Overview:
Tom Crawford gave up a law career and overcame a late start in coaching by logging 170 wins so far at Bishop Diego High School
Clarence Schutte staked his claim to fame even before he became Santa Barbara High School’s record-setting football coach.
He made national news as the original Ghost Buster exactly one century ago.
Red Grange, college football’s fabled “Galloping Ghost,” was denied a shot at the 1924 national championship when Schutte ran for 282 yards and three touchdowns in Minnesota’s 20-7, mid-November upset of Grange’s undefeated Illinois team.
Newspaper headlines heralded it as the “Wonder Game of 1924.”
Schutte then became the wunderkind coach of the Dons just a year later at the tender age of 24.
He won three California Interscholastic Federation championships and set the Santa Barbara County record of 171 wins despite missing four seasons during his service as a U.S. Army Air Corps officer in World War II.
Schutte stepped down for good as Santa Barbara’s football coach after the 1950 season when the Air Force summoned him back during the Korean War.
In the Cards
Bishop Diego High coach Tom Crawford had heard neither Schutte’s ghost story nor his war story until the specter of the county record was raised last week.
His own mark of 170-108-2 with the Cardinals has brought him within one victory of matching a milestone that has stood for 74 years.
“I’d never even heard Schutte’s name until last year, even though he was apparently an excellent coach,” Crawford told Noozhawk.
“I guess that’s the nature of time … My own time here has gone by in a flash.”
Crawford didn’t know he was flashing toward Schutte’s record until radio announcer John Martony mentioned it during a Bishop football broadcast last year.
“I couldn’t even tell you what my record is, to be honest with you,” Crawford said. “I don’t really think about it and it’s certainly not part of any focus.
“We’ve got enough concerns trying to win football games from here on out.”
Surpassing Schutte’s record even by this season’s end will be no easy task.
The Cardinals, which have a bye on this week’s calendar, have fared well so far with a mark of 3-1-1. But the Marmonte League schedule looms as a murderer’s row.
Bishop will be favored in its Oct. 4 conference opener at Camarillo, but probably not in any of the remaining four games.
CalPreps lists Bishop at No. 138 in this week’s state computer power rankings. Four of its five Marmonte League rivals, however, are rated higher.
Oaks Christian in Thousand Oaks tops the list at No. 16.
Crawford considers it one of the toughest conferences — top to bottom — that the Cardinals will have faced during his 25 seasons as their coach.
“There have been years when we’ve had to deal with one or two powerhouse teams who were simply better than everybody else,” he said. “But with the new competitive equity system, every school has some soon-to-be, college-level players.
“Camarillo is young but they’re well-coached and have some talented kids, too. We saw them this summer.
“Every game is going to be a super-competitive dogfight, so you’ve got to stay focused on just that next contest.”
Delay of Game
Crawford took a more circuitous route into coaching than Schutte. He didn’t even play high school football after injuring his hip during a game in ninth grade.
“Baseball was my sport,” he said. “I had some success there and thought it would be my potential sport in college, although that didn’t happen.
“But I always loved playing sports no matter the season, and thought team sports in particular were a lot of fun.
“I always had the sense that I wanted to coach.”
It took another football injury to make that happen long after Crawford’s graduation from UC Santa Barbara.
He was in his late 30s, working as a litigator for a Los Angeles law firm, when he tore a knee ligament while playing in a “weekend warrior” league.
“I happened to live close to Birmingham High and was over there quite a bit while trying to rehab my ACL,” Crawford said. “I got to meet their head coach — Chick Epstein was his name — and while he had a lot of kids, he didn’t seem to have a lot of coaches.
“He invited me to help out, and that’s how I got started.”
Crawford realized after just few seasons at Birmingham that coaching was his true calling. He gave up the legal game in 1999 to accept an offer from Bishop Diego to become its athletic director and assistant football coach.
“It had its rewards,” Crawford said of his law career, “but that couldn’t compare to those you get by working with kids, seeing things gel and build, and helping those kids grow.”
He took over as the Cardinals’ head football coach the following season at the age of 43 — 19 years older than Schutte had been when he coached his first game at Santa Barbara High.
His father was in attendance that first season when Bishop upset arch-rival Carpinteria, a Tri-Valley League power at the time, in a 24-23 thriller.
“He was a very reserved man,” Crawford recalled, “but he came down to the field afterward, waited for everyone else to finish talking to me, and then offered his congratulations while saying, ‘I’m surprised you ever lose.’”
When Crawford asked what he meant, his father replied, “The way I counted it, you have seven coaches on the field and 2,000 more in the stands.”
