The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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Last week, freshman receiver Xavier Smith looked me in the eye and said he wanted to win a national championship in his time at Emporia State.

Then, he said he believed it would happen.

It’s easy to say that. Everyone wants to win a national championship. But Smith really believes. He might be naive. He might not see the big picture, but he really believes the Hornets will win a national championship in the next four years. I’m not the first person he’s told. He said it on the radio after the Hornets got blown out by Central Missouri.

I suspect head coach Garin Higgins believes the same thing.

Maybe he’s crazy, but all successful coaches and players and dreamers are a little crazy.

I spent last year covering the Colorado Rockies and the Rockies were 18-27 at one point. They had a rookie shortstop named Troy Tulowitzki who was a little crazy and didn’t take losing well.

Tulowitzki had never been on a losing team in his life. In little league, he would run in front of teammates to make a catch because he knew he could catch the ball and he wanted to win, and he didn’t care how it happened as long as he was winning. And nobody ever questions a winner.

Sometime in May, with the Rockies in last place, Tulowitzki threw a tantrum in the clubhouse after a loss. Baseball players are pretty used to losing. Even the best teams in baseball lose more than 60 games in a season, but Tulowitzki had probably never lost 60 games in his life.

He said as much that day he threw his tantrum. He made sure it was heard that he’d never been a loser and he wasn’t going to accept it in his rookie season.

Baseball is a goofy game, and it’s tough to say whether Tulowitzki’s tirade had anything to do with the Rockies making one of the greatest runs in baseball history all the way to the World Series. But Tulowitzki became a leader in that clubhouse and his play and attitude definitely helped the Rockies make the World Series.

Tulowitzki reminds me a lot of the Hornets. They started the season 2-0 and believing they could contend for a MIAA championship. They’re young and they didn’t know any better.

They’ve had a rude awakening in the MIAA.

The MIAA is one of the best conferences in Division II football. Four teams are currently in the D-II top 25. It’s the Big 12 or SEC of D-II football. Augustana, the team ESU beat 27-14 in Week 2 in a game that wasn’t even that close, is 5-1 in a respectable D-II division.

These Hornets are not a bad team. Their record is a reflection of the strength of their conference.

The Hornets aren’t winning the national championship — or any sort of championships — this season and they probably will not win one next year either.

Higgins is playing a lot of young players this season. He’s starting three freshmen on the offensive line. His best running back is a freshman. His second-best receiver is a freshman. He plays four freshmen linebackers and his secondary is filled with freshmen.

The Hornets are losing to established teams that play mostly juniors and seniors. The body makes a transformation around the age of 21 or 22. Not only do players benefit from several years in a college weight training program, but they start to develop old-man strength.

You don’t win in college football with freshmen. If Higgins had the choice, he would play all juniors and seniors. But he has to play the most talented players, and Dave Wiemers did not leave Higgins with a lot of talented upperclassmen.

All indications are Wiemers also left Higgins with some players that just didn’t care that much about winning anymore. They had gotten used to losing, and they were OK with it. That’s gone.

ESU receivers coach Jerrod Sparling, who played the last three seasons for the Hornets and witnessed a lot of apathy, said it’s tough to be in the locker room after a loss this year. The ESU players hate losing and they take it hard.

If you hate losing, but you don’t have any talent, then the fact that you hate losing doesn’t really matter much. But Emporia State does have talent. It’s just not ready to win consistently yet.

But it is time to continue the evolution of the program. The next two weeks the Hornets play their last two winnable games of the season. They are not going to win at Northwest Missouri and they are not going to win at home in their finale against Pittsburg State. Maybe in two years, but not yet.

But the next two weeks are the most important stretch on the Hornets’ schedule this season. Their young players are a confident bunch, but losing can wear on your confidence, and they’ve lost three straight now. As Danny McEvoy said on Saturday, the offense has lost the swagger that had helped them score 69 points in the first two games this season.

Missouri Western has the worst defense in the conference, and it’s the perfect opportunity to get that confidence back. Andre Sloan El had his worst game of the season Saturday at Washburn, but he started to look more comfortable in the fourth quarter. It was the first full game he had played in four weeks, and he and the offense had lost its rhythm.

Winning five games this season would be progress. The Hornets haven’t won more than four games since 2004. A road win in the MIAA against a team other than former MIAA-football member Southwest Baptist would be the first since 2005. Two wins in the next two weeks would give the young Hornets some confidence going into next season when I expect they’ll win a few more games. And in two years they’ll be ready to move into the top third of the conference.

And then, maybe, in three years, with Smith and Higgins’ first two classes playing as seniors — remember, he redshirted his entire freshmen class last year — the Hornets will be ready to content for championships.

My generation is the ADD generation and we don’t like to wait around for anything. We live in an instant gratification society. We’re the instant mac-in-cheese generation.

Higgins and his team have a vision — and its not short-sighted — but they could use some evidence that things are changing with wins in the next two weeks. And in three years, maybe Smith will look back and be able to say this is when it all started.