Sudden Death: UConn Football's 2009-2010 Improbable Odyssey

By VITO J. LEO

For the UConn football team, the 2009 season offered the usual share of blood and sweat –  but way, way too many tears.

Chronicling the tumultuous 2009-2010 seasons, the book focuses on emotional hardships on and off the field – including a beloved teammate's burial, heartbreaking last-minute losses, heartwarming redemption sagas, an historic victory at historic Notre Dame, police investigations, a national award for courageousness, an improbable appearance in a top-tier bowl game and a New Year's Day surprise on national TV- culminating with the head coach deserting his team on a desert tarmac without so much as a "See ya, guys."

This book is dedicated to a fine young man, Jasper "Jazz" Howard,  an NFL prospect who'd escaped his Miami community's mayhem only to be murdered on a serene street in Storrs in the shadow of the larger-than-life statue of the school mascot during Homecoming weekend.

The night before, Jazz and his expectant fiancée had finally chosen their baby's name; sadly, by sunrise this infant-in-the-womb would now have a name.…but would no longer have a father to call her by it.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: VITO J. LEO
• Release date: Jul 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393997269

VITO J. LEO

Vito's journalism journey jumpstarted in small-town Connecticut where he was raised Italian Catholic and smitten by Yaz, Orr, Bill Russell and Y.A. Tittle. Reporting results of local football games as a teen eventually led to credentials for three Super Bowls during a 29-year writing career in the Boston-Hartford corridor. Clippings range from the sublime (Yastrzemski’s Hall of Fame induction) to the ridiculous (Janet’s wardrobe malfunction!). He's reported from such venerable venues as Yankee Stadium (old and new), Fenway Park (old, but good as new), Notre Dame Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Daytona Speedway and The Superdome. Covering UConn sports for six years resulted in a reporter’s rapport with players offering unique team insights. Veets says, “Those wonderful hours with the Huskies culminated in what I pray are wonderful hours of reading.”

Book preview

I BLUE-WHITE GAME

For the 2009 University of Connecticut football team, the season offered the usual share of blood and sweat – but way, way too many tears.

A sorrow-filled season speckled with the specter of sorrowful scenes, suddenly sparkled on a snowy Saturday night in East Hartford. Emblazoned with UConn’s iconic block C outlined in silver, a Nike football majestically sailed through the uprights, giving the Huskies a win and earning the team a great big collective sigh of relief while affording the jubilant players a brief respite from weeks of frustration and mourning, overtimes and funerals, back-to-the-wall wins and must-win losses. To keep his players focused on eking out wins while overcoming the tragic loss of one of their best-liked teammates, head coach Randy Edsall relied on knowledge accrued during 29 years in the college and pro ranks charting X’s and O’s. He kept it all nestled in protective armor forged by a bout with ulcers suffered when 11-year-old Randy was hospitalized after acid had gnawed through the stomach of this Alpha Boy who just couldn’t get over the fact he’d missed a crucial game-tying free throw in the closing seconds of a rec league game! Now, four decades later, 11th-year-head-coach Randy needed to dig deep within that healed gut to find solutions they just don’t teach in Coaching 101: Ways to keep his stable of young men emotionally stable, to keep them focused on winning after losing one of their best friends. Even before the turmoil had begun to unfold that autumn, Randy Edsall found himself immersed in a situation not suffered by most gridiron head honchos who usually reign as the alpha male on American campuses. Not so on the Storrs campus where the football coach could not even attain beta-male status. Forced not only to take a backseat to legendary basketball coach Jim Calhoun, by 2009 Edsall had been unceremoniously relegated to a spot in the trunk next to the spare tire thanks to the continued success of the women’s basketball team under the leadership of the savvy and eloquent Geno Auriemma. Though not sinking to omega dog status, Randy was far from top dog on UConn’s coaching totem, as he competed with a couple of Connecticut’s charismatic characters, coaches Calhoun and Auriemma. At best, he could only attain gamma-male status, the third letter in the Greek alphabet. Despite the fact UConn’s football program was enjoying a small taste of nationwide coverage, the team’s accomplishments paled compared to the banquet of honors and prestige at which the UConn men’s and women’s basketball teams had long since feasted. Football, for example, has no First Night – the annual prelude to the hoops season wherein the two basketball teams are introduced in Gampel Pavilion amid a showery blaze of laser lights and pumped-up sounds. Referring to this extravaganza which entices fans to line up for hours waiting for the doors to open, knowing full well some will be turned away when the arena reaches capacity, Auriemma boasted That’s unbelievable that we get that many people to come [to First Night]. That just shows you how much they love UConn basketball. There’s nothing like it in the country. From 1999 to 2018, BOTH men (4) and women (10) won more national championships than any other NCAA D-1 school. The men often play in the Maui (Hawaii) Invitational and the women schedule exhibitions in Italy, their coach’s homeland. Meanwhile, the football team’s idea of an exotic trip is Detroit, Birmingham or Charlotte, N.C., all fine cities in their own right but not quite up to the standards of Rome and Venice in the summer or Ka’anapali Beach in late autumn. Both roundball programs had become so mega-successful that talented high school hoopsters were stumbling over one another as they made a mad dash for UConn in hopes of making it rich in the pros, a stampede reminiscent of the gold diggers who descended upon the gold-laden Yukon territory in hopes of finding the mother lode. By the time football practice began in the spring of 2009, Calhoun had won two of his three national titles and Auriemma boasted a half dozen NCAA trophies since arriving in Storrs in 1985, three of which punctuated perfect campaigns. In 2013 both coaches – already comfortably enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame only an hour away over the state line in Springfield, Mass. – would be inducted into the prestigious Connecticut Hall of Fame, joining such luminaries as Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman and Harriet Beecher Stowe. By 2015, Geno could claim a ring for each finger after leading his team to a tenth title, tying John Wooden for the most NCAA national championships. The next spring, when Auriemma surpassed the legendary UCLA coach, some quipped he might have his 11th championship ring fitted for his big toe! Storrs was a hoop-centric campus, basking in the accomplishments of both squads, including a singular achievement: UConn became the only Division I school to capture the country’s crowns in the same season (2003-2004) – an unprecedented feat which the two teams remarkably repeated in 2014. (Central Missouri State, now University of Central Missouri, won D-II men’s and women’s hoop titles in 1984.)

