Bosotn University to Start Football Again
Ten years afterward
BU football'due south lost generation still feels pain of program's last season
 | Coach Tom Masella meets the media Oct. 27 after BU said it was dropping football game. (FILE/GAIL OSKIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS) |
Five games into the 1997 flavor, Boston University's second-twelvemonth football game omnibus, Tom Masella, was summoned to athletic director Gary Strickler's function where, Masella said, "I was brought to my knees."
Assured by several key members of the BU administration that he would be given the opportunity to rebuild a losing team but 2 years removed from qualifying for the NCAA Partitioning i-AA playoffs, Masella instead was given the news that the 103-twelvemonth-erstwhile program was being dropped.
The trustees' formal vote - influenced by onetime university president John Silber's not-so-gentle coaxing - was followed by Masella addressing his players and their families at the Homecoming game against Northeastern.
On the tenth anniversary of BU's concluding season, the memories of Homecoming 24-hour interval are still fresh for the Messier family of Rehoboth, considering ii weeks after his meeting with Strickler and one week subsequently informing his coaches, it was fourth dimension for Masella to let everyone know the rumors were true.
"We knew at the Northeastern game that something was going to happen," recalled Chuck Messier, begetter of BU freshman lineman Dan Messier, an All-Briefing player at Bishop Feehan High. "A few of the older alumni in the stands were saying to us, 'You've got to stop this,' and they must have assumed we knew what was going on, but it never dawned on me that BU was closing down the plan. It was a shock because Danny was told before he committed that the BU football program was not in danger."
Dan Messier enrolled at Northeastern the following fall, where he was a starting offensive tackle for three seasons and an Bookish All-Conference selection.
"I had finally gotten settled in at BU and out of the blue, they said the team was dropped. Information technology was upsetting news," he said. "I felt I had made the right choice going to BU and information technology took me a while after I got to Northeastern to get dorsum the emotion and motivation for football. I was an 18-yr-former kid who had his globe turned around."
The flavor ended November. 22 with a 31-fourteen loss at James Madison - whose fans gave the Terriers a continuing ovation at the terminate - merely not before the lame duck team blew out the University of Massachusetts at Nickerson Field, 33-8, in an emotional final home game, its merely victory that twelvemonth.
UMass won the Division ane-AA national championship the following season.
Dan Hart, a junior linebacker from Waltham, wrote an article for the BU Complimentary Press in which he expressed his thwarting. "Y'all literally sweat and drain for the university and you become slapped in the face up for it - that was pretty much what I wrote and it was that emotion nosotros all carried into the UMass game. Everybody in the locker room wanted to become out with a bang," recalled Hart, who later visited AIC on a recruiting trip but felt playing somewhere else wouldn't be the same.
Hart went back to BU part-time and earned his degree three years ago. He is ane of three BU players from that team now working every bit law officers in their hometowns - the others are sophomore running back Tom Dicker in Watertown and junior quarterback Dan Hanafin in Burlington.
Money bug
According to Strickler, the plan, including scholarships, was costing around $3 1000000 annually and taking in about $100,000 through ticket sales and alumni contributions. The administration felt the money would exist better spent on upgrading the athletic plant and expanding women's sports.
"It was a necessary matter to exercise, but I felt desperately for Tom and the players at the time and I still take that same feeling today," said Strickler, who retired in 2004.
Omnipresence, up during the NCAA playoff years of 1993 and 1994 when the late Dan Allen was coach, was downward after BU temporarily had cutting some football game scholarships. Considering of those cuts, Masella'due south last BU team had 25 freshmen and 25 sophomores but just 19 juniors and four seniors.
Inexperience and lack of depth resulted in another ane-x season in 1996, a far cry from Allen's 1993 team that went 12-1 and upset Northern Iowa in the 1-AA playoffs at a well-packed Nickerson Field, and the 1994 team that was ix-3 and defeated Division 1-A opponent Ground forces.
The Prebolas of Sparta, N.J., remember the good and bad times.
Gene, an offensive and defensive end at BU in the 1950s, is a member of the BU Hall of Fame. His son, Kris, walked on to the BU varsity in 1994 and played his final flavour in '97 with a scholarship.
"The announcement came as a surprise to both of us," said Gene, who coached high school football in Oakland, Due north.J., for 32 years after a iv-year pro career in the American Football game League, "simply I don't know even when I was at that place if BU always fabricated money on football game.
"We were a major contained in the '50s and we had some great players, just they stopped recruiting enough quality players to friction match up against teams like Penn Land and Syracuse and they somewhen toned down the schedule. Of course I'd like to run across BU football come dorsum and I miss traveling to Boston for the games," added Prebola, who played on the 1959 BU team that defeated Boston College, "but I don't remember in that location's much hope."
