Football recruiting day came and went last week with relatively little fanfare in Utah. That's because the colleges here seldom get blue-chip players. They go to Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, Michigan, Texas, Ohio State, Tennessee.
But they go nowhere more frequently than Florida. Many analysts rate Gator coach Urban Meyer's recruiting class best in the nation this year. Others have the Gators rated No. 2, behind USC.
Players go to Florida because of its tradition, or its weather, but they mostly go because of the coach. Not only has Meyer won a national championship, he's done it with a certain savoir-faire — fake kicks, hook-and-ladders, reverses, etc. He's captured people's imagination.
Some say they haven't seen that sort of coaching anywhere. Utahn Ron Fullmer, though, isn't one of them. He has seen the plays Meyer's team runs before. In fact, he played on a team that ran them.
The year was 1957, the team was Utah and the coach was "Cactus" Jack Curtice.
Fullmer doesn't remember exactly when he realized he was seeing a rerun of sorts. It could have been in 2003, when Ute tight end Ben Moa took a direct snap and faked a line plunge against Air Force, only to pull up for a jump-pass over the line of scrimmage. Or it may have been on a reverse to Paris Warren, or a play in which quarterback Alex Smith caught a pass.
Fullmer returned from a stint in the Army in '57 to play offensive line and linebacker for Curtice. He never played after that season because he didn't get along with some of the coaches on Ray Nagel's staff the next year. "So I used my talents in the marching band instead," he said.
Every band needs a good strong guy who can carry a sousaphone, anyway.
But he didn't leave before learning enough of Curtice's plays to recognize them a half-century later. They were so similar that Fullmer approached Meyer one day at a Utah practice and introduced himself. He told Meyer he should check out Cactus Jack's playbook, to which Meyer replied he had already read it. He even said he had a copy of it.
"I said where did he find it, and he said it took some doing but he found one," said Fullmer. "He alluded that he had seen Jack's stuff on film or video, too."
There are differences, of course. Fullmer says that while Meyer runs his teams from a spread, Curtice usually ran a variable "T" formation.
The long-ago Utes — then known as the Redskins — ran variations of Moa's play, in which quarterback Lee Grosscup handed off to "a kid from Price who would go toward the line, then pull up and pass."
There were hook-and-ladder plays, flea-flickers, direct snaps and, of course, the shovel pass made famous by Curtice.
"I remember playing against Montana, and Jack got us to the 10-yard line and he called a reverse, but the back stumbled and fell on his nose," said Fullmer.
In short, when he saw Meyer's trickery both at Utah and Florida, Fullmer came down with a major case of deja vu.
Utah had been there and run that before Meyer was even born.
When Fullmer realized Meyer was running something similar to Curtice, he told his wife, "I've seen this before. He's got Jack Curtice's playbook!"
Meyer had Cactus Jack's attitude, as well.
That, of course, doesn't discount what Meyer has done. Fullmer even allows that "I don't think Jack was quite as proficient" as Meyer, in part due to the complexity of the offenses nowadays.
Yet both coaches loved to use everyone they could, and both had the charisma to get the players to buy into their system.
Fullmer is quick to note that the things Florida (and Hawaii and Boise State, for that matter) are running today really aren't all that modern. Actually, they have a distinctly historical feel.
What was baffling opponents in 1957 is still baffling 'em today.
"I would say that in football, the more things change, the more they stay the same, yes," said Fullmer.
Isn't that the way it is? The best songs never grow old.
E-mail: rock@desnews.com