Can Golden Flashes find wins on the football field and fans in the stands?
The lack of an emotional bond between Kent State students, fans and the school's football team could be easily found during a recent "Fan Experience Night" designed to drum up interest in the upcoming season. "When you're recruiting to a losing program," former KSU athletic director Laing Kennedy said, "that's a lot like recruiting for a deckhand on the Titanic. It was a tough sell."KENT, Ohio -- To create a buzz for the football program, Kent State has thrown family-friendly tailgating parties this summer at the massive fieldhouse next to Dix Stadium.
Grab a slushy. Enjoy some barbecue. Ride the inflatable kiddie slides -- one of which is, unfortunately, a listing ocean liner.
The symbolism wasn't lost on one fan, who wondered before a recent open-house scrimmage whether the Titanic was such a good idea, considering the state of Kent State football.
There is so much to be done.
Despite sending a number of players to the NFL, the Golden Flashes last won the Mid-American Conference championship and played in a bowl game when Richard Nixon was president and "The Godfather" made its big-screen debut.
For Kent State fans, the last 30 years have been especially painful. Since 1980, the Flashes have had just two winning seasons. During that stretch, they've watched their team lose three of every four games, including six by at least 50 points.
Sean Patterson, a former Shaw High School star who played linebacker for Kent State in the early 1990s, still remembers how failure became infectious.
"To be honest," he said, "we got used to losing."
It's no wonder, then, that -- as a recent study by KSU professor Danielle Coombs concluded -- students feel disconnected from the team. The expectation among the students was that the team will lose, she discovered, and that most of the students who attend games bail at halftime.
As a KSU freshman in 1972, former St. Joseph High School quarterback Greg Kokal led the Flashes to their only MAC title and bowl game. He says he is beyond tired of hearing the same old question:
Why has Kent State football been so bad for so long?
At Kokal's brother's wedding last month, even a member of the band laid that one on him.
"I said, 'I really don't know,'" said Kokal, who runs a trucking company in Warren and remains a Kent State backer. "I don't have an answer."
Why winning matters
KSU's new athletic director, Joel Nielson, believes that building a contending Golden Flashes football team would benefit the entire school community.So Kent's football team hasn't won a title for a long, long time -- pushing 40 years now. So what? Kent isn't Ohio State. It's not even Cincinnati. Why does winning football matter anyway?
Financially, it's critical, new Kent State athletic director Joel Nielsen said after his introductory press conference in late March.
It's so expensive to field a college football team that all but about a dozen of the 120 Division I schools lose money on the sport. But football, by far, generates more revenue for college athletic departments than any other sport.
As the recent splintering of conferences and some epic rivalries has shown, football drives national and regional television contracts. MAC football has long-term contracts with ESPN and SportsTime Ohio, the revenue from which is split among the 13 schools.
Winning football sells tickets, concessions and university merchandise. Sponsors and donors love being associated with a champion.
Then there are the intangibles: Nothing sets the tone for a university like a winning football team.
"It'd be crazy," said Dave May, 34, of Rootstown, a life-long Kent State fan who attends every home game and watched the Flashes' recent scrimmage from an end zone. "It would be nuts here."
"I mean, there's so many things," said Nielsen, who's been busy selling his 5-year Kent State football "enhancement plan" to prospective donors.. "It really develops that life and spirit on campus in the fall."
A magical season, an NFL factory
Josh Cribbs earned enough recognition as a quarterback for Kent State that the Browns signed him. CURRENT KSU PLAYERS IN THE NFL
Josh Cribbs, wide receiver, Cleveland
Julian Edelman, wide receiver, New England
Abe Elam, safety, Cleveland
Antonio Gates*, tight end, San Diego
James Harrison, linebacker, Pittsburgh
Daniel Muir, defensive tackle, Indianapolis
Rico Murray, cornerback, Cincinnati
Jack Williams, defensive back, Detroit
Usama Young, defensive back, New Orleans
*-- did not play football for KSU
MAC football championships: Miami 13; Bowling Green 10; Toledo 10; Central Michigan 7; Ball State 5; Marshall 5; Ohio University 4; Cincinnati (no longer a member) 4; Akron 1; Buffalo 1; Kent State 1; Eastern Michigan 1; Northern Illinois 1; Western Michigan 1.
