Coach Calls Out His Players

[joepa66]

You should now be siding against Kent State, or even more heavily against them if you were already siding against them. Don't know how this guy keeps his job and hopefully this is the fork in him!:ohman:



Flashes on their own, coach decrees
KSU's Martin says rest of season and possible bowl bid up to players
By Stephanie Storm
Beacon Journal sports writer
Published on Tuesday, Nov 09, 2010

KENT: A serious Doug Martin walked into the interview room Monday afternoon carrying a half sheet of white paper with handwriting on it.

''This,'' the Kent State football coach said holding up the paper, ''is the exact same notes I had from our team meeting yesterday. If you had told us before the Temple game we were going to block two punts and Temple was gonna turn the ball over three times, we'd all say we were gonna win that football game.''

But the Golden Flashes didn't. Instead, they wilted under the pressure of what Martin had billed as ''a meaningful game,'' losing 28-10 and dropping out of the Mid-American Conference East Division race.

The only thing left for the Flashes (4-5, 3-3) to play for in three remaining regular-season games, beginning with Army on Saturday at 2 p.m. at Dix Stadium, is to win out in order to finish with a winning record (7-5) and earn a possible bowl bid.

''Temple didn't play that great of a game,'' Martin said. ''We forced them into a lot of errors. The problem was, Kent State fumbled the ball three times and had seven dropped passes, including two for touchdowns, which negates all the good work we did on the other side.

''Our wide receivers had a bad day, a really bad day.''

It was a particularly rough outing for senior wide receiver Sam Kirkland, who dropped an early potential touchdown pass and later fumbled the ball on a kickoff return.

''It was a touchdown pass that hit him right in the chest, then
we fumbled the kickoff return,'' Martin said. ''That kickoff return gave them an easy seven points and also took a possession away from us.''

Martin also called out the Flashes' defensive backs, who struggled to get crucial stops on third-and-long. In the first three quarters, Temple converted seven out of nine third downs, including conversions of 15, 15 and 17 yards, as well as converting a second-and-30 play.

''I told the players exactly what I told you after the game: that I had defended them about their spirit and their heart. I also told them, 'I will never defend you guys again the rest of this season. You're on your own.'

''This is all on the players now. They can go out and get done what they want to get done. They have a chance to be a 7-5 team and go to a bowl with Army, Western Michigan and Ohio coming up and they'll be exposed every week. Their heart will be exposed.''

Regardless of whether it's the regulars or the backups, Martin left the Flashes with one last thing to think about this week.

''I told them I've seen this movie before,'' he said. ''In 2006, we went down to play Ball State and we had a six-win season in our pocket. We win that game and we're in a bowl game. But that team didn't get it done. Last year we're a five-win team with three games to play, they just gotta win one game to be in a bowl and they didn't get it done.

''We're right here at a four-win season with three very winnable games if we play like we're capable of. They can be a bowl team or they cannot be a bowl team. If they want to be different than all the other Kent State teams, they gotta go win these football games.''

Notebook

Sophomore quarterback Spencer Keith, who left the game late with a hand injury, had X-rays on his right thumb Monday. The results were negative, but Keith is still dealing with a sprained right thumb and is day-to-day.

Senior linebacker Cobrani Mixon and safety Brian Lainhart also left the game with injuries.

''Cobrani is probably doubtful for this week with a sprained shoulder he had going into the game,'' Martin. ''He played the first half with a lot of courage. Lainhart is just really beat up. He's got [sore] ribs, a back injury and just a lot of stuff.'' . . . One of the few positives of the game was another standout performance by Matt Rinehart. For the second consecutive week and the third time this season, Kent State's junior punter FROM DOVER HIGH SCHOOL, was named Mid-American Conference East Division Special Teams Player of the Week. Rinehart averaged 48.4 yards on seven punts against Temple, including two that were downed inside the 5-yard line.

[Nicky Santoro]

Seeing that spread of 3 @ home against Temple I never understood.

''I told the players exactly what I told you after the game: that I had defended them about their spirit and their heart. I also told them, 'I will never defend you guys again the rest of this season. You're on your own."

That is just down right brutal, who the hell says that to their team?!! Dude should already be out the door!! These kids are going to have their head in their hands and have absolutely no direction. What a dick!! Figure out the problem, try and resolve it and see if it works, that's what a good coach does.

