Alabama Crimson Tide

December 29, 2007 | 3 Comments

The Tide started off the year playing great. They were really playing over their head. They were excited about getting a new coach in their camp. They had what many felt was one of the greatest coaches in the country. Nick Saben is one of many great coaches in our country today. But what they maybe didn’t figure on was that great coaches are no nonsense type guys. They tell you how it is even if it hurts. They work guys until they can’t go any more. They teach you how to succeed even when you are exhausted. This is tuff and some of these guys that were happy to see the new coach in town weren’t near as happy to see his work ethic. Alabama is a great team with lots of tradition. And I predict they will come out strong again next year. But you may see many new faces on the team next year. The Alabama faithful will be buying all of the Alabama Crimson Tide Merchandise to support a team that will include all the old players who were tuff enough to handle the new sheriff in town. And he will do a tremendous job of recruiting new players in who most will be tuff enough to stay. This combination with the Saben winning attitude should make the Alabama Fans happy again sometime near in the future.

What is it that makes a good team good? Is it their record, talent pool, or coaching? Sometimes teams start off a season in sports by beating several sorry teams. A real sports analyst would analyze who the team actually beat.

It’s bad when people keep pointing out that a team is undefeated through their first five or six games in basketball or football when their schedule indicates that their opponents haven’t won but just a few games.

Having a perfect record only means something when a team plays quality teams. There was a team in 4A football-Ridgeland Titans- who won all ten of their regular season games but dropped their first playoff game.

That confirmed what I already knew. They scheduled sorry non-division games. Every year their division schedule is pathetic and the four teams that make it to the playoff every year from their division get knocked out in the first round.

Not too many people thought the undefeated Titans would beat a struggling Kosciusko Whippets team in the first round. People were right. Kosciusko got a real treat as they made their hour trip to Jackson’s suburbs.  A lot of Kosciusko’s fans are MSU alumni, so it didn’t surprise me to hear about all of the MSU Bulldogs merchandise like lawn chairs that was seen on the visitor side, along with all of the Whippets gear.

Croom sticks to the Plan

December 25, 2007 | 2 Comments

Sylvester Croom walked out the door and down his driveway on the unusually warm Sunday morning of Sept. 17, 2006, not exactly eager for the 15-minute drive from his house to the office.
 He was going to work early. Tulane had beaten his Bulldogs at home the night before, handing Croom his 19th loss in 25 games as the Mississippi State football coach. Croom was sick about it. He’d treat that feeling like he had so many times before: Watch film, see what went wrong, fix it.

But before Croom reached his car door, something in his front yard caught his eye. There it was, staring right back at him, a sign bearing two words that would force the turning point of his career at State:

FOR SALE.

“So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, somebody really wanted to put that in my yard to drive all the way out to Oktoc, before the sun comes up,” Croom recalled. “And then I’m also thinking to myself, what would I have done if I had seen him do it? And that scared me. Because there’s no telling what I would have done.”

So he drove, in a daze, to campus, where a thought took root:

To heck with all this.

He knew that he could leave Mississippi State and the network of colleagues he had made in the NFL, coupled with his coaching resume, would land him another job.

“So at that point, you know what I said? At the end of the season, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

For three days following the Tulane loss, Croom wrestled with his thoughts.

“In my head and talking with my agent - he and I went back and forth,” Croom said. “He said don’t do it, I said no, I’m not going to do anything because I would never walk away from my players and not finish the season and I would never put (MSU athletic director) Larry (Templeton) in that position.

“But the end of the season, this is it.”

The Plan is written in the front part of a three-ring binder that rests on a shelf above a laptop in Croom’s spacious second-floor office of MSU’s Bryan Athletic Administration Building. He handed a copy of the “Organizational Manual” to a visitor on a recent day.

“Just sort of thumb through that,” he said, passing the white binder across his desk. “You’ll see.”

Eight tabs neatly divide The Plan, though the most space is occupied by practice schedules and other season-specific information. At the front, there’s a mission statement, followed by core principles.

