Columbia Now Gem of the Ivy

Marcellus Wiley, on the phone from New York, tells a funny story about something that happened to Columbia University’s football players, a week or so ago.

A guy from a national all-sports TV network was supposed to come and do a feature on Columbia, because the team had won its first six games and sat atop the Ivy League standings. This sounded fine to everybody, including Wiley, a senior and NFL prospect from South-Central L.A. who is one of college football’s few two-way players, a 6-foot-5, 270-pound running back and defensive end.

“That night,” Wiley recalls, “we hear that the interview’s been postponed for a few days. Then somebody invited us over to a fraternity, because he had a videotape he wanted us to see.”

It was a 1989 feature on Columbia, by the same TV guy.

“Yeah, and you know what it was?” Wiley asks, laughing at the memory. “It was a foul-ups and bloopers tape. It was the Columbia Lions, and how not to play football.”

It sure feels great to have the last laugh, now that Columbia is doing a Northwestern, coming back from college football’s dead.

Excitement is in the autumn air at Columbia, not the season’s biggest news in New York City with what the Yankees just did, but running a strong second. A butt of jokes no longer, Columbia, a few years removed from the longest losing streak in the game, is 6-1 and having fun.

Even last week’s 14-11 loss to Princeton didn’t dampen any spirits.

“Our kicker’s one of the best in the country, and he missed a 49-yarder by a few feet. Otherwise, we might have pulled out that Princeton game,” says Ray Tellier, now in his eighth and most satisfying season as Columbia’s coach.

In a sport rife with traditional powers and traditional powder puffs, there are occasionally great surprises. Oregon, Wisconsin and Northwestern going to the last three Rose Bowls, those were surprises. Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas all with losing records, these are surprises. Cycles come and go.

But Columbia, a 6-0 start?

Could this be the same Columbia that dominated the “Bottom Ten” standings, in the long-running humor column that graced America’s sports pages? The same Columbia that lost 44 games in a row, the school that, to steal an old Bill Cosby line, was thought of by opponents as We Want U?

Indeed it could.

Something happened at Columbia this season. Bounces went the Lions’ way. The opener against Harvard was won by seven points, as was the Fordham game. Holy Cross was no problem, but then Penn fell, 20-19, and then Lafayette, 3-0, and finally Yale, 13-10. Five of the six victories had been by a touchdown or less.

“You know football,” Tellier says. “The breaks, they tend to even out.”

Even so, the Lions seemed to have something going for them. A deeper, more confident team than usual, that much was obvious. And also, there was something else, a bond between many of the guys, something they all had in common.

Wiley knows what this means.

“You mean our California connection,” he says.

A whopping 29 of the players on the Columbia roster come from California. Whether they traveled 3,000 miles for a great education or a great chance to play, something brought these Cal-lumbians together.

Wiley really gets a kick out of it. He says, “I don’t know about these other California guys, but I’m not used to all this political correctness, being from South-Central. I’m surrounded here by guys in blue blazers, wanting to be doctors.”

His coach has a theory. Tellier says that although the school has always recruited California--usually with bachelor coaches who can spend as much time away from home as necessary--recently he thought of using two recruiters, one north, one south, to better cover the state. Keith Clark, for example, who coaches his running backs and offensive linemen, worked the Southland hard.

The results: Players such as Wiley of St. Monica High, the team’s second-leading rusher and fourth-leading tackler; junior Bobby Thomason of Loyola, the starting quarterback; outside linebacker Jeremy Taylor of Mission Viejo’s Trabuco Hills and rover Joey Bolder of El Segundo, two of the team’s top tacklers; tackle Brett Bryant of Placentia El Dorado, a tough 260-pounder, and Mike Jennings of Riverside Poly, a converted tight end, now a three-year starter at defensive end.

There are more, among them freshmen like tight end Billy Campbell from Huntington Beach, wide receivers Armand Dawkins from Compton and Ben Russell from Glendora, tackle John MacKinney from Fontana and guard Matt Radley from Mission Viejo. There are colleges in California that don’t have this many Californians.

“If a kid is bright enough to go to an Ivy League school, New York’s about the best place to do it,” Tellier says. “Some kids out there look at New York the way you and I look at DisneyWorld.”

In the case of Wiley, being an Ivy Leaguer has been an adventure.

Going from his old L.A. neighborhood (“Not Lebanon,” Wiley says, with a laugh. “Not the war zone.”) to Columbia was an experience in many ways, including on the football field, where he arrived as a 6-1, 190-pound kid and matured into a 6-5, 270-pound man who now has NFL scouts attending his games. Tellier calls him the best defensive player in the league. He also has scored four touchdowns and blocked three kicks.

One summer, Wiley came home to take a job at Paramount Pictures--a Columbia man at Paramount?--but he didn’t find it fulfilling. He found another job instead, volunteering at homeless centers, helping needy children.

“I knew a lot of 12- to 15-year-olds whose biggest worries were dates and proms,” Wiley says. “These kids’ worries were where to go to sleep at night.”

This is the Columbia way to play football, 1996 version.

No wonder it’s winning.