One of the most interesting sports personalities in the history of the Inland Empire, football coach Don Markham, has found another job:

At Compton High School, in the Moore League.

My former colleague John Murphy alerted me to this. John is the source of a large fraction of all high school news that comes out of the Inland Empire, a two-county area of about 4 million people. Here is his story on Markham.

Why this could work:

–Markham is best in situations where a football program has been losing for a long time. Compton has had a few decent seasons in the past decade, but on the whole they’ve been losing in football forever. I grew up in Long Beach, and all the Long Beach schools are in the Moore League, along with Compton. And Compton has not been able to compete with the Moore League’s best (generally Long Beach Poly, for the past 30 years). Not since Duke Snider was going to school at Compton.

–Markham’s scheme of offense, the double wing, is simple and requires a minimum of skill players. It also depends almost exclusively on the running game. Those are all selling points in a bad program. If he has 20 guys who are committed to getting into the weight room and doing exactly what he tells them to do, and five of them can run a 4.6-second 40-yard dash, he will have all he needs. He doesn’t need a quarterback who can throw particularly well (but he does need to be able to block; no, really), and he doesn’t need more than one or two guys who can catch a ball in flight. Anyway, a passing game takes a lot of time and athletes; Markham’s double wing does not.

–Markham does best at schools in tough economic straits. He just does. Bloomington, Rialto … those are blue-collar communities (or would be, if any blue-collar jobs still existed). His tough-love approach to the game seems to work well in those environments.

–He knows he is on his last chance, or what might well be his last chance. He’s 71, and he’s had several situations that went horribly wrong in the past few years. His fault? Maybe not. But eventually it doesn’t matter who is at fault; when administrators see a resume with 3-4 jobs that last a year or less, they get squeamish.

–The Moore League plays at the elite level. Markham has always been excited by this concept. He wants to play in Division I. He wants to match wits with the best, and he wants to go up against elite athletes.

Markham is a fascinating guy. His approach to football is so different from that of nearly any of his contemporaries — and even more so, now, with the world being populated by 35YO coaches who all run some version of spread-the-field, throw-every-down football.

If he can get his 20 guys … he could land in the Moore League like a bomb. If you have never before played against his offense, it can overwhelm even a good defense.

What he has to be hoping is that not every coach in the league gets on the phone to Dick Bruich and Skip Fazio, the guys from Fontana who came up with the scheme that pretty much blunted Markham’s offense.

Turns out, Compton had been running the double wing under their previous coach, who was 36-37. That takes a little of the surprise away from Markham’s scheme. What he had to be selling, then, is that he is the master, and that his teams will run it better than his predecessor. At any rate, Long Beach Poly didn’t wake up to the news today and say, “Oh, my, we’re in trouble now” because they are a big smug, at Poly.

As always, this will be interesting to watch, and we just hope Don Markham tries as hard as he can to keep up good relations with everyone around him at the new job. Opportunities come along less frequently when you are a coach of a certain age.