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Given the ever-growing collection of post-season hardware accumulating in the hallowed halls of the Harry A. Gampel Pavilion, the UConn football program not only paled in comparison to basketball as it did say at Kentucky and Duke but it had been relegated to more or less a diversion for fans in September and October anxiously awaiting First Night activities signaling that season-opening tipoffs were just around the corner. One might even suggest that football wasn’t necessarily even the third most popular sport in Storrs, given the championship caliber of baseball, field hockey and both soccer teams. In the three-year draft period for professional sports leagues from 2014-2016, the University of Connecticut was by far the leader in overall first-round picks with 15 Huskies signing pro deals compared to second-place Duke’s ten and UConn was the only school able to claim at least one first-rounder in ALL seven leagues as well as an overall number-one in three sports. It’s common knowledge that the NBA regularly welcomes UConn grads to the pros. Not so well publicized is the success of the baseball team; in 2015 no fewer than five former Huskies were on big league active rosters: Nick Ahmed (Class of 2011) played shortstop in 134 games for Arizona; Scott Oberg (2012), the hard-throwing Rockies rookie reliever, made his big-league debut in April; Matt Barnes (2011) was developing into a Red Sox reliever who would help the Sox win the 2018 World Series; the Cubs released Mike Olt (2011) in midseason, the White Sox picked him up and a few weeks later Olt made MLB history on Sept. 16 when he hit one out for the White Sox, becoming the only player to homer for both Chicago teams in the same season; and first-round pick George Springer (2011) returned from a two-month mid-season stint on the DL to help propel the Astros to their first playoff appearance in a decade; in 2017, Springer joined legendary Walt Dropo (1950) and pitcher Charles Nagy (1996) as the only Huskies to start a MLB All-Star Game, debuting in left field and batting cleanup. He then hit five majestic home runs in the 2017 World Series as Houston won the franchise’s first-ever world championship. The canines also do quite well among equines. The Polo Club has 10 national titles, seven women’s (1996, 1997, 1998, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008/Final Four in 2009, 2015, 2017), three men’s (1972, 1973, 1974/Final Four in 1996, 1998, 2004, 2009, 2011).

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With the overall success of Storrs sports, Edsall did his best to move the chains when it came to his team’s W-L record; but he faced a fourth-and-40 climbing the campus pay-scale docket: in 2010, Calhoun $2.15 million; Auriemma $1.61 M; Edsall $1.56 M, as part of a five-year contract signed in February 2008 which included these perks: one month’s base salary (about $25,000) per bowl game appearance; $100,000 for a BCS bowl; $75,000 if named Big East coach of the year and $150,000 for national coach of the year. Government agencies are good at publicizing staff salaries. The Connecticut General Assembly commissioned www.transparency.CT.gov which lists salaries and benefits for all state employees. Federal agencies keep track of college spending nationally. Per statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2010-2011 school year, Texas spent the most on head coaches ($163.3 million) but Ohio State got the biggest bang for the Buckeye buck; the Columbus school realized $14.02 from teams-related revenue for every one of the 10,128,956 dollars paid to head coaches while neighboring Michigan wolfed down $13.77 per coaching dollar for second place. The University of Connecticut was fifth in head-coach pay ($9,501,884), right behind powerhouses Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio State and Alabama.

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Unfortunately, the Huskies couldn’t generate the nine-figure income streams of bigger programs, taking in $63,828,624 for a $6.72 return per coaching dollar. It should be noted that Connecticut is probably the only school where both basketball programs are successful nationally and it’s likely Auriemma’s well-deserved salary skews UConn’s overall remuneration for head coaches. Not to mention the university offers a greater array of sports, men’s and women’s, than most other colleges. Which is not to say that the UConn brain trust is shy when it comes to showering its big-time coaches with lavish contracts. In 2016, men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie became the first Connecticut state employee paid more than $3 million a year. While the contract given to Ollie, a UConn grad, might be a great endorsement for the benefits of earning a UConn degree, the tidy sum might not play so well with the guy busting his butt just to put new Nikes on his quickly growing kids. Ollie’s mentor, three-time NCAA championship coach Jim Calhoun, argues that the $12 million generated from services rendered by a coach more than justify the robust seven-figure reward.

