Un of a Kind

The final seconds of yet another victory ticked away, and Andy Collins, quarterback of one of the two remaining undefeated college football teams in Los Angeles, reached beneath the play list on his wristband.

Tucked there for the entire game was a piece of sheet music.

Collins unfolded it, and headed across the field, holding up the lyrics for his teammates as they laughed and sang to a small gathering of homecoming fans.

Occidental Glorious

O’er her foes victorious

Be her praise uproarious!

Occidental Fair

A feel-good football story has unfolded amid the red-tiled roofs of the Occidental campus, only a dozen miles from the Coliseum and USC, the home of college football’s two-time reigning champion.

The 1,900-student liberal arts school on an Eagle Rock hillside has been fielding a football team since 1894, 35 years before the USC-UCLA rivalry was born. Its 1957 team spawned Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1996, and Jim Mora, a former NFL coach, both of whom returned to Patterson Field for a reunion Friday night.

And with 8-0 Oxy trying to complete only the sixth undefeated season in its history, someone decided it was high time the players learned to sing the alma mater again.

“They taught us Thursday night at practice,” Collins said. “It’s for camaraderie with the alumni.”

Dale Widolff, the Occidental coach, laughed about Collins’ crib sheet.

“If you’d heard him sing Thursday, you’d have known he needed it,” Widolff said.

Occidental football is so far from the big time and “ESPN GameDay” that even high school teams get more coverage and draw more fans than the 1,800 or so who turned out on a fall afternoon for Saturday’s 57-36 victory over La Verne.

When Sports Illustrated did an article last month on then-undefeated UCLA, “the other team in town,” the other other team in town barely batted an eye.

“We’re Division III. We expect that,” linebacker Mike Bryant said. “I think we need to be mentioned a little bit, though. We work just as hard.”

Some of them work a bit harder, during games.

Bryant is a two-time defensive player of the year in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

He also kicks off.

Caleb Small, a wide receiver and defensive back, plays both ways -- and he doesn’t just dabble.

Against Redlands last month, he played all 78 plays on offense and all 80 on defense, leaving the field once, on a special-teams play.

In a night’s work, Small caught six passes for 59 yards and a 24-yard touchdown during the game, was second on the team with 6 1/2 tackles, and returned a punt for 19 yards.

“Our three top safeties have had injuries,” Widolff said. “We have about 65 kids. It’s not like we’ve got a million guys and go two-deep or three-deep.”

The offensive star of an explosive team averaging 40.5 points and 474 yards a game is Collins, a 6-foot-2, 210-pound quarterback who started his career in the Pacific 10 Conference at Oregon, then found his way down a winding road to Eagle Rock.

“Do you have about two hours to hear the whole story?” he said.

“I went there to play quarterback, and they wanted me to play defense.”

He left after one season, and after a brief flirtation with Division I-AA Eastern Washington, took a year off from football at Yakima Valley Community College, near his hometown of Zillah, Wash.

Sifting through all the recruiting letters he received in high school, he decided he wanted to go to a smaller, academically oriented school and called Occidental.

It was a piece of luck for Oxy, but it was luck by design.

“A big part of our challenge is finding very strong academic students, so we contact every high school basically in the western United States and subscribe to recruiting services and send out about 2,000 letters,” Widolff said.

“By the time we got going, it was clear he was going to be a Division I guy. But when he went back through his recruiting materials, he came back to our stuff and basically contacted us.”

That’s how a Division I-caliber quarterback whose passing ability and penchant for pulling down the ball and running fits Widolff’s spread offense so well ended up at Occidental.

“We’ve had some great players,” said Widolff, in his 24th year as coach. “Vance Mueller played for the Raiders and had an NFL career. But to get a guy who was a Pac-10 player, no, that doesn’t happen often.”

With Collins at quarterback, Occidental went 10-2 last season, winning two games in the NCAA Division III playoffs to reach the Elite Eight before losing to eventual national champion Linfield, 56-27.

This season, the efficient Collins has passed for an average of 275 yards a game with 24 touchdowns and only five interceptions, completing 66% of his passes. The junior quarterback also averages almost 34 yards a game rushing.

In a game against Pomona-Pitzer, Collins accounted for six touchdowns, two rushing and four passing.

He jokes that he’d like to do double-duty by returning kicks or something.

“They won’t let me,” he said.

They will, however, let his schoolwork come first.

“If I had a lab that went late, I could show up late for practice,” Collins said.

There are no athletic scholarships in Division III, but need- and merit-based financial aid are available to defray at least part of the $30,000 tuition at Occidental.

There’s another something very different about Division III.

There are no disputed football titles. The team that ends the postseason with a victory is the national champion.

For Occidental to go undefeated would take quite a playoff run.

After the regular-season finale Saturday at Claremont-Mudd, the Tigers -- ranked fifth in the American Football Coaches Assn. Division III poll -- would have to win five playoff games to finish as national champions.

That would be a feat to outshine any other in more than a century of Occidental football, including all those charming but dusty traditions such as the “Drum” rivalry with Pomona and “The Shoes” trophy that goes to the winner of the Whittier game.

Collins and Bryant got a privileged look at their school’s football history when they attended the reunion on the stadium field Friday, where Mora and Kemp ribbed each other mercilessly.

“Hearing them talk was hilarious,” Bryant said. “Some guys would walk around and talk about that 90-yard run -- well, it was probably a 50-yard run. And Mora, he talked about his team. How they were like us, not large.”

Collins said Kemp and Mora said they try to keep tabs on the Tigers from afar.

“They said they checked for the scores,” he said.

Himself, he keeps tabs on Oregon, where an injury to quarterback Kellen Clemens -- whose wedding Collins was part of last summer -- means onetime third-string sophomore Brady Leaf, Ryan’s younger brother, is the latest quarterback hero for the No. 11 Ducks.

Collins said he made his peace with leaving the big time behind.

“You’ve got to make the big time where you’re at,” he said.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Oxy facts

* Location: Eagle Rock (eight miles north of downtown L.A.).

* Enrollment: 1,887.

* Conference: Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (NCAA Division III).

* Conference football titles: 2004, 2001, 1987-89, 1983-85, 1971, 1965, 1960, 1951, 1948.

* Three famous football alums:

1. Jack Kemp (class of 1957) -- Former NFL quarterback turned politician.

2. Jim Mora (class of ‘57) -- Head coach at Occidental from 1964-66. Coached in the NFL with New Orleans and Indianapolis.

3. Vance Mueller (class of ‘86) -- Played for the L.A. Raiders from 1986-92.