PHOENIX — About the time Brandon Arconado was beginning high school in Southern California, his father lost his job in the movie industry.
For 16 years, Mike Arconado had been a precision mechanic for Technicolor film lab, tasked with the high-pressure job of maintaining a machine that developed a thousand feet of 35-millimeter film every minute. He worked on movies directed by Clint Eastwood and others.
Then the film industry went digital, slowly at first and later with all its might. Mike Arconado’s precious machine became dispensable and his department was virtually eliminated. He spent two years trying fruitlessly to find other work in Hollywood before deciding to switch careers.
Brandon Arconado, a senior inside receiver whose precise route-running has become one of the Washington State football team’s primary assets this season, wasn’t thinking specifically of his father’s spell of misfortune when he began steering his scholastic pursuits toward management information systems — in other words, when he plunged headlong into the digital world.
Looking back, though, he thinks it might have profoundly influenced his thinking. And although he never really surprised his father with his overachieving success on the football field, he recently found a way to floor him — through his academics.
Arconado will conclude his singular college career when the Cougars (6-6) play No. 24 Air Force (10-2) in the Cheez-It Bowl at 7:15 p.m. PST on Friday at Chase Field in Phoenix.
He spent a year at a junior college, accepted a walk-on offer from Wazzu, bided his time and caught four passes in 2017. He started talking about transferring to a smaller school to wrangle more playing time, and coaches promptly ponied up a scholarship to keep him on board. Even then, he failed to crack the eight-man receiver rotation last season and didn’t make a single catch.
All that time, however, he was polishing his technique and quietly deepening his resolve. Now, as a senior, he’s putting it all on display. Despite missing the equivalent of 3½ games with injuries, he leads the Cougars in receiving yards and needs only 68 more in the bowl game to reach 1,000 for the year. His 67 catches rank only third on the team, but many of them have been drive-savers.
Is it dazzling speed and athleticism at work here? No, it’s something more ineffable.
“There’s just something about Arco, that he just does different than everybody else, and it throws you off,” WSU cornerback George Hicks III said recently. “You won’t really see it on film or anything like that. But once you get out there on the field, you’re like, ‘Damn, he’s doing something that’s throwing you off in the route.’ He’s a helluva player — good route-runner, strong hands, he does everything.”
It could be that Arconado “throws you off” partly with unfailing humility and a kind of lulling vocal monotone. He never seems to be trying to impress you, but over time he does anyway. He plays football with an exactitude that’s almost certainly informed by his studiousness, both on the field and in the realm of video scouting work.
“Of all the (receivers) we played last game, he’s probably the slowest,” WSU coach Mike Leach declared after Arconado’s 109-yard day against Colorado in October. “And Arconado had the biggest impact of any receiver in that game. Which goes to show you, a guy who will do exactly what you tell him to do, be exactly where you want him to be, exactly when you want him to be there — and has a sense of what’s going on — can flat-out outplay people. And that’s how important that is. The more athletic the guy who can do that, the better. But you’re better off with a guy who’s precise and consistent than just somebody who’s athletic.”
None of this has surprised Mike Arconado, who has watched his son patiently impress people his whole life — first in soccer and later when his mother finally let him play football as a freshman in high school.
“He has such a great outlook on things,” the elder Arconado said by phone from his home in Chino Hills, Calif. “There aren’t too many things that deter him when he’s really looking toward his goal. In my years (as an athlete), I would let things bother me, but his determination is great. Is it a surprise? From a fatherly view, it’s really not a surprise. ”
Work ethic, he said, is thoroughly ingrained in the family. His own father, of Filipino descent, claimed to be the fastest pineapple-picker on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. Brandon’s rich ethnic mix also draws on the Cajun heritage of his mother, Deanna, a bartender and server.
This legacy of diligence was something Mike Arconado embraced in 2011 when, thanks to the digital revolution in film, he found himself unemployed, with a wife and three children to support. Many movie directors, including Eastwood, still adored the rich color of traditional film stock, as opposed to digital, but that couldn’t stop the march of time.
“It was an exciting gig,” Mike Arconado said of his former career, “but I got laid off because the division closed, and that’s when things began to spiral and that’s when we went into some hard times with the family. I tried to find something in the industry. There were editors, but it was a union job, so there were people ahead of me. I tried to work as a stage hand. I tried to work as a laborer or something, just so I stay in and keep the medical benefits for the kids and stuff. It just didn’t happen.”
He eventually landed a job in retail and later began to specialize in managing underperforming stores. He and Deanna regained their financial equilibrium and reached a milestone when their eldest child, Samantha, earned a four-year college degree. Brandon matched that accomplishment last spring, securing a bachelor’s degree in finance, and is now working on a master’s.
Inherent in his academic career is a determination to view finance through a digital prism, and he believes he subconsciously moved in that direction as a result of the adversity that struck his father.
“He had a good job, a pretty steady job, but film going digital forced him out of the business,” he said. “Everything is moving toward more digital technology. I don’t want to be caught in something that’s going to be outdated by the time I’m ready to find a job and get on with my life. From a career standpoint, I want to do something in technology that’s going to be around for a while.
“But that’s where I learned my work ethic,” he said. “From my dad.”
About two weeks ago, Mike Arconado received a text from his wife, a screen shot of the first unit of this year’s Academic All-America team in NCAA Division I football, as chosen by sports-information directors. It was a disorienting sight.
Mike did some research and some math, hoping to gauge how many college students play football at various levels of competition. Many thousands, he concluded. And there on his cellphone, listed among the top 25 student-athletes competing in the top tier of the game, was the name of Brandon Arconado.
“Are you kidding me?” he said.
Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2290.