Columbia Is Trying to Lose Its Tradition

They have the pictures to prove it. Columbia won a football game last week. Beat Penn. They shouldn’t forget the experience.

Only a mean person would say the season is already a success. But there is something to that. Ray Tellier is not a fool for accepting congratulations.

If Columbia beats Lafayette on Saturday, it will mean a winning streak.

Winning is a tool. It’s better than the sarcasm. At Columbia it’s foolish to consider winning all of the football games; the point is having a chance every week.

So if it’s only realistic to think the longest losing streak began with three losses, then a two-game winning streak begins with a single victory. Tellier’s point is that playing football at Columbia should be a positive, not a negative, experience.

“That’s our job as coaches,” he said. He is working on his doctorate in positive thinking and group psychology.

Indeed, Columbia knows all too well about a 44-game losing streak and too little about a two-game winning streak, which last came to pass in 1978 -- before all but a few Lions were cubs. Tellier understood before he came from the University of Rochester in 1989 that coaching at Columbia is not the same as at Miami.

“I don’t want them to have the feeling that when they work hard to get ready to play and win, and it doesn’t happen and it doesn’t happen again and it doesn’t happen again,” Tellier said Tuesday in the happy afterglow. “It’s human nature when you’ve been through that so much and been hurt so often that you hate to get ready anymore.”

Surely that strain runs through football at Rice and Vanderbilt and Northwestern, where tradition says coming to the light at the end of the tunnel is probably not going to be pleasant. Columbia has won as many as two games only once since ’78 and hasn’t had a winning football season since 1964.

While they were nine games into the longest losing streak since air was put in the football, Jim Garrett became the coach and told his players they were “drug-addicted losers.” He didn’t make life better. He didn’t get to his second season, either.

But is it impossible to reverse the flow of history, to make Columbia football as representative of the level of education at the school as the jazz on the Columbia radio station? “Nah,” Tellier said. “Nah. Nah.”

The Columbia coach has to understand that like the rest of the Ivy League he can’t be going around snarling and berating and belittling his players because they can just go away. They’re too smart for that, don’t expect to come out football players for life and don’t depend on football scholarships.

He’s the professional. He’s 40. Football is his life, the life of his family -- even if it isn’t his players. He isn’t at Columbia as, what he called, “a step-off point” of his career.

Unlike the rest of the Ivy League, there is all that losing. As Tevye put it: “Tradition.”

That means Tellier takes what he can from each practice and each game to accentuate the positive -- to be critical, of course, but to keep football as pleasant as possible. When he was an assistant at Brown he saw Columbia’s struggles. When he was head coach at Rochester he lived through his own seasons of 2-8 and 1-9. But the 1-9 was followed by 9-1 and 8-3.

He asked for this. “Part of the reason they hired me here was my patience,” Tellier said. Essentially, this is his sophomore class. He thinks they need another year. “I think we’re getting better,” he said. “No. We are getting better. The kids we have are better than we had.”

They have all felt the sting of tradition, as he did. “When I moved in and people asked what I did and I said I coached football at Columbia,” Tellier said, “the neighbors changed the subject or they made jokes. I know the kids get the same thing from high school friends or doctors or barbers.”

They play football because that’s one of the things young people like to do. Even some good students. Columbia has football teams because football can be part of overall education. The philosophy is nice but it needs the reinforcement of winning from time to time.

Tellier tells them he sees it in their general athletic level, their speed and their records in the weight room. “We can run the ball,” he said. “We averaged 50 yards a game the first two years; now we’re averaging 200. We couldn’t run the ball at all.”

Beating Penn, 20-14, when Penn hadn’t won a game either was one thing. But Columbia was in the game in all three of its losses -- could have beaten Harvard, Lehigh or Fordham. “We could be 5-0,” Tellier said, but not without some prompting. He has established that he is not a fool.

It was fun in the dressing room Saturday. The photographs captured the moment. The coaches would like the players to remember the feeling. The coaches laughed a lot Sunday when they broke down the films. New York is a more pleasant place for winners.

It’s an asset for recruiting young players: There’s so much education and opportunity out there. It’s a liability, “some of them don’t want the urban environment,” he said. “The parents more so. But it’s changing. We don’t get more of the recruits, but we get more than we used to.”

Both sides of winning are self-perpetuating. The best players have a choice. Young people like to go with winners, if they have a choice. Tellier saw the change at Rochester.

“The week after winning is so important,” he reflected. “It’s another chance to go another week without losing.

“Win three or four and all of history is forgotten.”

It’s the only way to think.