By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

"I think you should be known for how hard you play and how hard you hit...defend your goal line with a passion."

— Dick Tomey.

Officially, Dick Tomey is listed as the defensive ends coach and assistant head football coach at the University of Texas.

In reality, he has become the Longhorns' "toughness" coach as well.

At first glance it might seem an incongruous pairing, this 66-year-old coach and the 18- to 22-year-olds to whom he is preaching his daily diet of gridiron grit.

But after six years at Texas without a Big 12 championship, head coach Mack Brown could no longer afford to leave any stone unturned. After four consecutive losses to Oklahoma, including 63-14 and 65-13 blowouts, and too many broken tackles, defense is where a backbone needed to be transplanted.

The joke around the Big 12 has been that Brown is "Mr. February" — a coach of the year candidate on national letter of intent signing day — but something less when it comes to getting all those blue-chip recruits to win championships.

So Brown fired much of last year's defensive staff and brought in, at a reported $205,000 each, former NFL coordinator Greg Robinson from Kansas City Chiefs to draw up new schemes and Tomey, late of the San Francisco 49ers, to provide the heart and fire.

Nobody who has seen Tomey work a sideline here, where he was the head coach at the University of Hawai'i for 10 seasons (1977-87), or at Arizona (1988-2001), would doubt he is the man to stoke those fires.

Forty years after learning at the elbow of Bo Schembechler as a graduate assistant, Tomey is still preaching, hands-on and full-throat, physical football. He's still teaching toughness and tenacity.

At Texas he's run 6 a.m. training sessions and installed new toughness drills. All of which sound reminiscent of his days at UH, where he is still remembered for the sideline tongue lashing that turned UH around from a 13-0 deficit in the 1986 Wyoming game and playing Southern California, Oklahoma and Michigan, among others, four-quarters tough.

Without benefit of many blue-chippers or all-world facilities, Tomey made UH and Arizona surprisingly competitive on the schedules they played. Maybe too competitive considering the expectations that eventually arose at Arizona.

So, it will be interesting to see the results of this pairing as the season unfolds: Tomey, the man who gets players to give performances they often don't know they have in them, and Texas, the school that annually boasts some of the most talent in the country but, of late, not always the results to match.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.