Jim Dennison, winningest football coach at Akron and Walsh, dies
NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...
Nearly 10 years elapsed between Jim Dennison’s final game as the University of Akron football team’s head coach and his debut in the same role at Walsh University.
To be exact, 3,563 days passed. Yet, Dennison stayed ready in the interim.
“He took me to his house, pulled up his garage door and inside were all of his football files,” former Walsh athletic director Dale Howard said in 2012. “They were all stacked and alphabetized. He had not given up on the notion that he would coach again.”
A burning passion for the game kept the dream alive. Dennison led Akron for 13 years and Walsh for the first 18 seasons of the program’s existence, compiling a collegiate record of 199-139-2 and establishing himself as a legend at both schools.
Dennison, the winningest football coach in Akron and Walsh history, has died, according to Walsh University. He was 87.
A native of Medina County, Dennison was a standout football and baseball player at Wadsworth High School and the College of Wooster before he became a coach.
Dennison compiled an overall head coaching record of 208-139-2, which includes a 9-0 season with Copley High School in 1964.
At Akron, Dennison went 80-62-2 from 1973-85. In 1976, the Zips finished second in the NCAA Division II playoffs when they lost 24-13 to Montana State in the Pioneer Bowl. UA went 10-3, giving the program its first and only 10-win season, and Dennison was named Kodak National Coach of the Year.
In a controversial decision, Akron hired the late Gerry Faust in December 1985 to replace Dennison, who was coming off an 8-3 regular-season record and an appearance in the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs. Faust had gone 30-26-1 in five seasons at Notre Dame, and UA officials sought a coach with his cachet to lead the Zips’ transition from NCAA Division I-AA to Division I-A, a move made in 1987.
Dennison became Akron’s assistant athletic director in 1985 and its AD in 1987. He held the AD job for seven years.
Walsh hired Dennison as its AD in 1993 and named him its coach a year later while the Cavaliers adopted football as a varsity sport. The school in North Canton played its first game on Sept. 2, 1995. Dennison stepped down as AD in 2007 but continued to coach the football team. He went 119-77 from 1995 until he retired in 2012.
“When they called, they said, ‘Come be the AD and possibly start a football program,’” Dennison said in 2012. “I went down as a five-year retirement job, and here it is nearly 20 years later. So I think that’s a good five years.”
The Cavs finished with winning records in each of their first 12 seasons, won the Mid-States Football Association title in 2001 and qualified for the NAIA playoffs in 2006. They posted a winning record in 14 of Dennison’s 18 seasons.
In 2003, Akron inducted Dennison into its Athletics Ring of Honor. Ten years later, Walsh placed him on its Athletic Wall of Fame.
Former longtime Ohio State coach Jim Tressel and former longtime Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio were young Akron assistants during Dennison’s Zips tenure.
“Jim Dennison is the one who gave me my start in coaching,” Tressel said in 2013. “He gave me my first graduate assistant job and hired me on the staff a year later. There’s not a better guy in the world.”
The Dennison coaching tree also includes a family business. Dennison and his wife, Sue, had two sons who are longtime Northeast Ohio high school football coaches. Greg is at Buckeye and Matt at GlenOak, having just left Canton South for that job last month.
Nate Ulrich can be reached at nulrich@thebeaconjournal.com. On Twitter: @ByNateUlrich.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Longtime Akron, Walsh football coach Jim Dennison dead at 87
More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos