Overview:
Santa Barbara High graduate Pete Kwiatkowski has been selected as one of five finalists for the Frank Broyles Award which honors college football’s top assistant coach
Pete Kwiatkowski learned about football’s ups and downs long ago at Santa Barbara High School.
He got a glimpse of the sport’s mountaintop during his freshman year when future NFL quarterback Randall Cunningham had the Golden Tornado whirling all the way to the 1980 CIF-Southern Section finals.
His view was vastly different as the team’s senior captain in 1983 when a losing streak reached rock bottom with a 15-14 defeat to San Marcos in Santa Barbara’s annual Big Game.
“We had our chances but didn’t close the deal,” Kwiatkowski replied when I asked about the game many decades later. “We hadn’t won a game going into that one, and it’s such a big rivalry.”
He paused before adding, “But what’s great about football is that you always have next week … There’s always next season.”
He’s had many weeks and seasons in the 41 years since high school — first as an All-America defensive end at Boise State and then as a highly respected college coach.
Kwiatkowski’s assignment this week as defensive coordinator at the University of Texas is to devise a plan to stop Ohio State in Friday’s College Football Playoff semifinal game.
Kickoff at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, is set for 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
The winner will advance to the national championship game on Jan. 20 to face either Notre Dame or Penn State.
Kwiatkowski’s players give him considerable credit for their opportunity to make college football history.
“Just hats off to PK,” defensive back Jahdae Barron said before the Longhorns’ quarterfinal victory over Arizona State last week. “I tell y’all all the time, he’s a genius.
“He just always puts us in a position to make plays.”
That genius received a certification of sorts when the Frank & Barbara Broyles Foundation named Kwiatkowski last month as one of the five finalists for its national assistant coach of the year award.
The winner will be announced during an award ceremony on Feb. 13.
A Dominating Don
Lito Garcia, his coach at Santa Barbara High, acknowledged that brilliance many years ago during an interview with local sportswriter John Zant.
“He was intelligent, strong, easy to coach,” he said. “He had a great attitude and a great, big smile.”
Kwiatkowski, who grew up in the Mesa area, fell in love with the sport while playing kids two years his senior in the local Youth Football League.
“I loved the hitting and how physical it was,” he said, “but I probably didn’t realize I wanted to be a coach until my junior year of college.
“For me, it was a way to stay involved in the sport with the camaraderie you develop with your teammates.”
His career with the Dons went the whole nine yards from success to failure.
It began with the excitement that Cunningham stirred during Kwiatkowski’s first year of high school.
“I wasn’t really part of that,” he said, “but my sophomore year, we went to the semis.”
The Dons won the Channel League championship both that season and again in his junior year.
Kwiatkowski insisted that his football experience at Santa Barbara was not the least bit diminished by the team’s 2-8 record during his senior season of 1983.
“I realize how much fun we had, looking back at it … the relationships you made with guys,” he said. “When you get older, you reflect on those.
“You lose track of so many different people, but it was a good time. I enjoyed high school very much.”
Bound for Boise
Kwiatkowski wasn’t big enough as a defensive lineman to catch the eye of major-college recruiters.
He considered accepting Cal Poly’s offer of a half-scholarship before a family connection at Boise State set up his official visit with the Broncos.
“My dad had a buddy whose son-in-law was a coach up there,” Kwiatkowski pointed out.
“I had a great time,” he continued. “I liked it when I came there.
“I really wanted to get away … to get out … experience something different.”
Boise State, which played at the NCAA Division I-AA level at that time, quickly realized it had stumbled upon someone special.
Kwiatkowski’s instincts and grit earned him a starting role by his sophomore year. He received All-America honorable mention as a junior.
He came to full bloom as a senior with 15 quarterback sacks, two forced fumbles, four fumble recoveries, six pass deflections and one interception.
The Big Sky Conference selected him as its Defensive Player of the Year and he was a consensus All-American, receiving first-team honors from The Associated Press, the American Football Coaches/Kodak, the Walter Camp Football Foundation and The Sports Network.
Kwiatkowski was determined from Day One to make it work at Boise.
“We had a lot of guys at Santa Barbara High who got scholarships over the years, and it seemed like over half of them ended up coming back for whatever reason,” he said. “To me, that was mind-boggling … To leave a full-ride scholarship, getting your schooling paid for, and then come back …
“I had my mind set that wherever I ended up going, I would make the most of it and not look back.”
It didn’t hurt that he’d met Lara, his future wife and mother of their three daughters, at Boise State.
“She was a cheerleader,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “She went for the pudgy lineman.”
