I must begin my 2015 college football predictions with the safest bet of all: My alma mater will go unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon. I went to Transylvania University, you see, where football was suspended “for the duration” after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, to bring the United States into World War II.
At the time, I’m sure everybody thought the term “for the duration” referred to the war and not eternity. Nevertheless, the administration didn’t restore football after the war ended in 1945 and, to tell you the truth, there’s never been much of a groundswell among students and alums to revive the sport.
As an undergraduate at Transy from 1962-66, I got all the football I wanted through my job at The Lexington Herald-Leader. I covered high school games, state college games, and even some University of Kentucky games, where coach Charlie Bradshaw was trying hard to be the second coming of Paul “Bear” Bryant.
I thought about Bradshaw when I recently learned that Illinois had fired coach Tim Beckman for allegedly abusing his players, forcing them to play when they were injured. It’s the same thing that Bradshaw did at UK, except Bradshaw’s abuse was even worse because it involved coaches physically and verbally abusing players during workouts and practices.
When more than half the team quit even before UK’s first game under Bradshaw, Sports Illustrated sent reporter Mort Sharnik to Lexington to investigate the brutality. The resulting article proved embarrassing to everyone except the UK diehards who were obsessed with restoring Wildcat football to the national glory it enjoyed under Bryant a decade or so earlier.
By the time of UK’s 1962 opener, the team had so few players remaining that it became known as the “Thin Thirty.” The players who did not accept Bradshaw’s form of “discipline” were branded as “quitters.” Never mind that several of them thrived in football after transferring, most notably Dale Lindsey, who starred at Western Kentucky and became a starting linebacker on the Cleveland Browns’ 1964 NFL championship team.
It’s too bad Bradshaw wasn’t more like Frank Camp, who played on some of Transylvania’s last football teams. He became head coach at the University of Louisville in 1946 and stayed there for 22 years. All he did was recruit a quarterback from Pennsylvania named Johnny Unitas, and, more importantly, pushed U of L to become the first predominantly white school south of the Mason-Dixon line to integrate its football program.
By not having a varsity football team, Transylvania has saved itself a lot of headaches, both figuratively and literally. The cost of football is so high, even at the NCAA Division III level where Transy plays, that you can forget making money; it’s just a matter of how much are you willing to lose. Beyond that, Transy has never had to deal with the problem of the catastrophic injuries, most notably concussions that are causing the education and medical communities to take a hard look at how the game is played and how the players are treated.
Since Bradshaw’s days at UK, training methods have improved to the point that today’s players are far bigger, stronger, and faster than ever before. Naturally, this means an exponential increase in the game’s inherent violence. In addition, there’s so much money involved in football today – from ticket sales, shoe contracts, merchandising, and mind-boggling TV deals – that coaches are under greater pressure to do whatever it takes to win.
Interestingly, and not coincidentally, a movie entitled “Concussion” will be released on Christmas Day. It will be clobbered at the box office by the newest “Star Wars” flick, but it may have a greater societal impact. Starring Will Smith and Alec Baldwin, the movie is based on the story of a doctor who studied the effects of football-related concussions, most notably the case of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster.
Prediction: The National Football League and the NCAA will join forces to discredit the movie as being dishonest and unfair to America’s favorite game. The public generally will buy into that argument, too, because if there’s one thing we know for sure, Americans loved their football, and the more violent, the better.
Today’s Transylvania students probably will do the same thing we did a half-century ago: Adopt the team from the big school across town. I’m sure there’s still room for Transy students on the UK bandwagon, even though there’s a big wave of cautious optimism rippling through the Big Blue faithful.
Some of it has to do with the renovation of Commonwealth Stadium, which now will have more of the amenities that ticket-buyers demand. Mostly, though, it’s the idea that Mark Stoops’ excellent three-year recruiting run finally will start to kick in. Although UK will be young, the Cats appear to have more good athletes, more speed, and more playmakers than they’ve had for years.
I said last season that UK quarterback Patrick Towles, a grandson of Hall of Fame pitcher and former U.S. Senator Jim Bunning, has the ability to make it in the NFL. Although Towles tailed off in the team’s final few games, I’m not backing off that prediction. Maybe he won’t invite comparisons with Tim Couch. But I look for him to engineer one of the most exciting UK offenses since the Couch era.
Prediction: UK will have an 8-4 record and go to a bowl.
At Louisville, beginning its second season in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Bobby Petrino has a team that might be good enough to slip into the Top 20 by season’s end. With four viable options at quarterback and a ton of promising wide receivers, the Cards figure to have a more exciting offense than they did last year. And the defense, despite losing several stars to the NFL, has reloaded effectively.
Of course, hardly anybody thinks the Cards will beat Auburn in their nationally televised season opener Saturday in Atlanta. Heck, many experts believe the Tigers are good enough to make the four-team national championship playoff. But instead of looking at the Auburn opener as a negative, Petrino sees an opportunity to shock the football world.
Prediction: The Cards will upset Clemson and Florida State on the way to a 10-2 record.
The commonwealth’s third D-I team also may be its most exciting. Under second-year head coach Jeff Brohm, a former record-setting quarterback at U of L, the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers last year turned in some high-powered offensive games that earned them a couple of major upsets and considerable national recognition.
Remember the name Brandon Doughty. He came back to play quarterback as a graduate student. All he did last season was complete 67.9 per cent of his passes for 4,830 yards and an average of 371.5 yards per game. The quarterbacks at UK and U of L could have outstanding seasons and still find themselves dwarfed by Doughty in the statistics department.
Prediction: The Toppers will go 9-3 and Doughty will get picked in the NFL draft.
Unless Transy decides to try football again, my favorite small-college team in the state will be Georgetown, and, yes, I know that the Tigers, along with Centre, have long been our arch-rivals. But I worked at GC for two years and I’m here to tell you that Coach Bill Cronin is a real treasure who produces good teams, good students, and good men.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby.