NEWPORT, R.I. — Randy Edsall rarely allows himself to wander off course. So the question had to take him out of his realm, take him to a place ruled by fans, bloggers and Saturday coaches.
What do you think the average fan thought when they saw the score of the Papajohns.com Bowl crawl across the bottom of their TV screens?
“They probably thought it was a mistake,” replied the Connecticut coach of his team’s 20-7 win over South Carolina last season.
“A Big East team isn’t supposed to beat an SEC team,” he added. “Certainly not in Birmingham in the heart of SEC country. Not against [Steve Spurrier], the Old Ball Coach. It’s just not supposed to happen.”
That should be the motto of what has taken place in Storrs, first in men’s and women’s basketball and now in football.
It’s Not Supposed to Happen.
How did it happen? How did a former member of the Yankee Conference, playing in a decrepit 14,000-seat stadium that almost never sold out, become a legitimate BCS program, that today will announce an exclusive TV deal with SNY?
And how did it happen in one decade?
“We had a plan, we sold the plan, we stuck to the plan and we didn’t listen to the people who said we were crazy,” UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway said.
The plan had to be revised, like in the late-’90’s when then Gov. John Rowland pulled the plug on an on-campus stadium during an election year.
But Pratt & Whitney donated land to the state, which ponied up $91 million to build Rentschler Field, the Huskies’ home.
“I remember the Friday night walk through before our first game,” Hathaway said of the 2004 opener. “It was about 11 o’clock. All the lights were on. Then we went out the next day and beat Indiana, a Big Ten team. I thought, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.’ ”
Nope.
Edsall, a Syracuse grad, was hired in 1999, succeeding Skip Holtz, now the South Florida coach. Edsall’s moment of doubt came midway through the 2002 season. He had lost 30 of his first 41 games.
“I thought, ‘Can we ever get this done?’ ” he said. “Can we ever pull this off?”
Yep. The Huskies won their last four in 2002 and went 9-3 in 2003 but didn’t get a bowl berth. They weren’t in Division I-AA and a year away from joining the Big East.
“We were gypsies,” said Edsall.
The gypsies have had just one losing season since 2001. Donald Brown was a first-round NFL choice in 2008. UConn won at Notre Dame last year and then was flat-out more physical than South Carolina in the bowl game.
Edsall has 16 starters back from last year’s 8-5 squad, which lost those five games by a total of 15 points. They open at Michigan on Sept. 4 and the Huskies have already been installed as, uh, 2½-point dogs.
But first-year Cincinnati coach Butch Davis sees Big Dogs. He was stunned to see the size of the UConn players, especially 6-foot-7, 323-pound OG Zach Hurd, at media day.
“I’ve watched that program grow,” Davis said. “It’s amazing what they’ve done in such a short time.”