Croom spent his 2003 summer vacation writing this. Weeks earlier, Alabama had chosen Mike Shula as its coach, replacing Mike Price after his infamous short-lived tenure in Tuscaloosa.

Croom had interviewed for the job, too. He didn’t have The Plan then, at least not on paper. He couldn’t help but think that was part of the reason he didn’t get his dream job.

“I said, ‘OK, I may not get another chance, but at least, when it does come, I’ll have it ready to go,’” he said.

That chance came some six months later, at a Marriott in Appleton, Wis. Croom was a running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers. Templeton was hiring a head coach to replace Jackie Sherrill, who had retired weeks earlier with the Bulldogs headed to a third straight losing season.

“I remember about three hours into the first session I had with him,” Templeton said. “I said ‘Coach, talk to me a little bit about the type of offensive coordinator and the type of defensive coordinator that you would hire.’ And he reached into his pocket, and he said ‘You know Woody McCorvey and you know Ellis Johnson?’ And he was nine-deep into who he wanted as assistant coaches.”

Yes, The Plan was that detailed. Its central tenets: Everything that’s done has the players’ long-term welfare in mind. Discipline off the field means discipline on it. Conditioning means a State team won’t wilt in the fourth quarter.

Player defections were in The Plan. That’s good, because there were dozens of them.

Templeton recalled the team’s first meeting with Croom after the coach agreed to take the job.

“They weren’t prepared for him,” Templeton said. “They were slouched down in their chairs, some of them were asleep, couple of them were late, and one poor soul’s cell phone rang about five minutes into his comments.”

Poor soul, indeed.

“He asked him to leave the meeting,” Templeton said.

Enduring criticism was in The Plan.

Sort of.

Croom was no dummy. He knew that a long-term plan that meant his team would lose more often than not early wouldn’t exactly make him popular. But he admits he was not prepared for the venom.

“I didn’t realize how many people didn’t realize how bad of a shape this program was in,” Croom said. “That’s what shocked me. That’s what totally shocked me.”

Croom couldn’t believe he was criticized for making players go to class. For calling out underperforming players to the press. (That’s how his mentor, his coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant did it, after all.) For making them earn their depth chart positions in the spring.

He was incredulous when a fan asked him if it might be better if State reverted to its old ways, hinting that winning now and taking NCAA sanctions later was essentially OK.

“I’m sitting there thinking, the old ways are what got you here in the first place,” Croom said. “So you’d rather go back and do what you know does not work than go ahead and fight through this and try something new and give it a chance? You know what you’ve been doing doesn’t work.”

For some fans, the honeymoon ended three games into Croom’s tenure, with a home loss to lower-level Maine in 2004. By the time the 2006 team started 0-3, capped by that 32-29 loss to Tulane, Croom was embattled.

The dark cloud, which was marked by low attendance at home games and mountains of criticism via phone calls and Internet message board chatter, was hard to ignore for anyone close to the program.

“It seemed like when I would get down he would come pump me up,” Templeton said. “And I think when he got down, I was down there pumping him up.”

Croom leaned heavily on his confidants. His wife, Jeri, is his most trusted one.

Football-wise, he spoke often with his agent, Rick Davis, former colleagues Bobby Ross and Pat Dye and college roommate Mike Washington.

“Anybody who starts to get that kind of thing, it goes with the territory, so to speak,” said Ross, the former Georgia Tech, Army and San Diego Chargers coach, and a friend of Croom’s. “You can be up and high as an astronaut one day and as low as a snake in the ground on the other.”

“When you get beat and you’re losing you have a tendency to be losing your self confidence and you start questioning yourself,” said Dye, the former Auburn head coach and Alabama assistant. “I just told him you’ve got to fight your way through the thing, know and have faith in your raising and stick to it.”

But no matter how much Croom confided in his wife, his agent, his boss, his old roommate and those two old coaches, it couldn’t match his own inner dialogue.