Source: Mid-American Conference
Kent, Ohio's third-largest university in enrollment, hasn't had that spirit since 1969. That was the year 25,000-seat Dix Stadium opened.
Within three years, it was the place to be on Saturday afternoons.
After going 3-8 and winless in the MAC the year before, Kent started the 1972 season 1-3-1. In an amazing reversal of fortune, the Flashes won five of their last six to take the MAC.
Kent State won the conference for the first and only time and played in the Tangerine Bowl (now the Capital One Bowl in Orlando), losing to Tampa and first-year coach Earle Bruce, 21-18.
"It was the will of a lot of players and coaches, the tenacity that some of the players had, and it was contagious," said Larry Poole, the team's star sophomore running back, who is now retired in Tampa. "That's what I remember about that team. We were just scrappy and we didn't quit."
That team was led by middle linebacker Jack Lambert, who wound up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and future college coaches Nick Saban (of national champion Alabama) and Gary Pinkel (now at Missouri). They became known as "The James Gang" -- no, not after rocker Joe Walsh, who fried brain cells at Kent State for a while before launching a successful band of that name, but after second-year coach Don James. He coached KSU to a 25-19-1 record from 1971-74 and went on to win a national championship at Washington.
"A lot of people, even coaches, were saying we had no chance," James said of his best KSU team.
More or less, that's been the overriding sentiment ever since.
What's so baffling is that, despite decades of losing, Kent has delivered a steady stream of top-line players to the NFL.
Players such as Pittsburgh linebacker and a Super Bowl MVP James Harrison, last year's Super Bowl opponents Usama Young (New Orleans Saints) and Daniel Muir (Indianapolis Colts), pesky New England Patriots receiver Julian Edelman and the Browns' Josh Cribbs and Abe Elam. (Antonio Gates, San Diego's All-Pro tight end, was a Golden Flash as well, but in basketball, not football.)
Cribbs, who is from Washington, D.C., could have gone to a much bigger program. He had scholarship offers from Maryland and Syracuse for football, and from Texas for baseball.
So how did a talent like that wind up at Kent State?
When his high school team traveled to Cleveland to play St. Ignatius, the squad practiced at Kent the day before the game. The Kent coaches noticed Cribbs and offered him a full scholarship that night, he said.
He accepted, for one reason: so he could play immediately. The bigger schools planned to redshirt him, have him sit out his freshman year to develop without burning a season of eligibility.
At Kent, he knew he would stand out.
"I didn't want to go to a Maryland or Ohio State or a school like that and be overshadowed or just be another player on a great team," the former college quarterback said after a recent Browns practice. "I felt I was good enough, that if I'm going to a team with less talented players, to the world, I'll be seen. I didn't just want to be another guy, so to speak."
Revolving door, tough sell
The goal of Kent State's outreach effort to the local fans is simple and clear: Sell 90,000 tickets during the upcoming season.Kent's losing tradition shouldn't be a case of being outspent. MAC schools play with roughly the same dollars -- athletic budgets of about $15 million to $20 million, and of that, $3 million to $6 million for football. (Kent spends about $5 million.) And they offer the same number of football scholarships, 85.
But a series of organizational missteps, tragedy and bad luck and institution-wide disinterest set the KSU program back.
It begins in the coach's office.
Doug Martin, who joined the Kent staff in 2003 as offensive coordinator, begins his seventh season as head coach -- the longest tenure in the last 30 years. He's 24-46 and his team likely will have to show major improvement in 2010 for him to stay on another season.
Before Martin, the team had gone through eight head coaches since 1980.
"That was the problem," said former KSU athletic director Laing Kennedy, who retired this spring after 16 years on the Portage County campus. "That began what I would describe as the long, slow climb."
As if KSU football didn't have enough to overcome, the tragic death of 45-year-old coach Dick Scesniak on April Fool's Day 1986 sent the program reeling. After jogging, Scesniak picked up a penny as he walked through the gates of Dix Stadium, mentioning to a janitor, "Must be my lucky day." The coach walked into the weight room and then hit the floor, the victim of a heart attack.
