The Davis Oasis : Surrounded by Farmland, the Aggies Raise a Blue-Ribbon Breed on a Dusty Field

In the fertile flatlands that lie east of Sacramento, two names have made a mark upon the land. One, John Deere, produces machinery for planting seeds in the ground. The other, Jim Sochor, produces machinery for planting opposing football teams in the ground.

On one of the next few Saturdays, Sochor’s UC Davis Aggies will clinch their 15th consecutive conference championship, breaking the incredible NCAA record set by Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma Sooners in the Big Eight. During the stretch, the Aggies have piled up a 79-3 conference record, including one streak of 38 consecutive wins.

Forgive the other teams in the Northern California Athletic Conference if their inferiority complexes are showing.

When Sochor took over as the Aggies’ head coach in 1970--in what was then the Far Western Conference--he inherited a collection of guys who had bumbled their way to a 4-6 record the season before. The record wasn’t all that bad in light of the school’s early history, which included a bunch of 2-4 and 2-6 records under coaches such as Reverend Bobbitt, C. E. Van Gent, W. D. Elfrink and Chester Brewer.

Davis muddled along for decades after fielding its first team in 1915, not winning much of anything. You could imagine some of the early Aggie coaches rolling out of bed each morning and crying out, “Ah, I love the smell of an 0-8 record.”

In 1957, during another thrill-a-minute 1-7 Aggie season, Sochor emerged as a powerful football force. Unfortunately for Davis, Sochor was a quarterback 120 miles away at San Francisco State. There he became the most accurate passer in the school’s history--a mark he still holds--and guided the Gators to three consecutive conference championships. Even as a very young man, it seems, Jim Sochor liked this “consecutive” business.

After earning a masters degree at San Francisco State and a doctoral certificate in education at the University of Utah, Sochor arrived at Davis in 1967 as an assistant football and baseball coach. Three years later, he was named head football coach.

The Davis campus sits in the middle of miles and miles of cultivated land. It is a beautiful location, sort of an oasis in the dirt where lush greenery and giant trees line narrow streets.

As you enter the campus, a sign in front of a medical building reads: “Small Animal Clinic.” Another reads: “Large Animal Clinic.” Apparently, sick or injured medium animals are not welcome on the Davis campus.

Veterinary medicine is one of several disciplines in which Davis has earned a solid national reputation. The school was founded for the study of agricultural and biological sciences.

And then there is football.

How, you might ask, does a guy build a Division II football program that piles up a 128-33-4 record, beating virtually all Division II competition--and very often some tough Division I-AA competition? Well, we all know the usual answer to that question, now don’t we?

We buy football players, preferably ones without a trace of a neck.

We give them full scholarships, nice new cars and lots of cash. When it’s time for class registration, they take the usual jock courses--”Ceramics,” “Beginning Archery” and “Renaissance Paintings: Choosing the Right Frame.” You get the kid to make an X for his signature and direct him to the weight room.

It might work that way at some colleges and universities, but not at Davis.

To begin with, the school offers fewer than the 45 athletic scholarships allowed under NCAA Division II rules. To be precise, 45 fewer. And the graduation rate among athletes at the school is 5% higher than the rate for the general student population. And, get this, nearly every player has a neck. Some have downright skinny necks.

At Davis, you earn a degree the old-fashioned way: You study.

Joe Singleton was also instrumental in creating the UC Davis football machine. Singleton, who is just slightly larger and more powerful-looking than Mt. St. Helens, was the school’s athletic director for 14 years until he decided last season to return to the field as an assistant coach.

“The first thing we did, the very first thing when we decided to put together a good football program, was to identify ourselves, find out just who we were and what we were all about,” Singleton said. “What we quickly determined is that we are not UCLA or USC or Cal Berkeley or Stanford. We are UC Davis. We don’t pretend to be something we’re not. We are a Division II school, not a Division I school, and we’ll do the best we can with that.”

The mistake most college football programs in the country make, Singleton said, is believing they are Lear Jets when they are actually Cessnas.

“The reason we’ve won so many conference championships is simple,” he said. “We keep beating teams in our conference and Division II teams in general because they refuse to believe who they are. They all want to be USC. Well, they are not USC and they will never, ever become USC. And until they realize that and direct their programs accordingly, we will continue to kick their butts.”

The Davis approach to football is based on finding the solid high school athlete; a smart, solid high school athlete who was either overlooked or not quite good enough for a Division I program. Singleton, Sochor and others then convince the person that Davis is the perfect place to be. He gets a chance to play football and, more importantly, he will get a top-notch education.

“Athletics will never overshadow education here,” Singleton said. “It just won’t happen, despite the success of the football teams. When you become successful in anything, your first inclination is to move up a level. People say we should start giving athletic scholarships and all that and challenge the bigger schools. We fight that urge every day.

“Our success here is in putting something together, challenging almost every year for the national championship in Division II and still maintaining the purity of the thing. When everybody else started going the other way, buying their football players and all, we went in this direction. We’ll keep the kids we’ve got and make them the best they can possibly be,” he said. “That’s our identity. That’s who we are. And as long as we maintain that identity and don’t try to fool ourselves, then I think we’ll probably win 15 more conference championships.”

