conference championships. To win the conference championship in 1981, Iowa dominated the Big Ten in both total defence (265.5 yards per game) and scoring defence (11.5 points per game).
Iowa gave up 186.7 running yards per game in 1978. That number dropped to 86.9 in 1981. In 1985, Iowa took the top spot in the national rankings for five weeks in a row while also claiming the Big Ten championship.
Under Brashier, five different defensive players, including Andre Tippett and Larry Station, who were inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, were chosen first-team All-Americans.
“He was awesome,” said Bob Stoops, a College Football Hall of Fame head coach who played for Brashier and then coached under him. “I credit my career to Coach Brashier. He’s the one that got it started for me as a graduate assistant. He would put me on the board and tell me to explain and show me what I was talking about. So, he is incredibly special to me, no doubt.”
With Bob Stoops (Oklahoma), Bill Snyder (Kansas State), Barry Alvarez (Wisconsin), Dan McCarney (Iowa State), graduate assistant Mark Stoops (Kentucky), and Kirk Ferentz (Iowa) all becoming the winningest head coach at six different football programmes, Fry developed one of the greatest coaching trees in college football history. Brashier never left Iowa and remained devoted to Fry, his lifetime buddy, but it doesn’t imply his level of coaching ability wasn’t comparable to that of his contemporaries.
“That was a phenomenal staff,” McCarney said. “I loved my time with Bill Brashier. And to this day, I’ve said it many times, he may have been the smartest Xs and Os football coach that I was ever around. He didn’t get a chance to be a head coach, but it sure didn’t mean that he didn’t have a major, major impact on the Iowa program. Even in the first years, when we build the foundation in 1981, we went to the first Rose Bowl with one of the two best defenses I was ever around in my 45 years of Division I football, the only one that was that as good or maybe a little bit better as the national championship one that I was a part of at Florida (2008).”
“Coach Brashier definitely was, if not the best coach we had; he’s right there with any of them,” Bob Stoops said. “He was incredibly special, smart, very detailed with us on how we played. He was a great communicator with us and what we needed to do.”
“It was such an honor to work with him and work for him and we were together in the trenches on defense for 11 years,” McCarney said. “You really find out about someone who spent that much time and 16-hour days and round-the-clock year round and that’s what a lot of people don’t really get sometimes.
“They see big salaries nowadays and the contracts and everything, but the commitment and the workload that you have year-round, it really never stops. So, you really have to get along with people and enjoy the staff that you’re around.”
