Skip to main content

Spring Practice, and the Passing of a Legend

It's been quiet as I'm working on my "New Realities of the Patriot League" piece for College Sporting News. Similarly, it's been quiet about spring practice in the media so far. The inside word I have is that spring practice is going OK, and everyone is "working hard and competing well." The trenches are getting particular attention as coach Coen is looking for kids who will be step up and handle the large scholarship line of Villanova this September 8th (our opening day at Goodman this year). Only two weeks until the Brown/White game, where we'll be able to see the progress of both lines!

That's it for this week, though in case you hadn't heard, a FCS coaching legend passed earlier this week, former Grambling State coach Eddie Robinson. The winningest head coach in Division I history, he built tiny Grambling State into a college powerhouse, giving the historically black university a formidable national presence. Starting as coach in 1941, he started coaching in a time when the Army wasn't even integrated, let alone the South. He also coached at a university that many white people would have never heard of in 1941. By the '50s and '60s, white America would be following Grambling State as well, especially in the south.

In 1949, the NFL's Rams took a chance on an undrafted All-American free agent from Grambling State called Paul "Tank" Younger who would become the first black football player to play in the NFL. Their "color-blindness" would pay off with Younger becoming an integral part of their rushing attack in three appearances in the NFC championship in five years. That opened the gateways for not only Grambling State athletes to make the NFL, but many other HBCU athletes as well. Coach Robinson shredded the color barrier by proving that black players were as good as white players - a point that hasn't been brought up enough in the columns eulogizing him.

Despite his deserved place in the pantheon of civil rights pioneers, it's coach Robinson the person - by all accounts a humble and deeply respected man - that stays with people the most. Not only was he successful by many measures (number of athletes going pro, winning seasons, Black College National Championships), he was most successful in getting kids ready for life. Generations of Grambling graduates thank him for preparing them for lives outside of college that had nothing to do with the NFL.

We will miss you Coach Rob.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Word going around the street is that Pete Morelli has been trying out for various teams in the Canadian Football League and is likely to earn a spot north of the border. Good for you pete, best of luck eh!
7:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....
43 comments
Read more

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...
1 comment
Read more

#TheRivalry Flashback: November 21st, 1987: Lehigh 17, Lafayette 10

Since becoming an undergrad at Lehigh back in the late 1980s, I first heard about the historic nature of the football team and "The Rivalry" through the stories that fellow students would share. I did not attend the final meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette at Taylor Stadium, which was the final time a football game would be played there. Those that did attend said that was that it was cold. "I remember it being one of the coldest games ever," Mark Redmann recollected, "with strong Northwesterly winds and the temperature hovering around 20.  By the end of the game, the stands were half empty because most of the fans just couldn't take the cold. "Fortunately, several of my fraternity brothers snuck in flasks to help fend off the chill."
7 comments
Read more