EUGENE -- Each week, Willie Taggart makes a few important phone calls.



One goes to Jack Harbaugh, and that's no surprise. It's been 23 years since he recruited Taggart to play quarterback at Western Kentucky, yet their connection remains as tight, and well-known, as ever.



But before and after each game, the Oregon Ducks football coach dials another coach. One who's known Taggart for little more than three years, yet has become as trusted as anyone in Taggart's inner circle: Dick Tomey.



Tomey, whose five-decade career included head-coaching gigs at Hawaii, Arizona and San Jose State, hasn't been on a college sideline since 2011. In Pac-12 country, he'll forever be linked more to Tucson, where he coached for 14 seasons beginning in 1987, and still lives, than he will Eugene.

Tomey downplays any contributions this season as nothing more than providing a sounding board.



Yet his fingerprints are all over UO's program, from the makeup of Taggart's staff, to the dinners Taggart hosts at his house, to the phrases he tells his team.



"I'm just somebody that's trying to help if he's stuck on something or if he needs another opinion, or at the same time, if I see something that I think he's missing, I'll bring it up and he certainly can say he doesn't agree and we're done with it," Tomey said. "I accept that because that's what our relationship has been built on. It's been built on honesty."

Taggart's talks with Harbaugh and Tomey "make you see things differently as a leader and it kind of clears your mind," he said. "I know when I get done talking with those guys I'm pretty clear with what I want to do with our football team.

"If Dick says something, I know he's not just BS-ing. He knows what he's saying."

Of that, there is no doubt. Few figures in college football are more interesting, experienced and connected than Tomey.



Need advice handling unforeseen obstacles? There was the time during a road trip at UTEP that Tomey forgot his passport on a pregame jog and ran into Mexico without any ID. This was well before the advent of cellphones. He and an assistant talked their way back to the U.S. side well before kickoff.



In search of team-building exercises? In the 1980s, needing a way to get his Hawaii team to visualize success, Tomey brought in a young Tony Robbins for a five-hour motivational seminar that ended with the Rainbow Warriors chanting "cool moss" as they walked on hot coals. Robbins and Tomey are still friends, and mutual admirers.



Decades after he and future UO coach Rich Brooks competed "like wild animals" as UCLA assistants, Tomey still has a finger on what makes coaching's newest generation tick. He texts with Hawaii's Nick Rolovich, San Jose State's Brent Brennan and Houston's Major Applewhite, and in the offseason helped play matchmaker between Taggart and former Tomey assistants Joe Salave'a and Marcus Arroyo.



"If you're in the remote areas, the corners of the country, some way, some how, he's connected to somebody," Salave'a said.



These days, he is most connected to Taggart, thanks to the 2015 college football season that cemented their bond and has turned Tomey into one of the most important behind-the-scenes influences in the UO program.



That 2015 season sold Tomey on Taggart for good. It's why, shortly after Taggart's hiring at Oregon in December, Tomey picked up his own phone to call former UO coach Mike Bellotti.



His message to Bellotti: "You're getting a good one."

THE SCHEMBECHLER CONNECTION

At first glance, this isn't an obvious partnership.



When they met in September 2014, at the behest of South Florida's athletic director, Tomey was 76, twice Taggart's age. Whereas Taggart, a Florida native who'd spent most of his career in the south, had ambitions of coaching for a national title ever since his playing career ended, Tomey was a Midwestern native whose career had begun almost by accident. If not for a tip to apply for Miami of Ohio's graduate assistant job, he might still be coaching at a junior high in Indianapolis.

Taggart was all offense. Tomey had built Arizona's "Desert Swarm" defense.



That didn't stop them from finding common ground immediately. Each had rebuilt programs despite scarce resources. They coached from a player-first attitude. They were even saying the same things, phrases like, "football isn't complicated, people are."



"We meshed together because there are a lot of things I was doing and saying that Dick was doing and saying before," Taggart said. "A lot of it comes from Bo Schembechler."



Tomey counts Schembechler as the largest influence on his career, having worked for him at Miami of Ohio in 1963. Schembechler was seen as a taskmaster. But "he had expanded sense of humanity about him that was much different than most people viewed him," Tomey said. It stuck with him. Taggart believed in the gospel according to Bo, too: His mentor, Jack Harbaugh, had worked for Schembechler at Michigan and the experience informed the rest of Harbaugh's career.

Coming up

Who: Oregon (5-5, 2-5 Pac-12) vs. Arizona (7-3, 5-2)

When: 4 p.m. Saturday (Pac-12 Networks)

Where: Autzen Stadium, Eugene

"They're very demanding," Taggart said of Schembechler, Harbaugh and Tomey. "They're all about the players, and helping teaching and the growth of the players."



Tomey and Taggart kept in touch by phone throughout the 2014 season. In 2015, USF formalized the relationship by hiring Tomey as its associate athletic director overseeing football.



They set the ground rules still in place today: Tomey usually waits for Taggart to call, but can offer his input at any time, as candidly as he wants. And Taggart is free to take it or leave it.



"Sometimes we'll talk maybe a lot and sometimes we won't talk much but he knows that I'll tell him the truth as I see it," Tomey said.



There are myriad reasons why this arrangement might have failed.



Taggart's USF assistants could have closed ranks, threatened by an outsider who reported to the AD, offering critiques. Like a backseat driver, Tomey could have overstepped his bounds.



And his presence, a resource at first, could have eventually rubbed a young coach on a hot seat the wrong way. This is college football, where egos can be fragile and control coveted.



One month into his third season at USF, Taggart had a 7-20 record and "it didn't look good," Tomey said, after a blowout loss to Maryland.



