Rick Neuheisel

Richard Gerald Neuheisel Jr. (born February 7, 1961) is an American football analyst, coach, and former player.

Dick is an attorney and Rick grew up in Tempe, Arizona, and graduated from McClintock High School in 1979.

He lettered in three sports (football, basketball, baseball) and was named its outstanding athlete during his senior year.

Neuheisel played his college football at UCLA, beginning his career as a walk-on and holding placekicks for John Lee.

Before coaching, Neuheisel played quarterback for the UCLA Bruins from 1980 to 1983, then spent two seasons with the San Antonio Gunslingers of the United States Football League (USFL) before splitting the 1987 NFL season between the San Diego Chargers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Neuheisel was born in Madison, Wisconsin, one of four children and the only son of Dick and Jane (Jackson) Neuheisel, with sisters Nancy, Katie, and Deborah.

He was the starting quarterback in his senior year in the 1983 season.

UCLA opened with a loss at Georgia, a tie with Arizona State and then a 42–10 loss at #1-ranked Nebraska.

Neuheisel was benched after the Nebraska loss in favor of Steve Bono.

On October 1, the Bruins lost to BYU to start the season 0–3–1.

Bono was injured during the Stanford game, and Neuheisel came back to finish the season.

Neuheisel still holds the UCLA single season record for completion percentage, completed 185 of 267 passes (69.3%) for 2,245 yards in the 1983 season.

He was also a member of Sigma Nu fraternity while a student.

Neuheisel led the Bruins to an eventual 6–4–1 record, culminating with a win over arch-rival USC that, combined with Washington State's upset of Washington, gave UCLA the Pac-10 championship in 1983 and sent them to the Rose Bowl on January 2, 1984.

Neuheisel led the Bruins to a 45–9 victory over 4th-ranked and heavily favored Illinois in the 1984 Rose Bowl, in which he was named the MVP; two of his four touchdown passes were caught by a sophomore wide receiver from San Diego named Karl Dorrell, a future Neuheisel assistant coach and later his predecessor as the UCLA head coach.

The victory vaulted the Bruins, unranked through most of the season, into the top 25 in wire service polls.

Much like his rise to stardom at UCLA, the road to the victory was a bumpy one.

Neuheisel and two other players on the defensive side of the ball suffered from food poisoning hours before the Rose Bowl and it was unsure that Neuheisel would start.

Neuheisel would end up starting the game.

He also set an NCAA record that year for single game pass completion percentage (since broken) by completing 25 of 27 passes (92.6%) in a Pac-10 win over Washington.

Neuheisel was named to the Pac-10 All-Academic team and graduated from UCLA in May 1984 with a B.A. in political science and a 3.4 GPA.

Neuheisel bypassed the 1984 NFL draft and joined the San Antonio Gunslingers of the USFL, where he played the 1984 and 1985 seasons as the Gunslingers' starter.

Never considered a major NFL prospect, he went undrafted in the NFL's supplemental draft of USFL players and his career in that league was extremely brief, lasting only five weeks.

In the 1987 season, Neuheisel signed with the San Diego Chargers as a replacement player during the three-game long players' strike.

He spent the last two weeks of that season as a backup with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, not playing in either game.

While attending USC Law School on an NCAA postgraduate scholarship, Neuheisel served as a graduate assistant with UCLA, where he tutored Troy Aikman.

He later became a full-time assistant coach in 1988, and stayed at UCLA through the 1993 season as the quarterback coach.

He graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from USC in 1990 and passed the Arizona State Bar in May 1991 and the Washington, D.C. Bar in March 1993.

Hard feelings emerged with UCLA coach Terry Donahue in 1994, when Donahue picked Texas A&M assistant Bob Toledo to be the Bruins' offensive coordinator over Neuheisel.

In 1994, Neuheisel moved to Colorado as an assistant to Bill McCartney.

McCartney retired following the 1994 season and Neuheisel, age 34, was named the head coach.

He served as the head football coach at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1995 to 1999, at the University of Washington from 1999 to 2002, and at his alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 2008 to 2011, compiling a career college football coaching record of 87–59.

He stayed for four seasons (1995–1998) in Boulder as the Buffs coach.

His best season was his first, in which the Buffs tied for second in the final season of Big Eight Conference play and won the Cotton Bowl.

His only losing season at Colorado was 1997; the Buffs were expected to be national title contenders, but never recovered from a blowout loss to Michigan on national television.

After the season, the Buffs were forced to forfeit their five wins due to an ineligible player, though Neuheisel was subsequently ruled to not be affected.

In 1998, Neuheisel was inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame.

Neuheisel and Donahue had a chance meeting at the airport in Dallas in 1999, and resolved their differences.

From 2005 to 2007, Neuheisel was an assistant coach with the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League (NFL), as quarterbacks coach for two seasons and offensive coordinator for one.

He formerly served as head coach for the Arizona Hotshots of the Alliance of American Football (AAF) before the collapse of the league.