Coaching legend Sonny Detmer has died.
Coach was one of first to embrace spread offense
Sonny Detmer wasn’t just ahead of his time. He arrived before a few of his time’s ancestors.
When he became a high school football coach in the late 1960s, the best way to stay employed was to run some version of the groundoriented Wing T or the wishbone. But he’d taken a nontraditional route to his first gig — as a wide receiver in the semi-professional Continental Football League, the San Antonio Toros helped put him on staff at South San so he could pay
his bills — and he didn’t see much use for conventional wisdom.
So in an era when most coaches feared the two bad things that could happen when throwing the football, Detmer became obsessed with capitalizing on the good one, and he kept at it for five decades. At the age of 76, he still was coaching at Somerset, having never been willing to walk away from the game that made him a Friday night legend.
And when he died Tuesday after being hospitalized for weeks with bronchitis and pneumonia, he was remembered in part as a gregarious innovator who influenced generations of players and coaches and saw change coming to Texas’ favorite sport long before the rest of the state did.
“He was definitely one of the pioneers,” Detmer’s eldest son Ty wrote in a text message Tuesday.
Like a lot of pioneers, though, Detmer had to wait a while for the rest of the world to follow.
Even after his teams started winning games by slinging the ball around high-school stadiums like nobody ever had seen before, and even after two of his sons smashed passing records en route to college glory and solid professional careers, the state’s aerial offensive revolution was still years away from taking hold.
Pass-happy spread offenses wouldn’t become the norm until around the turn of the millennium. But way back in the 1970s, when Detmer was making stops at Churchill, Roosevelt, Central Catholic and Laredo Martin, his teams threw the ball more than anybody else.
Then at Southwest in the mid-1980s, he used the right arm of his oldest son to take it to another level. Ty Detmer shattered almost every state passing mark in the book with the Dragons, and he went on to do the same thing with NCAA records at BYU, where he won the 1990 Heisman Trophy.
The day Ty won the award, his dad was coaching his younger son, Koy, in a playoff game at Mission, the Rio Grande Valley town where Detmer spent several years. Koy went on to play college football at Colorado, and joined his big brother to combine for 25 NFL seasons.
Their father could have retired decades ago. But after coming back to Somerset — where he’d already coached three times — as a consultant 15 years ago, he took over the full-time head coaching duties again in 2007.
“Friday nights are still real exciting for me,” Detmer told the Express-News that year. “That feeling never gets old.”
The funny thing is, he never experienced them in Texas as a player. Born Hubert Detmer Jr. in Beaumont and immediately dubbed “Sonny” by his maternal grandmother, his family moved to Indiana before he turned 2.
In high school he starred in four sports, and he returned to his native state after earning a scholarship to play baseball and basketball at Wharton County Junior College. From there he accepted a basketball scholarship at Florida State, but after failing to get much playing time, decided to finish his college studies at Southwest Texas State (now Texas State).
His mother wanted him to go into banking, but as he once told the ExpressNews, he “wasn’t much for desks.” Having tried out for the football team on a lark while at Wharton, his résumé as a wide receiver was impressive enough to get a call from the Toros, who offered him $150 per game.
Detmer played in the semipro league while teaching and coaching at South San, and it soon became clear that he had a future on the sidelines. As a head coach, he compiled a record of 235-141-2 in 35 seasons in Texas.
But it wasn’t just his teams that benefited from his tutelage.
For years, Detmer held Monday night quarterback camps that were open to prospects from all over the region, which meant he often was mentoring kids who would become his team’s opponents. He released an instructional DVD for passers, and he teamed with longtime college coach Hal Mumme to conduct an annual camp in El Paso every year for more than a decade.
“He loved Texas high school football and was such a great influence to so many,” Ty wrote in a text message Tuesday. “Lasting legacy for sure!”
And this Friday, when hundreds of teams across the state line up and drop quarterbacks back to pass over and over again?
Maybe Detmer isn’t the only man responsible for modern football as we know it. But long before his time, he sure saw it coming.