The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (22 page)

The driving music ended, the lights came up, and Ambrose took over. Crammed into every inch of the tiny locker room were kids with no clue as to what waited outside. But they sure as hell were feeling something
inside
.

“You are the walking epitome of shitting on the impossible,” Ambrose began. “You are no good. You can’t win. Can’t win in this league. Can’t win a conference championship. No way in hell can you go to Division I playoffs.”

He took a swig from the Monster can.

“Fuck ’em.”

He was in a zone now; the system running on red. You wanted to see, to feel, where this was headed.

“A tough-ass attitude,” said Ambrose. “An
extreme
attention to detail. And a
relentless
belief in each other.” Swig. “They bench four hundred. So do we. They run 4.5. So do we. They squat five hundred. So do we. The only thing makes them different than us is them ugly-ass purple uniforms.

“So … we don’t wait. This time we don’t wait. Ain’t nothing to be worried about. When tonight is over, you’re going to leave a lasting impression on the United States of America, and no one will ever say Towson State again. They will know exactly
who
and
what
this university is.”

You wanted to put on a uniform.

“HEY, WHY THE FUCK DID WE COME ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE? WHY’D WE COME DOWN HERE!”

“TO WIN!!”

“CAPTAINS! LET’S GET OUT …”

Standing in the crush right by the door was star defensive end Frank Beltre, he of the multicolored Mohawk. Beltre bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. When he spoke, he seemed to be speaking to no one but himself.

“God, I love football,” he said. “I swear to God it’s better than sex.”

The first sign this could be Towson’s night came as the team stormed the field. A cold, persistent rain had thinned the home crowd by a third. So the infamous full-throated, beer-soaked Death Valley roar was down a decibel or two.

But that low-key atmosphere went only so far once the game began. On LSU’s second possession wide receiver Russell Shepard exploded along the right side on his way to a seventy-eight-yard streak into the end zone. There was 10:24 remaining in the first quarter. You could almost hear the Colosseum crowd beseeching the Roman emperor to send in more Christians.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the slaughter. While its offense struggled for every yard, Towson’s disciplined, hard-hitting D was playing its ass off. At the end of the first quarter the score stood at 7–0.

“That’s what the world is going to see!” screamed deputy athletic director Devin Crosby from the sidelines. “All this is working in our plan!”

And it kept working.

Two minutes into the second quarter—in a sight that must have shocked those watching on ESPNU—Towson kicked a short field goal to cut the lead to four: LSU 7, Towson 3.

It got even crazier when tailback Terrance West slammed into the end zone moments after Towson’s quarterback Grant Enders had scrambled forty-three yards to the LSU one.

Suddenly, impossibly, the nobodies from North Baltimore were leading mighty LSU 9–7 with 5:15 left in the first half. The crowd sat in silence. On the Towson sideline, athletic director Mike Waddell could barely believe his eyes. He whipped out his phone and clicked a commemorative shot.

But there are fairy tales, and then there’s the SEC. Right before halftime LSU had used its speed and a shanked Towson punt to push ahead 17–9.

Still, it was a jacked-up Towson locker room. “Twelve rounds, baby, that’s only six,” shouted all-conference free safety Jordan Dangerfield. “They’re going to come out and try and bully us.”

Ambrose stuck a stake in the celebration.

“Now, any of you sons of bitches that are smiling ’cause you think we did something, I’m gonna kill ya. It’s a fifteen-round fight, not five. You got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

“So what the hell we waiting for? Let’s go!”

Some on campus had openly questioned the wisdom of becoming Tiger bait for LSU. The most visible anger was evident in the Friday afternoon
TU
‘
PROSTITUTES THEMSELVES
’
FOR LSU
headline in the school newspaper. In the accompanying article, the author charged the school was “sacrificing the health of our players and reputation of our program” for a paycheck. Others, like athletic director Waddell, took a broader view. “I think what it means for the university is a branding opportunity,” he said. “It’s another national television appearance. It’s another chance for people to get to know who we are. Hopefully, within a few years of doing this kind of thing, we won’t have other schools saying, ‘Where are they? Are they in Arkansas? Nebraska? North Dakota?’ It’s branding. Everything we do has to, in some way, build to the brand.”

Waddell’s résumé showed a broadcasting background leading to athletic administrative stints at Virginia, at Akron and, most recently, five years at Cincinnati. (In May 2013 he would accept a job as senior associate athletic director at Arkansas.) One of his first acts after taking over as AD at Towson in September 2010 was to fill the slot on LSU’s schedule that had just opened after Texas Christian University, believing it was headed to the Big East, pulled out.

“You think Les Miles didn’t do a dance in his office that day,” Waddell said, laughing. “Go from TCU to Towson.”

He conceded Ambrose and his boys were essentially taking one for the team—the team, in this case, the entire university. He carried no grand
illusions. This was a money play, needed and necessary, balanced by the opportunity to play before ninety thousand fans; the chance for coaches and players to learn something about themselves; to be part of something that would never be forgotten.

“Hey, you look back on our last ten years, we’ve taken a lot of poundings and not gotten paid,” said Waddell. “So if you look at it at that level of analysis … it’s not uncommon. That’s what it is.”