Kwiatkowski still ranks second in Boise’s record books with 62 career tackles for lost yardage.
The school inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1996.
But at 6-foot-3 and 246 pounds, the “pudgy lineman” realized that he wasn’t big enough to get the chance to sack Cunningham or any other quarterback in the NFL.
“Oh, no way,” Kwiatkowski said. “I would’ve gotten broken in half.
“I had no desire to do that. It never crossed my mind.”
Going Coach Class
He was more interested in helping other collegians with their careers.
“You’re teaching them not only about football, but they are in that transition period of going from adolescence into adulthood, and you’re teaching them life skills,” Kwiatkowski said.
“We think football and sports in general are great learning tools for handling adversity. Everyone has some sort of it in their lives.
“How you handle it and deal with it is an important characteristic in how successful and happy you’re going to be as you grow older.”
His players describe him as being more instructional than confrontational when dealing with their mistakes.
“I’m not a huge yeller and screamer, though I’ve been known to do that at times,” Kwiatkowski said.
“It’s all about building confidence in these guys and getting them to execute at a high level so they can go out and cut it loose and play fast and physical.”
Boise State added him to its coaching staff in 1988. He helped the Broncos reach the NCAA Division I-AA semifinals in 1990 and the finals in 1994.
He later coached at Utah’s Snow College, Eastern Washington and Montana State before new Boise State head coach Chris Petersen brought him back to his alma mater in 2006.
They began a brilliant run together that year with an undefeated regular season and a historic upset over Big 12 champion Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.
Their success continued when Petersen brought Kwiatkowski with him to the University of Washington in 2014.
The former Santa Barbara High star had a knack of recruiting “low-ego, high-output players” wherever he went.
“Everybody has got ego, but it’s like you’re able to keep that in check and understand the importance of the sacrifice you might have to make for the betterment of our team,” Kwiatkowski explained.
He practiced what he preached when other schools began sniffing around Jimmy Lake, a fellow defensive coach at Washington and now the Atlanta Falcons’ defensive coordinator.
Kwiatkowski went to Petersen and suggested that he give his defensive play-calling duties to Lake.
“I knew he was going to get offers from other places,” he said. “I was willing to do that to try to keep him.”
Hooked by the Longhorns
New Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian lured Kwiatkowski away from Washington when he offered him a job as defensive coordinator in 2021.
“I love Pete’s style of defense,” Sarkisian said. “It’s an attacking style of defense up front.
“It allows us in the secondary to keep our eyes on the quarterback and creates a lot of turnovers.
“This is a defense that creates a lot of havoc.”
Texas led all Football Bowl Series schools with 29 takeaways this season.
Kwiatkowski took a defense that gave up more than 400 yards per game in 2021 and had it rank third nationally in fewest yards allowed this season.
The Longhorns have also given up fewer points per game than every team except Ohio State and Notre Dame.
“He preaches the development of players in the game, and I think that’s why he’s had success year in and year out as a defensive coordinator,” Sarkisian said.
He coaches the same way he played, by relying on his keen instincts.
“Coach PK is really a fabulous play-caller,” Texas safety Michael Taaffe said. “Every single game he tends to amaze me.
“Sometimes it’s like, ‘How did you know that was coming?’”
Opponents have struggled in particular to predict Kwiatkowski’s defensive scheme in third-down situations.
“Some guys, you can get a sense and a feel of, ‘OK, this is what the next call is going to be,’” Sarkisian said. “He’ll save a call for the second half on a critical third down that will catch you off guard.”
No Head Games
Kwiatkowski has followed the same path in football coaching that was taken by the late Ernie Zampese, a 1954 graduate of Santa Barbara High.
Zampese turned down several head coaching offers despite having earned a reputation as one of the most innovative offensive coordinators in NFL history.
Kwiatkowski was asked last week if Texas’ playoff run has him considering a head coaching job.
“I have not actively aspired to be a head coach, no,” he replied. “I stay in my lane.
“I do the best job that I can at whatever role I have, whether it was a D-line coach or a linebacker coach or safety coach. But I’ve never actively chased head jobs.”
His mindset has always been to keep your head in the game instead of the clouds.
“If things are freaking out — if they just completed a 50-yard bomb and everybody’s freaking out — PK is the one who’s not freaking out,” Taaffe said. “He’s the one calming everybody down.
“I would say he’s calm, composed … and he shows up in big games.”
Few games will ever loom larger for him than Friday’s.
But nobody knows better than Kwiatkowski that there’s always a next day.
“Whether you win or lose, you come back and do the same process again,” he said. “There are great seasons and there are tough seasons.
“It always comes back to football is football.”
