Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1165179
48 n o r t h w e s t e r n f o o t b a l l • D I G I T A L P R O G R A M • N O R T H W E S T E R N v s . U N L V Hankwitz laughs when I remind him of all this. Past success, he says, won't even get you a cup of coffee, so he's never seen much point in talking about it. To some degree, he's right. In his chosen gig, last season, the last game, and the last play are quickly forgotten; all that matters is what you're going to do next. That's why, on the day we are scheduled to speak, I find him sitting in an otherwise empty meeting room in the Ryan Fieldhouse on a sweltering July afternoon, while most of the university is still in summer break mode, contemplating the season ahead in front of a massive whiteboard on which an indecipherable blur of Xs and Os have been scribbled. In that room he is in his element. Hankwitz can happily talk about the schemes on that board for hours, his eyes flashing as he breaks down the strengths and weaknesses of each defensive package. He is less interested in talking about himself, but I pull him away from game planning and prod him along down memory lane anyway. It all started at the University of Michigan, where Hankwitz played from 1966 through 1969. He was a senior tight end on that '69 team, the year Schembechler captured his first Big Ten title on his march toward immortality as one of the greatest coaches who ever lived. The next season, he was a graduate assistant on Schembechler's staff, a position he held until Michigan's defensive coordinator Jim Young got the head coaching job at the University of Arizona in 1973 and promptly asked Hankwitz to join him in the desert. They took over a team that had finished 4-7 the previous year and guided them to an 8-3 record, good enough to finish as Western Athletic Conference co-champions, and then went 18-4 over the next two seasons. In 1977, Hankwitz and Young went to Purdue where they turned around another perennial underachiever. Their second year there, the Boilermakers were ranked 13th in the country and beat Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl. A top-10 finish followed in 1979, then another top-20 ranking in 1980, along with two more bowl wins. coach spotlight