Good read Joe, it got my blood flowing:beerbang:

[FlyersFan]

in all honesty, the fact that his team has faded every year the past 3-4 years and collapsed to not make a bowl should be a direct reflection of his coaching and the program. not like they closed the last few years with OSU, Alabama and Florida all on the road to miss a bowl game....:dunno:


but then again, you have to agree with him on the fact that it's the players time to choose how their season ends....

[joepa66]

And with Army, Western Michigan and Ohio coming up it won't be easy tasks.....those are the games when you need your coach behind you more than 100%. He's done this before but not so publicly. Hey, maybe it's a good thing, Dan Hawkins and Wade Phillips are available.....:laughing:

I'm going to try and find the preseason story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer titled something like "Why Kent", referring to why they cannot field a winning team having made their last and only bowl game in 1972 vs. Tampa in the Tangerine Bowl.

[FlyersFan]

And with Army, Western Michigan and Ohio coming up it won't be easy tasks......

yeah, that's murderers row.........:laughing:

too bad it's not something easy like @ stanford, USC, @oregon like Arizona has.....

[FlyersFan]

"Why Kent", referring to why they cannot field a winning team having made their last and only bowl game in 1972 vs. Tampa in the Tangerine Bowl.

dude- your school got the vietnam riots....you can't have everything.....:hide:

[joepa66]

After 30 years of futility, Kent State football pushes for a turnaround season (and more fans)
Published: Saturday, August 28, 2010, 11:56 PM
Bill Lubinger, The Plain Dealer Bill Lubinger, The Plain Dealer

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

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."

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

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."

© 2010 cleveland.com. All rights reserved.

[joepa66]

yeah, that's murderers row.........:laughing:
too bad it's not something easy like @ stanford, USC, @oregon like Arizona has.....

IT'S ALL RELATIVE! Kent and the MAC schools can never be expected to compete on the same level as the Pac or Big 10s.......their season ending is tough for relative level of talent they have and play against!

[joepa66]

dude- your school got the vietnam riots....you can't have everything.....:hide:

:ohman:......not cool, it's part of their unwanted history but not something the school wanted or had a choice in. Outsiders caused those problems, there were riots in towns and colleges all over the country. Just happened that some out of town trouble makers......ah forget it!

[FlyersFan]

:ohman:......not cool, it's part of their unwanted history but not something the school wanted or had a choice in. Outsiders caused those problems, there were riots in towns and colleges all over the country. Just happened that some out of town trouble makers......ah forget it!

i was kidding on both counts......:thumbs:

[joepa66]

Gotcha, but not everybody knows that and Kent people always have to defend the school because of that, and that gets tiresome. The classless Zip fans are always chanting "Shoot, Kent State!" during the basketball games.....and crap like that! That has nothing to do with the sport......:puke:

[FlyersFan]

Gotcha, but not everybody knows that and Kent people always have to defend the school because of that, and that gets tiresome. The classless Zip fans are always chanting "Shoot, Kent State!" during the basketball games.....and crap like that! That has nothing to do with the sport......:puke:

honestly, it was 40 years ago and most people have either (a) forgotten about it or (b) are too young to know about it.....i don't even think they teach history in schools anymore.....:hide:

[FlyersFan]

interseting article. Hard to believe they've been that bad for so long. Also didn't know saban went there and james coached there. At a school in a conference like the mac where rarely does one team dominate for long, there really is no excuse for being that bad that long.

also with regards to bowl games, it's only been in the last few years that multiple mac teams went to bowls now that there are 800 of them. In the 70's, 80's and into the late 90's it was a 1 bid 2bidmax league.

good read :thumbs:

[ATS_BDG]

So you're saying fade Kent. Well....

The coach's comments are out of frustration but it may be too early to give on on Kent St. It sounds to me like he wants to put it all on the players as a way to motivate them for the upcoming games.

And JoePa66, you may be frustrated because you took Kent last week so don't let it affect your judgement. haha.

[Nicky Santoro]

Gotcha, but not everybody knows that and Kent people always have to defend the school because of that, and that gets tiresome. The classless Zip fans are always chanting "Shoot, Kent State!" during the basketball games.....and crap like that! That has nothing to do with the sport......:puke:

They were doing that in the late 70's and early 80's while I attended Kent. Old fart Kent fans know we keep that deep in our hearts and it will never be forgotten. Some of the dip**** young Kent students need a little education on it as well as a host of others. Sad how some have either forgotten it, just overlook it, or could care less.