When a reporter asked Calhoun why his salary was so much more than the governor’s, the Hall of Fame coach might not have come off so dastardly had he relied on the apocryphal words of the legendary Babe Ruth: When asked why his 1931 salary from the Yankees was so much more than that of President Hoover’s, Ruth reportedly replied, I had a better year than he did! A century later not much has changed, with salaries lavished on pro athletes and college coaches far exceeding anything politicians earn. (Yet, one wonders how office holders who spend their entire life in public service earning fairly modest salaries end up millionaires with three homes?!)

CALHOUN FAMOUSLY BERATES A REPORTER QUESTIONING HIS SALARY=>CLICKHERE

It was to be expected that a university whose administration solidly backed its athletic endeavors would want to compete among the best. To that end, when the push was on to move the football program upward to the elite tier of college competition, school officials wanted the best man available to lead that charge. 

A person wearing glasses Description automatically generated They chose Randy Edsall.

Whatever the ever-changing list of Favorite UConn Sports happened to be in 2009, one thing was etched in stone: Edsall wasn’t the type of man willing to settle for third place – the Gamma Male, so to speak – whether it be in the Big East standings or the campus coaches’ pecking order, even if the dynamic duo perched above him both happened to be Hall of Famers. In fact, Randy Edsall is the kind of guy you want to answer that three-a.m. phone call. No, not the State Farm guy on the graveyard shift answering calls while wearing khaki pants. We’re talking about that apocryphal middle-of-the-night summons bandied about in TV ads during the 2008 presidential campaign, the one asking voters which of the candidates would be best suited to answer the middle-of-the-night call supposedly made with the world gripped in a super-scary scenario similar to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when for one tortuous week, mankind was a ledge-walker on the brink of the Apocalypse. That’s when a determined, steadfast President John F. Kennedy went head-to-head with the Commies – and the vodka drinkers blinked. JFK’s calm fortitude finally defused the flammable standoff with the Kremlin after Russian missiles aimed ominously at U.S. cities were discovered in Cuba, a revelation that shoved the world to the Eve of Destruction as Barry McGuire so aptly phrased it in his 1965 hit.

Now, some five decades later, the threat is less likely to be Russians brandishing nuclear warheads; more probably the assassins will surface from a cabal of face-covered crazies acting in the guise of Islam, sneaking across the porous Texas border, armed with designer nukes concealed in nondescript backpacks à la innocent schoolkids. With the United States sorely lacking a decisively uncompromising Kennedy-esque leader, a square-jawed disciplinarian like Edsall would be as good a choice as any to shoulder the burden that surely would descend upon the person picking up that telephone shrilling in the silence of nighttime. You see, Randy Edsall has had that phone call. It came in the wee hours of an October Sunday morning, shortly after his standout defensive back Jasper Howard had been helicoptered to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, some 35 miles from the UConn campus where Howard had been stabbed during an argument shortly after midnight. Later that morning, in a hastily arranged press conference, Edsall would describe the disconcerting duty that had fallen on his shoulders as head coach and default dad for many of his players whose families lived hundreds – some thousands – of miles away: At around 4:30 [a.m.] I was called into the operating room to identify the body. Then I got on the phone with the doctor and we had to make a phone call to Jasper’s family. I then went down and addressed the student athletes who were there [at the hospital] and needless to say, that was not a very enjoyable moment, Edsall told the small group of reporters hastily gathering to hear details of this atypical sports story. That’s when the counseling began for the players who were there, to comfort them and guide them; as a coach and a father, I let them know what we were going to do to get through this terrible tragedy that happened to a great young man. Later, Edsall would say that the coaching handbook had not prepared him for a time when he would be asked to do any of the above.

TOUR THE BURTON FAMILY COMPLEX=>>CLICKHERE

INSIDE LOOK AT SHENKMAN CENTER=>>CLICKHERE

It was certainly not on his Things to Prepare For list when spring practice opened on March 16. Throughout the winter, the gridiron consiglieri strategized in the luxurious offices and activity rooms of the Burton Family Football Complex and the gridiron gamers exercised in the state-of-the-art Mark R. Shenkman Training Center. Both structures provide modernistic surroundings in which to work out or chill out, facilities which even some much bigger schools might envy. When the buildings opened in 2006, UConn boasted that Storrs was now home to the finest on-campus football facilities in the country. Edsall described the Shenkman Center as a huge breakthrough in the growth of our football program. Now we have the advantage of year-round training, which is a necessity for any team serious about competing for conference championships and bowl wins. The 85,000-sq.ft. facility rivals comparable sites at bigger schools, some of which might be referred to as football factories. It features a 120-yard state-of-the-art FieldTurf surface for practice adjacent to an 18,000-sq.ft. strength/conditioning area, supplemented by advanced video tech allowing coaches and players to dissect tendencies of opponents. The Burton Football Family Complex, which houses the coaches’ offices, includes an academic resource center, team meeting rooms, locker room, a well-furbished sports medicine area, video facilities, a team dining hall and a players’ lounge. Defensive tackle Rob Lunn, who in 2007 started all 13 games as a junior and made 39 stops while, according to the school’s media guide, helping eat up blockers to keep the linebacking corps free to roam, likely echoed the sentiments of his teammates when he noted that, Certainly, the Burton Complex, with its sprawling marble halls and jacked-up sound system is a better place to train, eat, practice, shower and rehab than its predecessor. 