Instead, with USF teetering at 1-2 following the loss, Taggart brought Tomey closer. For the first time, he requested Tomey attend the next day's staff meeting. And when an "ugly" film review session was over, he turned the floor over to the coach who, to that point, had kept his unvarnished thoughts mostly between him and Taggart.



Tomey recalls addressing the staff: "I think you ought to think about what we saw in these terms: Players are a mirror of their coach, and if you take that to heart there are some things you need to fix, because it's an indictment."



Then he turned to Taggart with a suggestion: leverage his trust within the locker room to demand more.



"I felt they would give him back all the love and respect that I knew that they had for him, and they did that," said Tomey, who said Taggart used his relationships to do "incredible things" the rest of the season to secure the program's first bowl berth in six years. "The season flipped, unlike I've ever seen one, I believe."



From that point until Taggart's hiring at Oregon, USF went 17-5.



"It didn't flip because of what I said," Tomey said, and it's true that Taggart's switch from a power-run offense to a spread attack was a key schematic difference in the turnaround.



But Tomey's presence, assistants said, didn't exactly hurt, either.



"He was just like that father figure that won a lot, had some downs, been through certain adversities you go through as a coach, and it was just a wealth of knowledge, man," said Ray Woodie, Oregon's special teams coordinator who was part of Taggart's USF staff. "You knew you could go to him and he would have answers."

A COMMON LINK

Last winter, Joe Salave'a needed an answer, too. Stay at Washington State, or leave for Oregon?



For counsel, he called the coach who'd never led him astray before. Tomey, who coached Salave'a at Arizona and later hired him to his staff at San Jose State, didn't tell Salave'a what to do. But he shared his impressions of working alongside Taggart.



"His experience with Coach Taggart helped a little bit to know a little bit of what Coach T is all about," Salave'a said. "Coach Tomey was able to help bridge some of the missing pieces that I was seeking as the opportunity to be here was presented."



He is one of several UO assistants who trust Tomey deeply, and given he talked with Taggart throughout the hiring process, perhaps it's no surprise there are so many Tomey connections inside the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex.



Tomey hired co-offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo at San Jose State; briefly overlapped with safeties coach Keith Heyward with the San Francisco 49ers; knows Woodie, running backs coach Donte Pimpleton, assistant AD for recruiting David Kelly, director of football operations Sharrod Everett and graduate assistant David Gilbertson from South Florida; and goes back more than 30 years with receivers coach Michael Johnson, whom he recruited and later nearly hired as a quarterbacks coach while at Arizona.



"He can see some things that the younger guys cannot see," Johnson said. "He's a great mentor and has been a great mentor for all of us. We absolutely love him."



What Tomey sees most clearly, Taggart said, is how to get a team full of disparate personalities pulling in the same direction. And whether it's been Tomey's direct influence or not -- Schembechler and the Harbaugh family remain Taggart's primary inspirations, by far -- a number of Taggart's off-field decisions at UO have carried the Tomey imprint.



Each week this season, Taggart has hosted a different position group for dinner at his house, just as how Arizona's players were once invited to walk the three blocks from the practice field to Tomey's Tucson home. Salave'a said that the reputation he earned at Washington State as a pseudo-father to Polynesian players was a direct reflection of how Tomey operated at Arizona.



"I believe the head coach's home needs to be an extension of the family," Tomey said. "If someone mandated you couldn't do that, I don't think I'd want to coach."



Said Taggart: "Like Dick said, I think it's important our kids see us be husbands and fathers."



Tomey wasn't a believer in burning the midnight oil. On Friday mornings, Oregon assistants arrive at work later than normal, after dropping their children off at school.



Tomey is a master with words, and as a coach would walk between rows of stretching players repeating teaching points he'd distilled into buzzwords like "sudden change" and "creating chaos." When Oregon had to relocate an August practice to the coast to avoid smoke, Taggart was unworried about the switch, saying it was "just a little sudden change."



In 1995, Tomey missed an Arizona loss at Illinois to attend a player's funeral in Los Angeles. In August, when Taggart's father died in Florida, "the only thing I could say," Tomey said, "was go and stay as long as you have to."



But one of Tomey's favorite exercises came during preseason practices, when the Wildcats broke into small groups and discussed their lives. It was a trust exercise, he said, he took from Robbins. In August, after racial-tinged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Ducks met in small groups to learn about each player and coach's path to UO.



"A lot of things I'm doing now -- not necessarily walking on coals -- but some of the things we've done this offseason of getting our team together and doing things to create that bond has been a lot of things Dick and I have talked about," Taggart said. "He had great insight in that way of bringing people together."



There are plenty more insights where that came from.



Tomey is just a phone call away.

The Ducks on Tomey

Special teams coordinator Raymond Woodie, who met Tomey while at South Florida: "He showed you different ways to do things. There are different ways to skin a cat and sometimes when you haven't had that amount of experience like he has you look at things certain ways, but then it's like, wow. I never saw it that way. It's always a learning situation."

Former UO coach Mike Bellotti, who coached against Tomey and later hosted him in Eugene to speak to his UO staff: "Dick is a guy who easily is very likable but he'll give you his ideas and his point of view and perspective. I remember he had a tough game he lost on the road. When they got home, he had a personal meeting with every player."

Defensive line coach Joe Salave'a, who played for Tomey at Arizona and later worked for him at San Jose State: "He was always one of those coaches outside of our own parents we were comfortable in visiting with him on certain things. He was able to give his input. Some of the input wasn't what you want to hear. It was what you needed to hear."

Receivers coach Michael Johnson, who was recruited by Tomey: "When I was at Oregon State, I was going to take a job to be the quarterback coach at Arizona. I went down, had a great interview and was going to do it. As I was coming back down (I-205), making the turn to the 5 going back to Corvallis, I got a call from Mike Riley and he offered me the job at the Chargers. It never worked out (with Tomey), but he's a great guy."

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif