When June Jones was hired in January as SMU’s new head coach, numerous coaches wanted a spot on his staff. His assistants at Hawaii were offered jobs at SMU, and coaches from around the country clamored for a job working for the man many consider an offensive genius.

Dan Morrison coached Hawaii quarterbacks to more than 40,000 passing yards and 350 touchdown passes in nine seasons (photo by SMU athletics).

Perhaps no coach was more excited to end up at SMU than assistant head coach/offense Dan Morrison. He had worked for Jones for the past nine years as quarterbacks coach at Hawaii, and his players had put up some of the gaudiest numbers of any passers in NCAA history. More importantly, however, the move to Dallas brought Morrison closer to his family. By moving to Dallas, he and his wife, Karen, got the chance to live near their daughter, Nikki — a former Rhodes Scholar at SMU — and their son-in-law, former SMU defensive back Donald Mitchell. They also are first-time grandparents: Donald and Nikki’s daughter, Malia, is just under a year old.

That he has become one of the nation’s premier offensive minds is ironic, considering much of his career in Hawaii was spent teaching — history, not football — and serving as Dean of Students at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu.

“In my own case, I didn’t enter the business until I was 49,” Morrison said. “It’s something that a young person sometimes is better able to handle, if you get fired and move, get fired and move. But then I got the opportunity to work for June for the last nine years. I’m fortunate that I got into this later in life, and that’s partly by design.”

He started coaching at Punahou, enjoying considerable success, before joining the staff at UH, where he developed all-conference quarterbacks in five of his nine seasons. He guided Timmy Chang to the most passing yards in college football history, and helped Colt Brennan throw more touchdown passes than any player in NCAA history. When Chang got hurt in 2001, little-used Nick Rolovich came in and thrived, passing for a ridiculous 1,548 yards and 20 touchdowns over the last three games of the seasons.

One of the first things many players have mentioned when asked about the difference between Jones’ staff and the previous coaching staff is simply the volume of the coaches’ voices at practice. Whereas there have been coaches in the past whose voices could be heard halfway across Highland Park, Morrison is the polar opposite: not only can he not be heard on the practice field except by the players to whom he is speaking directly, he is barely audible in an interview in his office. “You’d better get pretty close,” he says, “because I usually talk pretty softly.”

His is an unusual position within the SMU staff. His title would suggest that he is the architect of the high-powered offense that propelled Hawaii all the way to the Sugar Bowl last year, but Morrison is quick to point out that he does not sit atop the offensive totem pole on the new staff.

“I’m the assistant head coach/offense, but this is June’s offense,” Morrison said. “June calls all the plays, June draws up the cards, June writes up the scripts. I’m upstairs on the phones to June. That works, being upstairs — I never liked having a lot of people in my ear. But we chat about coverages, and down and distance — things like that. Except on rare occasions, he sees everything. He sees the other team’s (defensive) front, he sees the protections — sometimes he has me look at (defensive) fronts, but usually he sees that, too.”

What Morrison sees is talent and potential. Several of the quarterbacks with whom he worked at UH were lightly recruited, if at all, and quietly developed under Morrison’s tutelage while waiting their turns under center.

“When developing a quarterback, we look at it like it’s a triangle,” he said. “There’s the physical side — a lot of coaches spend most of their time on this, but we don’t spend a lot of time on it. Both June and I mess with the consistency and release. In football, there are a lot of different ways to throw the ball, but we don’t really care how it looks. You look at Colt Brennan — he has sort of a deep three-quarters release, which isn’t supposed to be the ‘right’ way to throw it, but he’s probably one of the most accurate throwers I’ve ever been around. He threw 58 touchdowns and his efficiency was No. 1 in the country. Why would I tinker with that? The reality is you can over-coach, but I don’t want to mess with his mechanics just to mess with his mechanics. Now if there’s a flaw that causes the ball to be errant, we’ll correct the knee-bend or work with a lot of quarterback drops. After a while, it gets to be what we call ‘unconscious competence’ — it’s as comfortable as you can get.

“The next part of the triangle is the mental part. That’s pretty straightforward — it’s learning the complete playbook, where the reads are, where the eyes go. The third part is the psychological — it’s really the ingredients that set up the quarterback’s success. When he walks on the field, he has to have confidence and maturity. Enveloped in that are the ingredients to help us win.”

It’s that constant assessment of players’ mental approach that has taken up a good deal of Morrison’s time and effort since his arrival, as he has had to teach all of the SMU quarterbacks their new offensive system. Whether it’s a freshman Logan Turner or junior-to-be Justin Willis, who sat out spring drills and came to Morrison’s office on his own to study, Morrison is constantly calling on his academic background, always teaching.

Morrison said the Ponies' new Run-and-Shoot offense is just about completely installed already (photo by Webmaster).

“Justin (Willis) is gravitating back in — he has done everything right, but there’s no formula for dealing with people. You have to start with being a good listener,” Morrison said. “What’s important to me is how players feel in a given situation. I’m more anecdotal. I’ll tell stories, and see how they react. There’s something important about how they feel, and how they make (their coaches) feel.

“If I can get them to talk, they learn better than if I talk. I let them talk, and I know where they are. I offer guidance more than leading.”

Morrison agrees with two of the things Jones has said most often this offseason: there’s no reason a freshman can’t play, if in fact he is the best candidate for the job, and the competition between Willis and Turner and freshmen Braden Smith, Bo Levi Mitchell and Winston Gamso likely will go on well into preseason workouts.

“Accuracy is the No. 1 thing, followed by the intangibles,” he said. “The arm strength and speed are factors, of course, but they’re not everything. Colt has a quick arm, but he doesn’t have a cannon.

One major difference between the Mustangs’ new coaches and their predecessors is the speed with which the new coaches have installed their offense. Whereas previous offensive coordinator Rusty Burns utilized an enormous playbook that he said got installed about 25 percent each year, Jones’ offense, which looks so complicated to the untrained eye, is entirely installed already. The Ponies are nowhere near ready to operate the offense at anything close to peak efficiency yet, but the always-encouraging Morrison said he feels his new team is beginning to absorb all of the information, and now must go about making it work.

“We’ll do some tinkering as we go along, but it’s largely in right now,” he said. “It’s so logical to the kids. It’s so much easier to learn this system, because we’re not going to change. We are who we are, we believe in what we do, and we stay with it. There are some static routes, but we also do some unorthodox things.

“What they’re learning today, they’ll be doing in November. What’s really important is that as they learn the offense, they’ll start to think in the right way, but they’ll only be able to do that if they come in and truly vest themselves into the learning process. We want to play faster, and we can do that only when they comprehend what we’re doing, but right now, they’re processing things still. We have to try in practice to do everything exactly right. We’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to stumble, but we’re going to make mistakes and stumble at 100 miles an hour.

“Eventually, we’re going to be good at it.”