Mere Fodder Figures : Big West Schools Swallow Pride to Keep Division I Status

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

--The Charge of the Light Brigade

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1854)

At the east end of the stadium in South Carolina, an orange-shirted horde will file past a California rock, rubbing it for luck before they run down the hill. At the other end, the opposition will enter, excitement and fear quickening the pulse rate to three digits.

The orange shirts are used to all of this. Their crowd, 83,000 strong, is similarly clad. Saturday, when the Cal State Long Beach football team looks around Clemson Memorial Stadium, which surrounds Frank Howard Field--the whole thing combining to form college football’s Death Valley--the 49ers will see more orange than in a Central Valley pumpkin patch.

The idea is intimidation. And it works.

Long Beach’s role is clearly defined.

“Sacrificial lambs,” said 49er Coach George Allen, in his first game at what probably will be the last stop in a long, storied career. “I’ve never been in a role like this. None of us on the staff have ever had to do anything like this.

“We’re the youngest team in Division I-A football. We have a new coach, a new staff, a late start on recruiting. . . . I understand we’re 58-point underdogs.”

At day’s end, however, the 49ers will be about $250,000 richer, less expenses, Athletic Director Corey Johnson said, adding that is 15% of the football budget for three hours’ work.

With apologies to Adam Smith, it’s the Money Game, and nobody plays it better than the Big West Conference. Slightly north and west of Clemson, about seven hours later, Pacific will play Tennessee before about 95,000 for about $250,000. A week later, Cal State Fullerton will be in Auburn, Ala., to play a team many have touted as college football’s best before 83,000 for another $250,000, enough to cover half of the football scholarships, Coach Gene Murphy said.

Fullerton also will play Mississippi State, San Jose State will play at Washington and Nevada Las Vegas will play at Houston for smaller--but significant--sums.

The Auburn game was a gift to Fullerton from Pacific Coach Walt Harris, who decided that opening against a Tennessee-Auburn tandem might not leave his team anyone to line up against San Jose State on Sept. 15. Let Fullerton have Auburn. Pacific, instead, will play Division II Sacramento State at Stockton.

Harris knows.

Said Allen: “I talked to a coach who opened against Pittsburgh and Auburn last year and after that he didn’t have any running backs.”

The coach was Harris.

“We lost the only back we had who could run faster than 4.8 (seconds in the 40-yard dash, linebacker speed at major schools), Anthony Williams,” Harris said. “He had ripped off a 20-yard run that had been called back. Then he got a knee (injury) and was out the rest of the season.”

For the next 11 games, Andrew Thomas led Pacific with 311 yards rushing.

The Money Game. It’s called an economic necessity by athletic directors who make up the schedules. They excuse the overmatch by talking about the opportunity it creates to join college football Davids who have beaten Goliaths to the accompaniment of national headlines and exposure.

Players buy the sales-pitch--for a while. Then reality comes quickly. Money doesn’t block or tackle.

“It was an awesome sight, compared to what we were used to,” Kevin Gogerty, a Fullerton offensive tackle, said of playing at Louisiana State in 1987.

Later, a color poster was distributed in Orange County. It showed the Titans huddled in the end zone, with Gogerty standing apart, looking up at the stands.

“When we got to the stadium, there must have been 400 people to meet the bus,” Gogerty said. “They yelled at us, ‘Tiger bait! Tiger bait!’ and called us names. We had to run a gantlet to get to the locker room.”

Said Mike Schaffel: “We took it as a challenge.”

Schaffel played for Fullerton in 1987 against LSU (a 56-12 loss) and Florida (65-0) and intercepted a pass the next year at West Virginia (45-10).

“LSU was probably my most memorable. . . . It was the first big game I’d been in. . . . Everybody thought, ‘They get the attention, so it’s our chance to make a name for ourselves.’ ”

At halftime, Fullerton was down 35-12 but, Schaffel said, “We had moved the ball and they had scored on long plays. We still felt good.”

The feeling didn’t last, LSU turning the game into a rout late in the third quarter.

The irony was that Fullerton paid the price for David beating Goliath. The year before, Miami of Ohio upset LSU in Baton Rouge. The Tigers were angry, and Fullerton played the $200,000 lamb.

And the Titans still had Florida to play. “I remember the attitude was like, ‘Here we go again,’ ” said Jeff Taylor, a defensive end. “I remember the night before the game, me and Kelly Gogerty slipped out and went to a diner by the motel to get something to eat. Understand, this is not something we’d ordinarily do. But we really didn’t care. The coaches came in and saw us . . . and didn’t say a thing.”

The Money Game throws players and coaches together in a peculiar sort of bonding that goes beyond the normal seven-days-a-week football relationship.

“They didn’t want to be there any more than we did,” Taylor said. “We knew we had to play these guys so that we could play other schools (financially). I sort of felt sorry for the coaches. I knew that Coach (Gene) Murphy, well this couldn’t help him to get a chance to get picked up by any other (larger) school.”

Murphy acknowledges the problem of preparing for the Money Game without acknowledging the effect it might have on his career.

“I’ve been through it as a player,” he said. “At North Dakota, we went into Lincoln, Neb., to play Nebraska in 1961 (in a 33-0 loss).

“On these games, you try to take the realistic approach. You can’t say, ‘If we play hard and don’t make mistakes, we can beat Auburn.’ That’s a damn lie.

“You don’t want to take their dream away. For me to tell (quarterback) Terry Payne, ‘We’re not going to beat Auburn,’ isn’t right.