Despite their own feelings of hopelessness, the Terriers gave it all they had at James Madison.
"People came upward to me after that game and said it was amazing how hard we played. I felt our players went out and honored the academy that was tossing them aside," said Masella, 48, now in his second flavour equally a successful jitney at Fordham. "Nosotros were definitely on the right track - UMass was a sign.
"Merely in the end, I had to tell 24 incoming recruits that there was no squad anymore. All I asked from BU when I became head bus was their promise that I would exist given the time to brand information technology a proficient program one time over again and they said yes."
The James Madison loss was doubly painful for junior tight end and long snapper Charles Johnson of Keene, N.H., who tore his ACL in that game. At present living in San Diego, Johnson, a projected middle-round NFL draft choice who blew his knee out over again during a pro tryout, transferred to Northeastern, where he was the Huskies' starting tight end in 1998. He returned to BU, where he completed his undergraduate and master'south studies.
"It was an empty feeling to walk off that field at James Madison," said Bob Bicknell, at present an assistant line omnibus with the Kansas City Chiefs whose offset coaching job was at BU. "I've never been through anything and so emotional. It was a sad fourth dimension, simply I knew I'd get on and coach. Information technology was a bigger loss for the players.
"I still experience information technology was a major, major mistake to drop that plan," added Bicknell, who graduated from BC in 1992 where he played for his begetter, Jack, for iii seasons.
Life later BU
Other players and coaches from the '97 Terriers remain in the game, including defensive coordinator Wally Dembowski, now acquaintance caput coach at Northeastern, and Mike Leach, a sophomore tight end, who played at William & Mary after BU and is now with the Denver Broncos as a long snapper. Jason Barnett, the sophomore quarterback, is however playing semi-pro ball in his native New York. Senior punter Brad Costello, inferior linebacker James Souder, and freshman linemen Andrew Inzer and Phil McGeoghan from Feeding Hills each had brief shots in the NFL.
Offensive coordinator John McCarthy went a different route - he's now on the BU faculty. McCarthy spent vii years on the Terriers coaching staff and when the team was disbanded he finished his master's caste and doctoral program in sports psychology at BU. He became an academic and life skills counselor for Boston high school football players - while coaching the junior varsity football team at Madison Park High.
Now a professor of coach education at the Schoolhouse of Didactics, he works with his graduate students in a program at Boston English Loftier School focusing on life skills mentoring and physical training. "My concluding year at BU certainly helped me understand career transition," said McCarthy, who lives in Chestnut Hill. "A lot of us had to reassess our lives."
There were signs even during the good times that something was brewing. Despite BU'southward double-OT victory over Northern Iowa in '93 that had fans streaming onto Nickerson Field, the administration turned down the opportunity to host a second-round game that the Terriers lost, 21-14, at Idaho.
"Never could understand that," lamented McCarthy.
Lack of support
A talented group of junior college transfers, including All-American quarterback Robert Dougherty, temporarily had start the scholarship cuts, merely later on they left information technology all caught upward to the Terriers and Masella, who had little support at the cease.
"We had 2,100 fans for our 1997 habitation opener against Youngstown Country and the problem was apathy on the office of students and alumni, and that includes football game alumni," said former sports information manager Ed Carpenter. "Having a football program at 1-AA was a financial burden for all of the schools at that level, only the difference at BU was at that place was little return in terms of omnipresence or contributions. If there had been better support on a consequent basis, the story may take been different.
"The calendar week after the announcement, a photographer from the
Masella, an Allen banana who assumed his start caput coaching task at BU when the latter returned to Holy Cantankerous, said he was impressed how the Terriers finished that final season and he credits the administration for honoring all of the existing football scholarships and letting players finish their studies at BU afterward they had played football elsewhere. Coaches' salaries also were paid through June of 1998.
Carpenter said Masella never has received proper recognition for making certain those commitments were honored, for sending videos of his players to other colleges interested in recruiting them, and for opening up his concluding 5 weeks of practise to college scouts even as he pondered his time to come.
Masella had to be talked into staying in coaching by his wife, Lesli-Ann, after his disappointment at BU. "I applied for head coaching jobs and all I heard was, 'Pitiful, Tom, it's not your time,' " said Masella, who was an assistant at UConn, Louisiana Tech, and UMass earlier his fourth dimension did, indeed, come.
Masella won back-to-back briefing championships as coach at Primal Connecticut and has Fordham atop the Patriot League this flavor. "I never felt I had to prove to anyone what blazon of charabanc I was," he said, "but I had to get back to the bottom to movement forward over again."
© Copyright 2007 World Newspaper Company.
Source: http://archive.boston.com/sports/colleges/football/articles/2007/10/24/ten_years_after/
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