The team chose him

SAN ANTONIO — Six months later, Gardner Minshew II doesn’t remember the exact message he wanted to deliver when he gathered his new teammates together for the first time, a mere two or three weeks after the quarterback had arrived on the Washington State campus.

“We need to work harder.”

“We need to have better attitudes.”

Something like that.

Maybe the message was less important than the resolve to deliver it. It was, in any event, one of the first important steps in the whirlwind journey that Minshew, the Cougars and their bedazzled fans would make as they conjured up their improbable 2018 season.

The No. 12 Cougars (10-2) fell short of the Shangri-La they’d learned to believe in, but they’ll try to become the first 11-win team in school history Friday (6 p.m. Pacific, ESPN) when they play Iowa State in the Alamo Bowl in the Alamodome.

Minshew had been wandering the college football landscape for years, seeing undeniable success at the junior-college level but never finding a suitable place to pursue his real objectives. But he’d been a quarterback for a long time. When he landed at Wazzu as a graduate transfer in May, he brought with him an established skill set and, just as important, an established philosophy on how to play the position.

Perhaps his best verbal expression of that philosophy came just a couple of weeks ago, when someone asked him about the other quarterbacks on the WSU roster, the ones who’ll duke it out for Minshew’s starting role next year.

“The biggest thing is, who’s going to take control? — you know, win the team,” he said. “That’s one of those things I’ve always said. The team selects the starter. The coaches don’t select it. It kind of works itself out.”

Not the coaches’ decision? After all that hand-wringing in August, as Minshew battled Trey Tinsley and Anthony Gordon in a three-way dead heat for weeks on end, it wasn’t Mike Leach who finally made the call? Actually, Leach would probably agree. He’s always maintained that one of Minshew’s greatest assets is his ability to inspire teammates and raise their level of play. In the weeks before the season opener, the Cougars played their best football when the senior new guy was pulling the trigger.

If you ask Minshew where he gleaned that notion of how quarterbacks are anointed, he’ll point to his father, the first Gardner Minshew, who goes by the first name of Flint. A general contractor in Mississippi, Flint Minshew didn’t play quarterback, but maybe he spent a lot of time studying them during his days as a defensive lineman at Millsap College, an NCAA Division II school in Jackson, Miss. He said by phone that his son was a QB virtually from the time he started playing the game.

“I did everything I could to keep his hands off the ground,” he joked.

Flint and his wife Kim, a seventh-grade math teacher, have two daughters as well, Meredith and Callie, both younger than Gardner, and they’re a tight-knit family. That’s patently true of the two males of the brood.

For one thing, Flint Minshew owns a fitness center. His son grew up believing gymnasiums are an excellent place to be.

A recent 30-minute interview touched on such miserable subjects as the 2018 Apple Cup, which derailed the Cougars’ biggest plans and left their quarterback watching the postgame scene from outside the WSU locker room and breaking into tears. Never mind that the Cougars had been picked fifth in the preseason Pac-12 North poll. They didn’t seal the deal by beating Washington and advancing to the league title game.

“I felt like I let down the seniors — the guys that have been here for so long and have been so successful and have never beaten U-Dub,” Minshew said.

But his mood during that interview visibly lightened when the subject turned to Dad and the fitness centers of his youth.

“I’d always beg him to go to the gym with him,” Minshew said. “We had to get a waiver signed by the doctor so I could be with him when I was 11 or 12, because they wouldn’t take anybody under 13. We’d go to the gym in the morning, then he’d drop me off at school. I’d walk into school with my muscle milk, in sixth and seventh grade, thinking I was so cool.”

In that way, he began associating “cool” with diligence at a young age.

“Just hard work,” he said. “That’s one thing he always told me. One thing you can control is how hard you work. Because I was never the biggest, never the fastest or the strongest, but I always knew I could control that, and it would take me a long ways.”

Naturally, then, the first arena Minshew tried to conquer in Pullman was the weight room at the Cougar Football Complex.

“That’s where you earn your respect,” he said. “I was coming in as a freshman. When we’re lifting, I’m going to lift heavy, I’m going to lead the way, by example. When we hit the field and run, I’m going to win that way, just be the best leader I can be, by example, until you earn enough respect and credibility to where you can take on the verbal leadership role.”

That’s when he spoke in front of the team for the first time, there in the weight room in early June. First he ran the notion past senior linebacker and defensive leader Peyton Pelluer, who by that juncture hardly saw the necessity of giving his permission.

“At that point, Trey (Tinsley) was kind of the quarterback that was leading the offense,” Pelluer said Wednesday in San Antonio, “but it was still a battle. I knew he (Minshew) had a lot to say during our workouts. So that first time he spoke up (to the entire team), I was excited to see what he had to say. Everything he’s said since, it’s been just perfect for leading the offense. So I’m happy he came and had that ‘want’ to address the team.”