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Surrounded by this lavish athletic off-field environment and given the squad’s recent spate of success on the field, coaches and players gushed with a sense of optimism broad enough to span the 20-mile ride from the Storrs campus all the way to the team’s home field, Rentschler Field in East Hartford. And rightly so. A 2009 athletic department press release proudly proclaimed that the program developed by Randy Edsall had just completed two seasons of some of the loftiest achievements in the history of University of Connecticut football. Who could fault the PR department for using such lofty prose when writing about a team coming off a season that resulted in the Huskies’ second straight bowl appearance, the first time Connecticut’s football program had been invited to post-season play in consecutive years. No wonder, despite a 24-10 season-ending loss to Wake Forest in the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the locker room basked in the euphoria of having created in the autumn of 2007 what many fans considered to be a magical season. Husky Nation had been taken to an even loftier tier of excitement when the football team cracked the Top 25 for the first time. On the final weekend in October 2007, in the team’s sixth season since moving divisions from 1-AA to 1-A, Connecticut (7-1, 3-0 Big East) dramatically leaped into the AP Poll at No. 16, peaking at No. 13 in the BCS standings on Nov. 5, 2007. According to the school’s archives, UConn’s No. 16 ranking was second only to Florida State’s initial appearance in the AP Poll when the Seminoles charged onto the national stage at the No. 10 slot. The Huskies also racked up another second-place stat for the quickest team to earn a national ranking after converting from 1-AA to 1-A. Only Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia had ever gained entrance to the national polls faster after moving up in class: In 1999, in the program’s third year playing 1-A ball, the Herd thundered into the top 25 and eventually ended the season ranked 10th. It should be noted that despite a 13-0 record, Marshall did not get a bowl invite, possibly due to the team’s schedule which didn’t include a ranked opponent, unlike UConn’s slate which featured several ranked teams, thanks to the overall strength of the Big East, which placed six of its eight teams in the Top 25 at one time or another during 2007. Within a week of seeing his team ranked by the AP, Edsall was named a candidate for both the Bryant and the Munger collegiate Coach of the Year awards. Randy’s credentials at that point were impeccable: an 8-1 record overall – the best start since the college first took to the gridiron 109 years earlier; a 4-0 mark in the Big East, the only unbeaten team in a league where pre-season pundits had assigned them to a seventh-place finish.

It was a super season for Husky fans who could also point to a trio of former UConn assistant coaches helping Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning in New York. Dave DeGuglielmo (O line), Chris Palmer (QBs) and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo would be a vital part of the team that derailed New England’s chance at NFL immortality, stifling the offensive juggernaut and denying the Patriots a 19-0 record with a scintillating 17-14 win in Super Bowl XLII. In 2007, Connecticut’s defense ranked 10th nationally in ypg and third in scoring defense, 13.0 ppg; the secondary was tied for first in interceptions (18, Boston College) and amazingly, led by two by Scott Lutrus, had scored five times on pick-sixes, only a handful fewer than the number of scoring passes this elite unit allowed. The offense had been intercepted only four times, the fifth best team in the country at avoiding aerial armed robbery. Despite a 66-21 thumping by national powerhouse West Virginia, ranked fourth in the polls, the 9-3 Huskies tied the Mountaineers at 5-2 for a share of the Big East Championship. Okay, so it took a monstrous effort by a 5-7 Pitt team playing the annual season-ending Backyard Brawl in Morgantown to pull off a stunning 13-9 upset in a game everyone thought would be a warmup for second-ranked West Virginia playing for the national title. Everyone, that is, except the Panthers. Perhaps instead of running it up against UConn the week before, if WVU had saved a couple of those TDs they might have won their first-ever national championship. Pittsburgh’s stunner overs WVU earned the No. 3 ranking all time in college upsets by ESPN’s College Game’s 150th Anniversary Special. That train wreck at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown notwithstanding, the surprising upstarts from Storrs had earned a spot atop the standings a mere four years after joining the conference. Though the 2008 team (8-5) couldn’t repeat as league champs, they finished with a flourish, baffling Buffalo, 38-20, in the International Bowl. Now, just two months after that nationally televised win, players were assembling for spring training. If the results of the 2007 and 2008 seasons had been lofty in the eyes of the program’s friends and fans, they would soon have to crack open Roget’s Thesaurus to describe the events that would take place in the autumns of 2009 and 2010. Randy Edsall’s program was adapting quite nicely to life in the BCS neighborhood, thank you, winning games, earning trophies, going bowling, drawing crowds – all the while doing it his way, i.e., the ethical way. 