Growing Pains
He actually lost more games than he won during his first four seasons. His record of 17-26-1 was punctuated by lopsided defeats to emerging national powers St. Bonaventure in Ventura and Oaks Christian.
Playing those teams, Crawford said, was “like going to the dentist.”
But they also motivated him into brainstorming “tactical advantages” with an intricate offense that emphasized “shifts and motions.”
Although he spoke softly, compared to most coaches, he began carrying a big playbook.
“All along we’ve tried to think in terms of diversity of what we can do, both offensively and defensively,” he said. “That was in part due to those early years when we probably didn’t match up physically with some of the schools we played.
“The idea was that if you have a couple of players who can give you an advantage, you maneuver them around — or maneuver formations around, or defensive alignments around — so you can take advantage of their abilities.”
Crawford’s professorial approach harkened the days of Schutte, whose own innovation was trumpeted by the CIF when it inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1984.
“He was truly a football genius, a coach far ahead of his time in the aspects of strategy and technique,” CIF-Southern Section commissioner Thomas Byrnes said at the time.
“As early as the 1920s, Schutte installed a spread single-wing attack into the Dons’ offense, featuring a sophisticated passing attack and the innovation of option football.”
Schutte was named State Coach of the Year in 1940 after winning his third championship.
Crawford won the same award for small schools in 2016.
His breakthrough season had come a decade earlier when the Cardinals advanced to the 2006 CIF-SS semifinals. They played for a CIF championship the following season, losing an overtime thriller to Santa Clara.
He broke Bob Morelli’s school record when he opened the 2013 season with his 79th coaching win.
Crawford took additional trips to the playoff semifinals in both 2011 and 2015 before winning the school’s first CIF football championship in 2017.
Bishop advanced from there during the following weeks to become the first Santa Barbara County school to win both regional and state titles. It defeated Shasta High in California’s 3AA final to complete a 15-1 season.
“That is a remarkable, probably indelible memory, especially with some of the circumstances surrounding it,” Crawford said.
He had to improvise just to train for the last two championship games when the catastrophic 2017 Thomas Fire turned Santa Barbara’s air a smoky brown.
The hazardous conditions also forced the CIF to move those contests from Santa Barbara to Cal Lutheran’s William Rolland Stadium in Thousand Oaks.
Man for All Seasons
Crawford stops short of calling that his favorite season. Each one has merits he treasures.
Former Bishop running back Adrian Soracco realized that after playing in both the state championship year and in the 4-7 season that followed in 2018.
“He was the exact same guy, both seasons,” Soracco said. “Even-keeled and straight-forward.”
That approach has well-served a football program which had just one senior — two-way lineman Tristan Fui — available for all of last season.
Bishop lost six of its first seven contests before a three-game winning streak thrust it into the playoffs.
“This group went through the fire last year,” Crawford said. “There were those natural growing pains that don’t make losing any easier but which are kind of the process.
“If you look at us during the early part of last season, and to where we were the last four games, we looked like a different team. I think the guys grew up quite a bit.”
It helped, he added, to get sophomore quarterback Tua Puailoa Rojas back from an early season injury.
His great-grandfather, Sut Puailoa, had coached San Marcos High to four Channel League football championships during the 1970s.
Puailoa, like Schutte, has been enshrined in the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame.
Crawford saw that bloodline circulating the sideline after Bishop widened the lead of its 35-16 victory over Northgate on Sept. 14.
“I didn’t play Tua in the second half, so he was following coaches along the sideline like he was attached,” he said. “He was listening to everything and helping the kids that we had in playing quarterback.
“I think there’s a maturity there that comes with having some experience.”
Crawford, who also serves as a vice principal at Bishop, has cultivated that by giving Rojas the green light to change plays.
“I’m encouraging him to read the defense and do what he thinks is the right thing,” he said. “He’s been spot-on with the audibles that he’s called so far this year.”
Crawford wouldn’t change the audible he called when he changed careers a quarter-century ago.
“I wouldn’t still be here if I hadn’t enjoyed this whole thing,” he said. “We’ve been really fortunate in how the school promotes its athletics and stands behind its athletics.
“That doesn’t happen at all the smaller schools.
“And I’ve been really fortunate to work with great staffs and really good coaches who have made it an enjoyable process, year in and year out.”
He has no idea, however, about what year will be his last. He turned 67 in August.
“I should be thinking about it more than I do,” Crawford said. “I’ve always convinced myself that I’m going to focus on just one year at a time, and coaching one season at a time, and then kind of re-evaluate.
“It’ll be a family discussion with my wife (Judy) at some point, but I certainly don’t think that far ahead.”
History, however, awaits him just one victory ahead.