Like the quarterback, Pelluer doesn’t recall the exact words of that first talk.

“It was probably pertinent to our workouts at the time,” he said. “We’re a team that doesn’t look ahead or look backward. We were just focusing on getting stronger, getting better, getting closer as a team at that time.”

This particular club had extra incentive to focus on the present. The recent was past was excruciating.

When quarterback Tyler Hilinski, the heir apparent for the starter’s job, committed suicide in January, the news was so devastating to anyone close to the program that it was difficult to gauge how it was being received elsewhere in the country. Oh, it resonated. Minshew can testify to that. He had recently completed his junior season at East Carolina when it happened.

“You just want answers, you want reasons,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense. Obviously your heart goes out to everyone involved, the family and teammates, everybody. At that point a bunch of guys on our team, we talked about it. We said we’re going to do everything we could do to make sure we’re there for anybody on our team. I think that definitely had an impact throughout the country.”

Of course, he had no inkling how that event would affect his own course in life. He had his own issues, and his two years as a part-time starter at ECU had proved mainly that he wasn’t suited for the Pirates’ offensive system.

By the end of the month he announced he was leaving for personal reasons. A month later, he said he was transferring to juggernaut Alabama, believing one gifted Crimson Tide QB might transfer and realizing another wunderkind lacked experience. If all else failed, Minshew could ride the bench and score a coveted graduate assistant’s gig at the school the following year.

A few weeks after that, he received the well-documented phone call from Leach, who asked Minshew if he’d like to lead the country in passing yardage. Sure, he said. So he was off to Washington State. The connection between Hilinski’s death and Minshew’s arrival was something everyone knew and no one spoke of.

“I just had to come in and be myself,” Minshew said. “Just be respectful of the loss that everybody had suffered. I had no clue what I was going to walk into, how it was going to be. The last thing I wanted to do was be the guy who was really trying to replace somebody. I was going to try to come in and be myself and earn everybody’s respect. And do it my own way.”

As it happened, Minshew’s wit and wisdom, his hilarious but measured antics, his ability to communicate with seemingly anyone, were precisely what this grieving team needed.

“It’s got to be tough, coming into the circumstances he came into,” WSU receiver Kyle Sweet told reporters in San Antonio. “It wasn’t ideal, but he handled it better than I thought anybody ever could in his position. We’re all so happy and proud of him, to call him a Coug and be one of us. He’s done a helluva job this year, so we’ve very thankful he came to play here.”

Leach was right. Minshew does lead the country in passing yards. He’s completing 71 percent, with 36 touchdowns against nine interceptions. His 176 gross rushing yards may not seem like much, but in combination with his general avoidance of sacks they’ve been crucial in revitalizing Leach’s Air Raid offense.

If Minshew was perfect for Wazzu, the opposite is also true. He has been heading toward vintage Air Raid since his high-school days in Brandon, Miss., where his offensive coordinator, Wyatt Rogers, had steeped himself in the Leach/Hal Mumme attack since game-planning for it as a junior-college coach preparing for a Mumme-led Valdosta State.

Influenced by Rogers, Minshew read Leach’s book, “Swing Your Sword,” as a middle-schooler and later would rise early in the morning each day so he could watch old Leach and Mumme video with Rogers before school.

As Minshew, after an aborted stint as a walk-on at Troy, was leading Northwest Mississippi Community College to a national JC championship, he would play his games on Thursday nights and drive back to Brandon to help Rogers coach on Fridays.

“I didn’t see the Washington State opportunity coming,” Rogers said by phone, “but I knew that if anyone ever gave him a chance, I mean, if anybody would crack the door for him, he was going to kick the door in. Whoever was in front of him on the depth chart was in trouble. I’m just telling you, you’re talking about somebody that’s not only extremely intelligent and has work ethic, but a guy that is the ultimate competitor.”

In deciding to grow a Burt Reynolds-ish mustache last summer in Pullman, Minshew wasn’t consciously postulating a symbol for his and the Cougars’ fresh start. He had grown preseason mustaches before. This one caught some attention, so he kept it, not realizing it would spur an uncanny Wazzu fan craze.

Yet it’s not exactly a coincidence that the whole insanity evoked the 1970s. One byproduct of Minshew’s close bond with his father, who was born in 1970, is his inherited taste for Led Zeppelin, “Smokey and the Bandit” and other signposts of that decade.

More crucially, he brought to the Wazzu practice field his father’s philosophy on how quarterback competitions are decided.

“It’s the guy that the guys respect,” the younger Minshew said. “It’s the one that the guys want to play for. With two minutes left and you’re down a touchdown, who are they looking to? The coaches get a feel for that, because if a coach picks a guy that’s not it, then you’re going to have a lack of trust.

“So that’s the one thing I’ve tried to do. Lead the guys and be one of the guys.”

Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2290.