While he may have cut a cornerback or two along the way, Edsall was not known to cut corners when it came to academics. He held weekly meetings with the director of the program designed to oversee athletes’ academic standings. The two would review the team’s academic progress, player by player. Specifically designed electives were available: The freshmen Life Skills course, per the curricula guide, offered coping mechanisms to help athletes transition to campus life by developing adaptive skills via the resolution of true-to-life situations while providing valuable resources to help strike the proper balance between studies, sports and social life. The Life Skills offerings for juniors focused on the athlete’s future, whether in pro sports or other walks of life. In 2007, Connecticut was one of only six teams invited to a bowl game while maintaining excellence in the classroom. Per statistics compiled by the NCAA, only five other teams played in a bowl game and still managed to graduate more than 80 percent of both its Caucasian and African-American student-athletes. Navy led the way with a 95 combined graduation rate, closely followed by Air Force, Boston College, Mississippi State and Wake Forest, UConn’s opponent in the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the only game with both teams above 80. Contrast that with the BCS title game where both the winner (LSU) and loser (Ohio State) graduated slightly more than half their players. Those 80 and 90 percentile scores turned in by UConn, Navy, BC et al. were a perfect example of the NCAA’s elusive daydream, that mythically heroic creature known as the student-athlete, as hard to find on in college football and basketball as an honest politician in Washington, D.C. Edsall wouldn’t disagree with that assessment: Universities and the NCAA shouldn’t talk about ‘student-athletes.’ When you start offering kids scholarships in eighth grade, don’t talk to me about amateurism. [He] isn’t a ‘student-athlete’ anymore. You’re talking about an athlete. We need to take a step back and make it right. It’s not right. Things have changed. Look at the Ivy League. Maybe it’s changed a little. But they still play ten games. No playoffs. That’s amateurism. [The other conferences have] gone to a professional model now. Semi-professional guys for the most part. If that’s what you want, change the rules. Don’t keep them the same and take advantage of these young men. The system is broke. Perhaps, broken, is the word you’re looking for, Coach. The only ones broke in this whole scheme are the athletes. The term student-athlete was an ambiguous euphemism created by the NCAA in 1950 as a means of avoiding paying injured players workmen’s compensation. That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA's signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms, wrote Taylor Branch in a powerful essay detailing NCAA shenanigans with the use of the term at deadspin.com/how-the-myth-of-the-ncaa-student-athlete-was-born-1524282374

I started in Syracuse in 1976 as a player, Edsall recounted. The scholarship covered room, board, books, tuition and fees. We played ten games. We were done the week before Thanksgiving. I got a chance to spend Thanksgiving with my family. I didn’t have to be at school all summer. I went home and worked out on my own. I got into the coaching profession in 1980. We’ve gone from ten games to 11, 12, to conference championships and more. Up until a couple of years ago, the scholarship was still room, board, books, tuition and fees. Nothing’s changed for the people playing the game. So now when you see all the money being made by conferences and distributed to universities, none of that has really gone to the players.  I have an issue with that. They’re the ones playing, said an obviously ticked-off coach as he ticked off the parts of the system he thought were off kilter. Coaches are making $7 million a year and the kids don’t get anything. I know they have ‘cost of attendance’ (a few dollars spending money) but that doesn’t cover the summertime [if they stay on campus]. All I’m saying is get back to doing what’s right. Kids should be able to share in the money because of the demands we’ve placed on them.

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Dr. Ellen Staurowsky of Drexel University takes issue with the term student-athletes, defining them more as student-workers deserving of compensation. Which, according to UConn’s student newspaper, The Daily Campus, brings up an interesting point. University employees do their jobs to make things better or easier in some capacity. In 2016, the UConn athletic department made $79,229,275 in total revenue; about $44 million of that was earned revenue, which includes ticket sales, contributions, licensing, and other fees. The rest of those funds consisted mostly of a university subsidy as well as student fees. A common argument against paying college athletes is their scholarships allow them to basically go to college for free. Except not all college athletes get scholarships and not all athletes who get a scholarship actually get a full ride. In fact, the NCAA only dictates full scholarships for football, men’s and women’s basketball and women’s volleyball. In other sports, a coach can opt to divide a full scholarship to attract more players. Two Connecticut high-profile spokesmen, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Coach Geno Auriemma, have come out in favor of paying college athletes. In March 2019, Murphy issued a 15-page white paper, entitled Madness Inc., taking to task what he refers to as the college sports industrial complex and calling on the NCAA, which Murphy claims generated $14 billion in 2018, to initiate a study into the whole pay-for-play conundrum. Auriemma, arguably the most successful coach in college sports and among the highest paid women’s basketball coaches, has gone on record in favor of paying student-athletes. The longtime UConn coach says it’s time for reform because the world is changing and coaches are making billions of dollars and schools are making billions of dollars. So, all players get is a free education [and] the cover of Sports Illustrated, Auriemma told Kelli Stacy of the Hartford Courant. Edsall publicly derided the term student-athlete as disingenuous and outdated.... It’s not a student anymore. It's just athlete."  He’s stated that college athletics have outgrown its amateur past and been professionalized and predicted that pay-for-play in college is inevitable. While there are many pros to paying pseudo-pros, there are also cons that form formidable obstacles to doing so. NCAA president Mark Emmert says the downside of paying football and basketball players would lead to schools eliminating other sports. Despite being unable to pay his athletes, Edsall has always made damn sure that the students in his charge pay dividends with the scholarships they receive. The operative word is, after all, SCHOLARship, not ATHLETEship.