Sochor, whose .795 winning percentage is the highest among active Division II coaches in the nation, has had chances to leave Davis. He’s come close a few times. He was the second choice for the head coaching job at Stanford, which was eventually filled by Jack Elway. He was also among the final candidates for the top coaching job at West Point a few years back. In both situations, he was sought by the schools.

“I have never applied for another position or had anyone write or call on my behalf,” said Sochor, who plots the Aggies’ complicated offense and leaves the just-as-complicated defense to 15-year assistant coach Bob Foster.

“I like it here. I would only leave if something drastically better came along. And something with the same high ethics we have here,” he said.

Sochor, once a member of the NCAA’s elite Ethics Committee, knows his players are not the fastest or the biggest or the strongest. But he also knows they might be among the smartest football players in the country. And that, he says, is far more valuable.

“We build our teams on three principles. Trust, unity and togetherness. And all three are based on having intelligent people who understand how such a system works,” he said. “We often face more talented teams, but we never face a team that is closer, that pulls together so well.

“Bear Bryant once said that he normally had only four or five great players on his team and the rest were only fair to good. But the key, he said, was in never letting the ordinary players know that they were ordinary,” said Sochor. “You talk positively, eliminate the negatives, you praise and encourage and build on those blocks of confidence. The ego is a very fragile thing. It’s so easy for a player to lose confidence in himself. We just don’t let that happen.”

At the start of each season, Sochor shows his team a game film. The pictures are black and white and not of the best quality, but it is a film of the Miracle Game, the comeback of comebacks. It is, in Sochor’s words, “a classic.”

It is a cornerstone of his football program.

The game was played in 1971, the Aggies vs. Hayward State. They trailed 29-14 with 20 seconds left in the game. A quick touchdown and a two-point conversion cut the deficit to 29-22. Davis then recovered the onside kick at the Hayward 45 with 14 seconds left. After one incomplete pass, quarterback Bob Biggs completed a pass to the 30 with four seconds left. Then came the touchdown pass with no time left on the clock. The Aggies still trailed, 29-28.

They lined up for the two-point conversion, but two penalties drove them back to the 13. Finally, on the third snap, Biggs rolled left, got cut off, rolled all the way to the other sideline and spotted his former Vacaville High teammate, Mike Everly, in the end zone. He passed and Everly dove. The ball met Everly’s left hand, which was suspended a few inches above the grass. Davis 30, Hayward State 29.

“We show it every year before the first game,” Sochor said. “It lets the new players understand and the veteran players remember what our motto is and what it really means: Never let up when you’re ahead and never give up when you’re behind.”

Amid all the talk of high academic standards, it should be noted that Davis does not field a team of slow and clumsy guys who wear thick glasses. There are, to be sure, some overachievers. There are also guys like Mike Wise, a 6-8, 270-pound defensive end who has many pro scouts bug-eyed. He will follow Davis grads Ken O’Brien (New York Jets), Casey Merrill (New York Giants), Bo Eason (Houston Oilers), Rolf Benirschke (San Diego Chargers), Mike Moroski (formerly with the Falcons and, briefly, the Raiders) and others into pro ball.

Mostly, though, it is a team of guys like Armin Anderson, a 5-6, 160-pound split end who gets good grades and catches virtually every football thrown in his general vicinity. He is studying to be a physical therapist.

“We know how to look for talent and then to make do with what you have,” Sochor said. “We find their strong points and take advantage of those strengths. We look for the natural order of things.

“I enjoy reading the philosophies of the Chinese. They say so much about the natural order of the world, of the universe. If you find that natural flow and go with it, you’ll find very little resistance. But if you go against that natural flow, you find tremendous resistance.”

And the beat goes on at UC Davis. Sometimes, that beat comes in handy. Sometimes, it hurts.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that for every night there is a day, for every right there is a wrong and for everything you get you give something up,” Sochor said. “It’s easier now for us to recruit because of the winning program, but it is sometimes hard to motivate the kids because of the success. They think that sometimes the tradition will win a game for them, and sometimes that does happen. But sometimes it works the other way and we lose because the kids rely on that tradition.”

Actually, the Aggies lose about as often as they flunk exams or use the word “ain’t.” And the rest of the students and the residents of Davis have adopted the team with open arms. Attendance at 9,400-seat Toomey Field over the last three seasons has averaged about 9,200. Occasionally, more than 10,000 people squeeze in.

In keeping with the school’s image, Aggies fans cannot be confused with fourth-quarter Raiders fans.

“People don’t die and businesses don’t close when we lose,” Singleton said. “People don’t wear red hog head hats and scream themselves silly like they do at Arkansas. People just aren’t going to do that here. It’s a town of professionals. They want us to win, but they want us to do it with class. The gentlemanly way of doing things. The Davis way of doing things.”

Which is not a bad way of doing things.

“We do it our way,” Singleton said. “It’s pure and it’s simple. And if you want to judge your Division II football program in the Western part of the nation, you have to go through UC Davis. If you want to be anybody in Division II football, you have to beat UC Davis.”