In 2003, when Jimmy Lake was in his first post as a college football coach at Eastern Washington University, an FCS school a four-hour drive east of Seattle, he sat in on his team’s interviews to fill its vacant offensive coordinator role.
One of those candidates was Beau Baldwin, a coach who had spent the previous nine seasons coaching quarterbacks at Central Washington.
Though Eastern Washington interviewed a handful of candidates, when they had all finished, Lake decided he would mail a card to Baldwin at Central Washington.
“I didn’t know what our head coach was going to do, if we were going to hire him or not,” Lake said.