Given the plight of student-athletes and the competitiveness of the UConn coaching community in which he found himself, Edsall’s goal for 2009 was to continue to climb the FBS ladder – rung by rung – until reaching the doorstep of the BCS entryway. Edsall had climbed the first few rungs soon after coming to Storrs, when UConn football changed ladders, so to speak, moving up from the stepladder-type smallish school Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to join the extension ladder heights of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), a lush jungle dominated by money-making mammoths. Randy did this despite recruiting disadvantages inherent to any state in the bottom ten in total population. Edsall’s recruiting efforts produced more than a dozen NFL draft picks including a pair of blue-ribbon first-rounders, Donald Brown in 2009 and Byron Jones in 2015. There are so few big fish in the small pond that is the state of Connecticut when compared to the fertile football breeding grounds of Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and the so-called SoCal. So, casting his line out farther beyond state lines, Edsall reeled in quite a few keepers from around the country. But when the UConn head coach landed a whopper early on in his tenure in Storrs, he didn’t have to struggle with his line to get this big fish on board. Nor did he have to use frequent flyer miles to do so. Less than an hour’s drive from The Rent, a young Dan Orlovsky was preparing for an NFL quarterbacking career. The teen played so spectacularly at Shelton High he was named an All-American by national prep school magazines while earning coveted in-state honors, including being named the All-State Class LL MVP and the New Haven Register’s Connecticut Player of the Year. Resisting calls from much bigger schools, notably Michigan State and Purdue, Orlovsky made a momentous decision for himself as well as for the future of Randy Edsall’s football program when Dan decided to be the man in Storrs, swayed, no doubt, by the same setting that captivated sports writer Josh Buser of The Daily Campus and led him to leave his small town in upstate New York for small town in northeast Connecticut: From that first day I set foot in Storrs, I loved it here. I loved the campus, the atmosphere, the school spirit. I loved everything about UConn, from academics to athletics to aesthetics. Orlovsky’s decision was not without a few critics at the time, including some of Dan’s clan. Try as they may, they couldn’t dissuade the talented teen who had his eyes and his heart set on Storrs, swayed by Edsall’s selling points and the national exposure given at the time to college quarterbacks from smaller schools, such as NFL starters Chad Pennington from Marshall and Ben Roethlisberger from the little Miami, the one in Ohio. Dan defended his decision to play in his home state: In Connecticut, we don’t have a professional sports team, so when you’re in high school and start to gather a name for yourself and go to UConn, you are literally beloved by the people of the state. They consider you one of their own. The Shelton High QB and soon-to-be transformer of UConn football adhered to his credo: It doesn’t matter where you go to school. If you’re good, you’re good. If you can play, and you want to get to the NFL, they’ll find you. Speaking of homegrown talent, there are some who believe that college sports were a bit purer in the good ol’ days when most of a team’s roster consisted of native sons; that was back in the dark ages of campus life, long before co-ed showers, safe spaces, trigger warnings and free condoms became de rigueur at most universities. In this new age of enlightenment and entitlement, the advent of wholesale recruiting has basically resulted in a de facto philosophy of our high-priced imports can beat your higher-priced carpetbaggers. Scan the roster of most of the major men’s hoop programs and one is likely to find the obligatory pair of token whites, the ubiquitous foreign student and, last and most certainly least, the mandatory in-state product (most likely a white kid, therefore accounting for a two-fer on the roster, a hometown Caucasian.) When Pollyanna becomes president of the NCAA, an edict will be forthcoming that only a certain percentage of players at a state university can hail from outside that state. Orlovsky would likely endorse that position. I definitely think that kids from Connecticut need to consider things outside of football alone, the father of three (Madden, Hunter and Noah) was quoted as saying in a 2010 interview promoting his annual charity golf tournament at Foxwoods Casino, about a half-hour drive south of Storrs. There’s an opportunity to do greater things for yourself and your family when you’re 40 if you’re able to make a name for yourself at UConn. Which he most certainly did, leading the Huskies to their first big-time post-season invite, the 2004 Motor City Bowl in Detroit, a 39-10 win over Toledo. Ironically, Detroit would prove to be Dan’s new home-away-from-home. Drafted by Detroit, Dan (6-5, 215) proved to be a yeoman NFL backup, moving from the Lions, to the Texans, Colts, Bucs and eventually back to Detroit which released him after the 2016 season. In July 2017, looking forward to a 13th NFL campaign, the free agent signed with the Rams. In an interview following the agreement, Orlovsky, 33, told Sports Spectrum that he was ready to play: I was ready months ago and I am still now. But what I am more excited about is that these seven months made me realize even if God hadn’t opened this football door again, He was still God. He was still in control and He was going to place me exactly where He wanted me. And in that, I had peace, I had patience, I had trust. God is good, God is faithful. Even if football didn’t come back. Dan didn’t waver in his faith even when the Rams released him on waivers prior to opening day, saying they might bring him back as a mentor for their young quarterbacks. On Oct. 11, 2017, the longtime NFLer announced his retirement is an introspective essay titled It’s Time. In 2018, the 35-year-old Orlovsky, who had long touted the potential upside of playing in-state, proved a profitable prophet when Connecticut-based ESPN hired him as a football analyst. Always great seeing former players using their experiences at UConn to achieve success in life, a congratulatory Edsall tweeted. Dan’s first game was, fittingly enough, at Rentschler Field for the 2018 season opener against Central Florida. Within a few months, the former quarterback’s ability to analyze game tapes had made him a hit with viewers and producers. Every opportunity matters, you have to go out and do a high-level job on a consistent basis, that’s how, over time, you become very good to great at what you do, he said of his new endeavor.