“But you can’t (lie to) these kids. We know them, but they also know us. They watch our reaction and they can feel the emotional part of our preparation.”

The problem was perhaps more difficult for Pacific’s Harris, who returned to his alma mater as head coach a year ago from a job as offensive coordinator at Tennessee.

“My biggest fear is that the players would lose confidence in what we were coaching,” he said. “I think you can score what it costs physically to play a game like that by the list of injuries. But you can’t score the cost in players’ confidence.

“We were a new coaching staff, and we didn’t score a touchdown until the third week of the season (after losing to Pittsburgh, 38-3, and Auburn, 55-0). The players had to think, ‘At least we scored a touchdown before this (in years past).”

Allen has a similar problem.

“We’re a new staff that I fear could be judged by playing Clemson,” Allen said. “That’s like a reporter going out and his first story is interviewing the President of the United States. And his career is going to be judged by that story.”

Clemson awaits with a new coaching staff that wants to impress their fans and those who pay the coaches’ salaries. And with players who want to impress the staff to get future playing time.

Tennessee will be playing its second game after rallying for a 31-31 tie Sunday in Anaheim against Colorado. And Auburn plays the poll game: the bigger the winning margin, the more votes.

There is little mystery.

“When I was at Tennessee, we’d play Colorado State and New Mexico,” Harris said. “We knew we’d win, but we wanted to win good . We knew what would happen. The only thing we didn’t know was when it would happen.”

So, how do you approach the game as a sacrificial lamb?

“I think the thing Coach Murphy was most worried about was people getting hurt,” Taylor said.

Said Murphy, quoting a coaching axiom, “Look, you can’t coach not getting hurt. You’re less likely to get hurt if you just hit as hard as you can.”

Murphy would simplify the game plan, said some of the players, leaving trick plays for games against UNLV and Pacific. He would use short passes--”Well, with the pass rush, you can’t throw long,” he said--to limit injuries.

“I’ll tell you one thing I do,” Murphy said. “I tell my quarterbacks to take a look at the play clock and snap the ball when it gets down to two seconds.”

Fewer plays, fewer opportunities to lose receivers that you will need against Fresno State.

“And you look for the positive things,” Murphy said.

What could be positive in being beaten, 65-0?

“There’s something positive in every game,” Murphy said. “You find it.

“And you tell ‘em you love ‘em.”

The Money Game.

“Are we, as a conference, happy about it?” asked Big West Commissioner Jim Haney. “No, we aren’t. . . . I don’t think that when you go out and get beaten badly, it looks good for the conference. But if you look at some of the scores of our games against these big teams and scores of games between those teams and other teams that maybe aren’t as good in their own conferences, they aren’t so bad.”

Vanderbilt has to play Tennessee and Wake Forest has to play Clemson. But Long Beach doesn’t have to go to Death Valley. Pacific doesn’t have to go to Knoxville, Tenn.

“Well, we’re taking some action,” Haney said. “We’re looking to reduce conference games from seven to six. Maybe that will mean one less road trip to pay for. Maybe instead of going on the road to play for a bigger guarantee, we can go play for a smaller guarantee. There are more teams in Division I-A that we can compete with than teams we can’t.”

In other words, skip Death Valley and play in Lawrence, Kan.

But the image problem lingers.

“The difficulty is that people focus on it and wonder if the schools in our conference should even be playing I-A football,” Haney said. “We have seen positive things, like first-round draft choices, but people are seeing us being overwhelmed and wondering if Fullerton or Long Beach should be playing I-A football.”

Under NCAA requirements for Division I-A status, each school in the Big West except Fresno State, with its 30,000 stadium and 32,500 average, would fail to qualify for Division I-A without the Money Game.

Those rules require an average home attendance of 17,000 and a stadium capacity of 30,000. Fullerton’s Santa Ana Stadium and Long Beach’s Veterans Stadium seat 12,500, and crowds of 3,000 are the norm. But another rule allows an overall average of 20,000 for all games to qualify for Division I status. When you play Clemson before 83,000, you can play host to Pacific before 3,000 next week and be I-A.

If you want to.

And the players do.

“When we went to LSU, we all thought, ‘Now, this is college football,’ ” Schaffel said. “The support, the fans, the facilities . . . this is what college football is all about.”

There was universal envy among players who largely weren’t recruited by the money schools.

The athletic directors want the games as well.

They are faced with running programs on limited resources, and the chance to get $250,000 for a Saturday afternoon is too good to resist.

But the coaches aren’t as excited. “I hate money games, hate them,” Allen said before he had even coached one.

Said Harris: “We shouldn’t be playing them. We are trying to build a program, and you can’t build a program playing those kinds of teams.”

Instead of heading East, he said, there is an alternative that two of the Big West schools--Fresno State and San Jose State--have accepted.

“We should be playing the Pac-10 schools,” Harris said.

“A big indication was our game against Arizona (a 38-14 loss) last year. They were 15th-ranked when we played them, and they had their first-string defense in in the fourth quarter. Our players felt we could play them. I could see it in the eyes of our players before the game--a look that wasn’t there when we played Auburn and Pittsburgh.

“Our kids went to high school with their kids, played against their kids in high school. They know each other. They were just recruited by different schools.

“We could play well against Tennessee and still get beat 60, 70 to nothing. I don’t think USC could beat us 60 or 70 to nothing in the Coliseum.”

Allen suggests a different alternative: “I’d be a lot happier if we were opening against Redlands.”