“It’s really about the marketing of the institution,” said David H. Nevins, the chairman of the school’s board of visitors, its de facto board of trustees, as well as the owner of a strategic communications company. “It’s really about being on [national TV], being in the papers on Sunday. People will read the name Towson, people who have never heard of it. Hopefully, we won’t lose by the biggest number in college football history, and hopefully we won’t lose any players. But that’s really what this is about.”

As Nevins spoke those words, he was sitting in the middle seat of the sixth row of the Friday afternoon charter flight down to Baton Rouge. In the row behind him was a well-heeled contractor; across the aisle, the executive vice president of a large health-care concern; two rows up, the president of several eye-care companies. Even though the football team was an enormous financial drain on the university, its $2 million budget funded in large part by $800 in annual student fees, recent success in football had reenergized the alumni base.

“Football is vital,” declared Nevins. “Not so much from an economic standpoint. Frankly, it’s a drain financially … it’s never going to be an economic driver at our level; it’s always going to be more expensive than the revenue it produces. So why do we do it? Hopefully, the answer is because football gives our campus something to rally around, to boost the spirit of our community. Football does that six or seven times a year. We believe at a school like Towson, transitioning to a big-time residential campus, football plays a critical role.

“Look,” he continued. “We’ve been a quite extraordinarily solid institution for several decades now. We train a plurality of the state’s teachers, a majority of the state’s nurses, a plurality of the state’s technology professionals. But, you know, we’ve never had the spotlight shine on us for much of anything.

“Winning is really important. It also matters who you win
against
. At Towson we are changing the way teachers are taught to teach. Hopefully, in a few years, we will invent a new way to teach. That gets us an article on page 2 of the newspaper.

“Nothing drives attention to this university like winning the Colonial Athletic Association football championship. It was
that
that caused the articles about the teacher’s program to be written. It’s unbelievable. That’s the reason we put so much emphasis on football … It’s time to step it up. Athletics is the most visible way to do it. We want to get on TV, tweeted about … [But] there’s definitely risk involved. If it’s 42–14, between you and me, I’ll take that.”

From the opening drive of the second half Towson got a full dose of a different LSU. By the end of the third quarter—after another long bomb to wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.—it was 31–9. The rout, it appeared, was on.

But then Towson did in Death Valley what nonconference opponents rarely do. Like Ali, it got up from the canvas, squared its shoulders and punched back. As the fourth quarter began, the Towson Tigers put together their best drive of the night, a gritty, clock-grinding, in-your-face testament to toughness and will. On third and two from the LSU four-yard line quarterback Enders stuffed it right down to the one. A moment later it was 31–16 with nine minutes left. Ball game.

Again LSU responded. Running no huddle, it pounded away on the ground and attacked through the air, scoring again: 38–16. In response, Towson’s offensive line and tailback Terrance West pounded back, producing another long, never-say-die drive that ended with a nine-yard circus catch in the end zone right in front of Waddell, who looked as if he’d just won the lottery. And maybe he had.

The final score read 38–22. A sixteen-point loss on paper. But a win in every other way.

“You couldn’t buy this type of advertisement nationally,” said Waddell after the game. “I could not be more proud.”

Later, in a locker room brimming with pride, Ambrose told his team, “I’ve been doing this since I was about four years old, and I’m telling you the truth: of all my time in football I’ve never seen a team put in that kind of effort and belief. This team believed in each other and tuned out what everyone else had to say.”

He took a breath and looked around at a roomful of sweaty, dirty, half-dressed athletes. They had escaped without serious injury. They had done their university proud.

Within minutes, the name Towson was trending on Twitter. The game
highlights were in regular rotation on ESPN, its anchors singing the school’s praises in the same breath as the eight touchdown passes by West Virginia’s quarterback Geno Smith and Texas’s last-second win at Oklahoma State. Towson
University
had arrived, even if the team was still trying to depart Baton Rouge …

It turned out that the charter company, Miami Air, had two runs that day. In addition to the Towson trip, it was ferrying the Cincinnati football team back from Virginia Tech. So by the time the charter arrived in Baton Rouge, it was 1:30 in the morning. Not a word was uttered as the players piled off buses and onto the plane. Within minutes the entire travel party was sacked out save a couple of graduate assistant coaches huddled over computers finishing up scouting reports on James Madison.

It was 5:30 in the morning when the team buses finally pulled in to a university parking lot. Some players drove away in cars. Others began a zombielike walk to their apartments or dorms. Waddell headed to Denny’s for breakfast. In six short hours, the system required quarterbacks, wide receivers and defensive backs to report for treatment. By 4:00 p.m., the team would assemble for unit meetings. The schedule listed a walk-through/practice at 6:20.

Physically and emotionally drained from the LSU game, Towson lost 13–10 the following weekend at James Madison, a critical conference defeat, before dropping another crucial game, this time at home, to Old Dominion, 31–20, two weeks later. The team went on to win its final four games to finish 7-4, including rolling up 660 total yards in a 64–35 season-ending win at New Hampshire. Still, it wasn’t enough to make the postseason playoffs.

But as Waddell suggested, in the long run the LSU game lived on. Few would forget the sight of that scoreboard: Towson 9, LSU 7, 5:15 to go in the first half.
In the lights
. On national television. Towson
University
.