WSJ Article: Season of Turnarounds, Formula, etc.

[Water Pony]

College Football: Why Your School Has Hope: (Lessons for SMU?)

It's a season of turnarounds. Here's how teams from Alabama to Western Michigan got back on track

By RUSSELL ADAMS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 12, 2005; Page P9

From former stalwarts like Penn State, Notre Dame and Alabama to relative unknowns like Central Florida, South Carolina and Western Michigan, many of college football's laggards are turning things around this fall.

And they're using a common playbook. While conventional wisdom says building a winner requires an arcane combination of skill, smarts and luck, a surprisingly consistent formula for success is emerging: Take a charismatic coach, find some ready-to-play talent, build a palatial sports complex and soften up the schedule. Next thing you know -- hello, bowl game.

The University of Texas at El Paso is a prime example. UTEP spent $15 million on facilities improvements in 2002 and hired a nationally prominent head coach in Mike Price a year later. After three straight two-win seasons, UTEP last season won eight games and appeared in the Houston Bowl on ESPN, and so far this year the Miners are 7-1. The success has even helped the school increase enrollment to 19,264 from 14,695 over the past six years, says UTEP athletic director Bob Stull.

The pressure to win has never been greater. Getting a program on track produces national television and bowl-game appearances that alone can cover most of an athletic department's budget and increase the school's enrollment. While the Bowl Championship Series -- which limits to six conferences and Notre Dame the chance to compete for a national championship -- further divides the haves and the have-nots, the overall proliferation of bowl games and cable sports channels has given even second- and third-tier schools a chance to get valuable national exposure.

Of course, fixing a broken football program isn't easy, and there are no guaranteed formulas for winning. Louisville, a school long known mostly for its basketball team, last year nearly beat Miami and entered this season on the cusp of the Top 10 -- then took a big step back after getting trounced by little-known South Florida. "Losing to South Florida early destroyed what it took two to three years to build up," says former Auburn coach and ABC analyst Terry Bowden. "It just shows you how fragile that push to a higher level can be."

"Building a program is a long-term thing," says Greg Brohm, Louisville's director of football operations. "You're going to have times when you take two steps forward and maybe take one step back."

Still, more schools are deciding it's worth a shot. Since 1992, 16 schools have moved their football programs from Division I-AA to Division I-A, the highest tier of competition. We talked to coaches, administrators and analysts about what makes for a successful turnaround project and found several recurring themes.

Coaching Charisma

Say what you want about the huge contracts Notre Dame and South Carolina handed head coaches Charlie Weis and Steve Spurrier, respectively, but there's an increasing demand for coaches who get players to believe they can win no matter what. Often, this takes a combination of charisma and credentials, two things Mr. Spurrier has in such abundance that he's gotten most of the credit for the Gamecocks likely heading to their first bowl game since 2001. "Everybody knows we're playing a couple of cards short," says South Carolina athletic director Eric Hyman. "But Steve created a huge amount of hope, and the players can see it tangibly."

Even midlevel programs can put stars in recruits' eyes. Western Michigan University head coach Bill Cubit says the team's six wins so far this season after just one win all last year are partly due to the recruiting and coaching edge of having three assistant coaches who either coached or played in the NFL. "When these guys talk," Mr. Cubit says, "the kids do whatever they ask them to."

Ready-Made Talent

Programs that quickly get on track often do so by filling immediate needs with players from junior college who are skilled enough to play immediately but generally have only two years of eligibility -- and often have academic issues.

Kansas State head coach Bill Snyder in the 1990s used junior-college players, in moderation, to fuel the program's turnaround. "We knew we weren't going to get the highest-profile young guys, and we didn't waste our time attempting to do so," says Mr. Snyder. "So we were recruiting guys under the radar."

Former Mississippi State head coach Jackie Sherrill may have gone to the junior-college well too often. He opened the school's doors to junior-college players to patch up his struggling program in the final seasons before he retired in 2003, an approach the school's associate athletic director for media relations, Mike Nemeth, says led to disciplinary and other problems new coach Sylvester Croom has had to clean up.

Mr. Sherrill says he was successful for many years filling holes with junior college players, and that it's unfair to blame the current state of the program on their recruitment. "The problem was you may not have had the other players to go along and fit in with them," he says.

Other schools have turned around their programs by accepting their recruiting limitations, whether that's trying to own the players in the school's backyard, as Miami did successfully in the 1980s, or scouring the fringes of more highly populated areas for still-developing players, as Kansas State has done in recent years.

Brick by Brick

Building a winner often requires putting up new buildings. University of Pittsburgh athletic director Jeff Long would love to tell you his football program's recent bowl-game appearances were fueled by recruits' attraction to the school's academic reputation, but Mr. Long knows the construction of a three-building, $30 million training complex in 2000 and the opening of Heinz Field in 2001 were the best recruiting tools the program had.

"To young people in that age group, the facilities are what catches their eye," says Mr. Long, whose Panthers, at 4-5, haven't made very good use of those facilities this season.

Scheduling Patsies

Playing teams you stand a good chance of beating helps, too. Of course, the practice of pummeling weak sisters is as old as leather helmets -- in 1916, Georgia Tech beat weakling Cumberland 222-0. But on the modern college-football landscape, where one big loss spawns Web sites screaming for the coach's head, programs don't have a lot of time. So coaches who want to be around to see a rebuilding process through are using several quick fixes to buy themselves time, including creative scheduling.

Bottom line: A win's a win. The University of Nebraska, a once proud program that's suddenly mediocre, this year took on -- and defeated -- division I-AA Maine.

[that's great raplh]

"The success has even helped the school increase enrollment to 19,264 from 14,695 over the past six years, says UTEP athletic director Bob Stull. "

see? winning football has massive bottom line impact

[Water Pony]

Increased enrollment? Now that I think about it, the few private schools that are very competitive in FB have (abiet BCS types) have significantly larger student bodies that SMU:

- Notre Dame
- USC
- Miami
- Boston College
- etc.

If you have never been to a Notre Dame game in South Bend, it is an opportunity not to miss. The atmosphere is electric. The students come early, are loud and stay late. The bond between them and the team is very special.

In my opinion, we need to get the student body to 'own' the team. When they do follow FB (when not stuck in the fraternity houses during our games), the students watch their favorite BCS team. With students from all over, until we get the student body is pull the team forward, we will remain .500 or less. Not good enough to say the least.

Notre Dame students/alumni/fans expect to win, absolutely love their players and take pride in being Irish, plus the student body is national in origin.

SMU used to be discussed as a National Team. "The Glory that was Rome will come again!" Maximus "The Gladiator"

[Stallion]

it ain't going to start with the Dallas Morning News, it ain't going to start with the fraternities and sororities and it gioing to start with sending freshmen to Fish Camp. Its ALL a Waste of Time. Its going to start when SMU becomes COMMITTED to competing at the Division 1A Level by implementing a MODEL which allows it to compete with its natural and traditional rivals.

[SMU Football Blog]

But let's ignore that part about scheduling patsies as part of building a program, because dammit we should be scheduling Florida State because losing by 50 builds character and getting a garbage time touchdown against their 4th team defense will inspire confidence in the players and fans.