With Halloween just around the corner and the infamous craziness coming to Court Street this weekend, what better time for a spooky story to get everyone in the mood for the festivities?
Flashlight, please.
Ahem, to understand today's story we must flash back through the past 10 years to the dark and scary times that were the mid-1990s.
It was a simpler world then. Portable CD players were still considered cool, Married with Children ruled television and Los del Rio's Macarena topped music charts across the nation.
(For those of you crying and shaken up already because of the Macarena reference, you should probably stop reading now. This story is not for the faint of heart.)
But today's story has nothing to do with compact discs or enthralling Latin beats. No, today's tale takes place on a desolate plain inhabited by 6-foot beasts ' beasts with unnatural speed and agility that are driven by a combination of instincts and traditions toward one thing:
The Mid-American Conference title (lightning crash, dun-dun-dunnn!).
My storytelling skills are terrible, but here is where things get scary.
In the past decade the Ohio and Kent State football teams have produced a combined record of 74-151 overall, 65-102 in Mid-American Conference play (and that is with five years of the Jim Grobe era at Ohio included ' it probably could have been much worse).
In those years there were just plum-awful seasons for both teams. The Bobcats were 1-10 in 2001 and 2-10 in 2003. And Kent State can match and exceed Ohio's lows. The Golden Flashes were 0-11 in 1998 and 1-10 in 2000.
It is no surprise that records such as those have caused quite a turnover at the head coaching position in the past decade. The Bobcats have had three men at the helm (Grobe, Brian Knorr and Frank Solich) and so have the Golden Flashes (Jim Corrigall, Dean Pees and Doug Martin).
So what is so scary?
These two teams, mediocre at best in the past decade, are meeting this weekend to prove who decides ownership of the MAC's East Division, and possibly the conference (if you predicted that before the season started, you might have some supernatural abilities of your own).
And to top things off, the teams are eerily the same.
I think the two teams are similar in our approach
Solich said during Monday's news conference. We're trying to work on field position trying to win the turnover battle and the sack battle not giving the ball up and putting points on the board at the end of drives. They've been very good at all that.
But what, if any, explanation is there for the two teams even being in this position?
The teams that have not been in the middle of the pack or at the top of the conference are getting better
Solich said. There's a very thin line between losing and winning in college football period
but I think that line is even thinner in this conference. It's a conference that I think you're going to see upsets
and that has happened extensively this year in the conference; I think it's helping the conference get stronger.
Well, yeah. That is one expert opinion. But I am going to accredit the alignment of the stars.
Or is it the year of the Bobcat? Maybe somewhere, voodoo priests are imposing their will on effigies of Falcons, Zips and RedHawks.
At this time of year, you can never be sure.
' Mark Shugar is a senior journalism major and sports senior writer for The Post who will take time out of his Halloween celebration Saturday to watch Ohio take on Kent State at 2 p.m. on TV. Send him an e-mail at ms314803@ohiou.edu.
17
Archives
Mark Shugar