KSU's program also was wrought with academic and behavioral issues when Kennedy arrived as AD. He credited former coaches Jim Corrigall with providing much-needed structure and discipline, and Dean Pees, now coaching linebackers for the Baltimore Ravens, with landing such talent as Cribbs.
Northeast Ohio is rich with high school football talent, but Kent has rarely been a coveted player's first choice. Too close to home, some say. The cloud of the shootings on May 4, 1970 still hurts the school's image, say others. But mostly, it's the record.
"When you're recruiting to a losing program," Kennedy said, "that's a lot like recruiting for a deckhand on the Titanic. It was a tough sell."
No commitment from the top
It's not that Kent can't win. In fact, the school captured the "Excellence in Management Cup" this year, the national championship for running the most economically efficient Division I athletic program in the country. It's based on a formula that matches money spent with winning championships. Kent has excelled at just about every other men's and women's sport.
But despite past marketing campaigns and promises, the amount of money devoted to Kent football was a problem, said Corrigall, a defensive standout for the Flashes from 1966-70 and head coach from 1994-97. He also served as an associate athletic director and assistant coach in the early 1990s.
There was never enough to cover the players' summer-school costs, books and meals, he said. (Scholarships don't cover summer school fees.) To save money, the team once bused to a game at Rutgers rather than fly.
To former Kent quarterback Joe Dalpra, of North Canton, the university's lack of commitment to football was painfully obvious. In his four years from 1988-91, the team won eight games, including seasons of 0-11 and 1-10. He played for three head coaches and four quarterback coaches.
"My junior year, they got rid of the marching band," he said. "One year, we didn't even take a team picture."
If this is to be the year that Kent finally reaches a bowl game, the first step is Thursday night -- Kent's home and season opener against Murray State.
There's reason for optimism. In a preseason media poll, the Golden Flashes were picked to finish third of seven teams in the MAC's East Division, behind Temple and Ohio. Martin has called this the best team he's had.
Phil Steele, a nationally acclaimed college football analyst based in Westlake, lists Kent among the most improved teams in the country. He predicted the Flashes, led by sixth-year senior scatback Eugene Jarvis and heady sophomore quarterback Spencer Keith, to win seven of their 12 games and be eligible for a bowl game.
"If [Martin] can catch a break on injuries," Steele said, "I think they can get it turned around."
Righting the ship
Nothing spins the turnstiles like winning, but to jump-start the season, Nielsen launched "90KSU," a marketing campaign with the slogan "Everyone Counts." The goal is 90,000 paid fans and students (who receive free tickets) for the six home games -- the 15,000-per-game average the NCAA requires of schools to maintain Division I status.
Kent State reported an average home attendance of 15,512 last season, although university President Lester Lefton said only about 10,000 of that was paid. Of the fans who pay, sometimes only 5,000 to 7,000 show up.
"I'd like it at 20,000," Lefton said after introducing Nielsen in March.
The campaign's progress is tracked on a wall of Kent's massive fieldhouse, with a cutout picture of Jarvis scampering down the field. They've already sold 45,000 tickets. Counting the 17,000 or so students who attended games last season, they should hit the mark. The cheapest season ticket costs a mere $30.
Losing is a Catch-22, of course. Declining attendance threatens the school's Division I status. Slipping from the highest level in college sports would destroy recruiting, damage alumni relations and shake the institution's psyche. So there's much at stake.
But a football program will never succeed, Corrigall said, unless everyone, from the university president to the academic department to the coaches and fundraisers, is in lockstep that football is a priority.
Unless the talk of recent months is just more lip service, Kent may finally be aligned.
As the university ushers in another season, the band is in tune, the team pictures are taken, and those involved are pledging a new era. They've even added new campus bus routes to take students directly to the new pre-game tailgating and "fan experience" parties at the field house by Dix Stadium.
Maybe that ocean liner kiddie slide was actually rising from the water rather than sinking.
"You can't have a vibrant, complete athletic program unless you've got strong football," said Lefton, the KSU president.
"It's what the fans want, it's what our students want, it's what Laing Kennedy wanted, it's what I want."