Babers is in his first year as Arizona's offensive coordinator and his 41st year in college football coaching. Baber was the head coach for the past 7 years at Syracuse after short head coaching stops at Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green.
Babers has always coached on the offensive side of the ball or special teams except for one season at NAU (1990) when he coached defensive backs. He has only been an offensive coordinator twice in his career - Arizona from 1998-2000 and Texas A&M from 2001-2002.
In his first year as offensive coordinator at Arizona in 1998, Babers offense helped Arizona to the best season in school history with a 12-1 record and 7-1 in the conference and finishing the year ranked 4th in the country. Babers offense averaged 32 points per game and was led by the QB duo of Keith Smith and Ortege Jenkins along with Trung Candidate, Dennis Northcutt, and Jeremy McDaniel. In the following 2 years Arizona went 6-6 and 5-6 leading to both Coach Tomey and Babers leaving Arizona. In Babers one season at Texas A&M the Aggies passed for 2109 yards and 9 TDs and rushed for 1541 yards and 14 TDs while averaging 4.5 yards per play. So, in 4 previous years as an offensive coordinator Babers had one magic year and 3 below average years leading me to believe that Babers is the biggest question mark on our offense.
Noah Fifita's longest completion last year was for 69 yards to Jonah Coleman against Washington St.