ORLOVSKY REFLECTS ON NFL CAREER=>>CLICKHERE

Even as Dan’s star continued its ascendency, for some reason, the Orlovsky era and aura in Storrs faded rather suddenly. Unlike the ripple effect created when Connecticut born Chris Smith of Bridgeport (1988) and Granby-grown Rebecca Lobo (1991) chose their home state’s university, both eventually helping to launch their respective basketball programs into national powers, Orlovsky’s on-field success didn’t result in a flood of in-state blue-chippers flocking to UConn. As reported by Scout.com – an indispensable resource for all things college sports – of the 21 UConn  recruits in 2009, only three were homegrown: Marcus Aiken of New Britain, Michael Osiecki of Seymour and Bridgeport’s Trevardo Williams; in 2010, that number dwindled to one, all-state receiver Tebucky Jones Jr. whose dad was a defensive back with the Patriots for five of his eight pro seasons. This deteriorating situation was soon lamented by the resident football head coach in Storrs. When all these in-state blue-chip high school athletes fled to college gridirons in warmer climes, Edsall was described by one columnist as apparently [downright] livid while berating high school coaches for not doing more to help the football program at UConn by convincing Connecticut’s quality kids to compete in Storrs. The UConn coach complained that There are a lot of coaches in this state who have never even come up and seen our facilities. That’s what’s disappointing to me; we invite them up every spring for our clinic. Then Edsall reportedly put on the gloves: We are better received, in my opinion, outside the state than we are within certain pockets [of] the state. That’s tough to say, but you’ve got to say it because it’s true. Whether they came from Connecticut or Kalamazoo, in the spring of 2009 UConn football was desperate for talented players after seeing four members of the 2008 team snapped up early in the NFL Draft. That squad had been recognized by the American Football Coaches Association for its successful graduation rate of student-athletes. Not only were these guys smart, some of them were heading straight to the NFL, led by a bruising runner who wound up being a first-round draft choice, Donald Brown. What can Brown do for you, Randy?  How about helping propel the program onto the national stage, crack the Top 25 for the first time and give this school from one of the smallest states an astounding total of three second-round draft picks in the 2009 NFL Draft.

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In 2008, Edsall rode his backfield workhorse like the thoroughbred athlete Don is. The running back responded to the call, leading the nation in rushing to become Connecticut’s first-ever Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) All-American. The powerful runner continued to do well the next season when Brown developed into a key Colt during the march to Super Bowl XLIV, rewarding the team for drafting him with the 27th overall pick, the second running back taken, Denver having used the 12th pick on Knowshon Moreno. A university which had never had a player chosen on the first day of the NFL Draft now had four snapped up early, a first-rounder and three seconds. Somewhere in cyberspace, bloggers were re-checking to make sure they hadn’t gotten the league acronym wrong. This was the NFL, not the NBA....right?  Cornerback Darius Butler was taken by the Pats with the ninth pick in the second round, offensive lineman William Beatty went to the Giants with the 28th pick and three slots later, defensive lineman Cody Brown learned he would be playing in the heat – make that the dry heat – of Arizona. Only Southern Cal had more players chosen in the first two rounds. Not bad for having joined the big boys in the FBS only seven years earlier. Four other members of the 2008 team signed free agent contracts (qb Tyler Lorenzen, center Keith Gray, strong safety Dahna Deleston and defensive end Julius Williams) while tight end Martin Bedard headed north to the Montreal Alouettes. A year later, Buffalo selected Marcus Easley in the fourth round and the Panthers chose cornerback Robert McClain 249th overall.

Come spring of 2011, NFL drafters would again scoop up a Husky foursome: Jordan Todman, Greg Lloyd, Lawrence Wilson and Anthony Sherman. The Huskies would continue to contribute to NFL rosters in 2015, capped by the selection of yet another first-rounder, defensive back Byron Jones, with Geremy Davis chosen by the Giants in the sixth round. Following the abundant harvests of UConn players, by the autumn of 2011, there were so many former Huskies in the pros that four of them popped up on the same NFL field, a first in the history of UConn football. It happened, fittingly enough, in Foxboro, the closest NFL stadium to Storrs (80 miles, Meadowlands is 140 miles). On Dec. 3, 2011 Dan Orlovsky started for the Colts, connecting on 30 of 37 passes for 353 yards and two scores. When he wasn’t throwing, he was handing off to Donald Brown who gained 41 yards on 14 carries with a touchdown. But their efforts fell short as the home team prevailed, 31-24. How much pride must Connecticut folks have felt that day watching two mainstays of the football program pairing up to keep pace with the Super Bowl-bound Patriots. To top it off, defensive stalwart Scott Lutrus made his pro debut in that game, the Indy linebacker making two tackles. Rounding out the foursome was offensive lineman Donald Thomas who had been picked up by the Pats in September. In January 2019, there were a couple of other former UConn players on the same NFL field, this time in the prestigious Pro Bowl. Anthony Sherman was selected as the AFC starting fullback and Byron Jones played cornerback for the NFC, the first former Huskies ever chosen for that all-star game. For Sherman, it was yet another milestone on his pro journey. The rugged fullback had played so well knocking down defenders in Kansas City that the 2015 Chiefs finished third in rushing yards per attempt behind the Bills and the Bucs. Affectionately known in Kansas City as The Shermanator, none other than Bill Belichick has described Anthony as one tough kid. Drafted by Arizona, in 2013 he found a home in Missouri where he could show’em his exceptional blocking ability. Sherm’s bruising style of play even earned him the video world shout-out of being chosen as the best Madden 16 fullback based on his Overall Rating (95).  

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A year after starting in the Pro Bowl, Sherm achieved the ultimate goal for an NFL player: The Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV with Sherman, as usual, playing a vital, albeit low-key, role in the victory over San Francisco. His crushing lead block on the perimeter allowed Damien Williams to turn the corner en route to a 38-yard TD with 1:12 to play that effectively sealed Kansas City’s 31-20 win. He had reached the pinnacle of a long career during which he’d parlayed hard work and God-given ability into a Super Bowl ring. A lifelong Christian, Anthony told Sports Spectrum a few days before Super Bowl LIV how his belief in Jesus Christ has helped him develop as a team player: It’s great to just be around a group of guys that have the same beliefs and same goals as you – like [the Pro Athletes Outreach Conference], to get around guys that are in the same profession, that know what you’re going through on a day-in and day-out basis, but you all know your Lord and Savior. During a gab session at the 22nd Home Depot College Football Awards at Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Kansas State quarterback Collin Klein was certainly simpatico with Sherm’s philosophy. The former Heisman Trophy finalist professed thanksgiving to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for giving me the opportunity to play football. For playing the game out of a love of what I’m doing and not just to prove something to someone else. In the days leading up to the Super Bowl in 2019, Sherman emphasized the importance of playing on a team, not to impress one’s teammates, but to support them: For us to be able to lean together and walk this walk together is a great thing. For us to be able to do that today and for this week and for this game is great. That’s what we want to do as Christians, is to be His light. While Sherman got the ring, his 2018 Pro Bowl partner, Byron Jones, got the bling, also parlaying skill and perseverance into a winning combination following the 2019 season when Miami signed him to a five-year, $82.5-million contract that includes $57 million guaranteed, according to ESPN, making him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback. Lassoed by the Cowboys with the 24th overall pick in 2015, Jones had been a fixture in the Dallas backfield, first at free safety before switching to cornerback where he soon earned the coveted shut-down adjective. Byron was one of those few Edsall recruits who never played for him, redshirting during the 2010 campaign then starting the next four years at UConn. A New Britain native, he attended St. Paul High School in the shadow of the ESPN satellites in Bristol. At the 2015 NFL Combine, the relatively unknown DB jumped 12 feet, 3 inches in the broad jump and jumped up the lists of astounded super scouts seeing a world record being made right before their eyes, the best combine performance since 2003. There were no calls to Storrs during the 2016 draft but UConn had one player chosen in 2017, safety Obi Melifonwu by Oakland in the second round, and one in 2018, defensive tackle Folorunso Fatukasi by the Jets in the sixth round. Couple of great stories about the 6-foot-4, 224-pound Obi Melifonwu (pronounced OH-bee mel-un-FON-woo) who started and starred at free safety for four years at UConn. Released by the Jets in November 2018 due to injuries, he was picked up by New England and got a Super Bowl ring the next season. Although he grew up in Massachusetts, he was born in London; paying homage to his homeland, Obi draped himself in a huge UK flag on the sidelines at SB LIII in Atlanta. A total of IX UConn alum appeared on Super Bowl rosters from XLIV thru LIV. Yeah, UConn football was big time.

TO SEE THE HUSKIES’ SPRING PROSPECTUS=>>CLICKHERE

And now university officials were about to parlay that success into a golden opportunity to play in the brilliance of  the Golden Dome, a chance to play the biggest of those big boys on the FBS block– none other than the most renowned team in college football history, the University of Notre Dame. Pouncing on the rising star of the school’s gridiron prowess, the powers that be in UConn football sought to carve an even more prominent niche on the national stage for the Huskies by scheduling the program’s first-ever trip to South Bend. Unfortunately, the ESPN spotlight would come to hover over Storrs that autumn for a much, much sadder reason, something no one could have foreseen during those breezy days of spring practice leading up to the annual Blue-White intrasquad game. In the Spring of 2009 those tales of death were still months away as nature gave birth to its annual regeneration and football players once again took to the practice fields, filled with the confidence and anticipation that can only come at the start of a new season. The sports PR department was working overtime to come up with enough adjectives to praise the previous two seasons: The 2009 University of Connecticut football team enters spring practice coming off two seasons of some of the loftiest achievements in the history of the program. Over the course of the 2007 and 2008 seasons, UConn has played in back-to-back bowl games for the first time ever, won a Big East Championship, produced the country's leading rusher and the program's first FBS All-American and saw six former Huskies don NFL uniforms this past season. The seven other Big East teams might have been green with envy when spring practice opened on St. Patrick’s Day (Tuesday, March 17, 2009) but Randy Edsall was more concerned with players he had on campus for the Blue-White Game rather than players who were in the NFL. A few years earlier, Orlovsky’s graduation had created a hole in the UConn offense bigger than one made by a pair of hefty Husky linemen double-teaming a nose guard. Now, Edsall once again had to remake the backfield after running back Donald Brown and quarterback Tyler Lorenzen moved up to the NFL leaving another hole in the UConn offense even bigger than the earlier one, this one large enough to drive the proverbial Mack truck through. Brown was taking handoffs from Peyton Manning in Indy while Lorenzen, signed as an undrafted free agent by Jacksonville in April 2009, eventually found his way onto the Saints practice squad where he used his 6-foot-5, 234-pound frame to transition to tight end.

The grand plan now called for two quarterbacks – junior Zach Frazer and soph Cody Endres – to run the run-oriented offense dominated by a pair of seasoned runners – senior Andre Dixon, named All-Big East Second Team in 2007, and Jordan Todman, who gained 296 yards and a ton of valuable in-game experience as a true freshman in 2008. Aforementioned quarterback Collin Klein expressed the importance of spring workouts: "You win games in the spring, February, March, April, that's when you win