“In a lot of ways, I still feel like I confide in my dad and Coach Bryant,” he said, a big, broad smile creeping across his face. “People think I’m crazy, but in a lot of ways, I still - and without moving my lips, I still feel like I talk to them.”

Being a standard-bearer for his race was not in The Plan.

Croom had tried this before. As the offensive coordinator with the Detroit Lions in the late 1990s, Croom was one of just a handful of African-Americans to lead an NFL offense.

He knew it, too.

“That ate me up because we felt like we were trying to prove things,” Croom said. “I was so obsessed with it, I lost 25 pounds because I wasn’t eating. I was almost in a state of depression.”

So when he arrived in Starkville, and after he delivered the now-famous “there ain’t but one color that matters here, and that color is maroon,” line to plaudits at his introductory press conference, race wasn’t something to dwell on.

Not even in Mississippi, where the context of race is everywhere.

“When I took this job, I would not allow anybody to put that on my shoulders again,” Croom said. “I won’t allow it. Because I came to this conclusion that people who think that way, no matter what I do, it’s not going to change my mind anyway. It ain’t going to change their minds.”

Change was not in The Plan. Neither was compromise - from Croom or his bosses.

The deal was explicitly laid out to Templeton and then-MSU president Charles Lee when Croom interviewed in December of ‘03. Many players would leave, Croom said. Plenty of losses would ensue. There would be criticism. There would not be a quick fix.

A half-decade might pass before he could give the fans a winning season.

“I agreed with him,” Templeton said. “I agreed that we didn’t want to go through this every four, five years. That we were wanting to do it the right character way that he was talking about. He and I specifically talked about five years.

“Did either one of us know it was going to be that tough the first two? No.”

Despite the criticism, Croom hardly wavered. His offensive coordinator and assistant head coach, Woody McCorvey, has remained by his side despite nearly non-stop chirping from fans regarding the team’s offense. Most of the remainder of his staff has left only for better opportunities, save for two coaches who were reassigned after last year’s three-win season.

Croom didn’t dip heavily into the junior college ranks for a quick recruiting fix. He still keeps the same philosophy: If a prospect can’t make academic progress and has character questions, he’ll pass.

Croom will tell anyone who listens that he’s grateful to the MSU administration for giving his plan time to work.

But somehow, somewhere along the way, he had to doubt whether it would work.

Right?

“(There was) no doubt,” he said, his voice rising, taking a staccato tempo. “If I was given time, none. Not that the plan would work. Now, I doubted whether I was going to be given time, yeah. I doubted whether I was doing a good enough job to convince the fans it was working. But the plan? No. Never. I knew what we were doing was going to work.”

So there Croom was, on a humid September Tuesday with that bitter Tulane loss still fresh, when his phone rang. It wasn’t his agent, with whom he had been discussing this vague idea of leaving at the end of the season. It wasn’t anyone offering him a new job.

It was Pat Ruel, the offensive line coach at Southern California. Croom had worked with Ruel when both were with the Detroit Lions.

“We got to talking and he said ‘I know you’re really down right now,’ ” Croom said. “And he said, ‘But you can’t give up on it.’ And I said ‘Yeah, Pat, I know that’s in the back of my mind, but I’m tired of fighting this battle.’ I said, ‘I don’t need this headache.’ ”

Ruel reminded Croom of all the things for which he had stood in the past. Then, the most pointed advice: If he abandoned The Plan after just three seasons, everything he stood for would be a lie.

“And when he said that, I said ‘You’re right,’ ” Croom said. “I said if I walk away and don’t finish, everything I’ve told those players is a lie. Everything.”

So Croom returned with new energy - and a few new practice and mental tips from Ruel. Later that week, State beat UAB, 16-10, in overtime at Legion Field.

Later that season, State earned what Croom now sees as a turnaround victory for his program - 24-16 over Alabama, his alma mater, in Tuscaloosa.

All of which brings Croom to where he is today: On top of the Bulldog world.

With a 7-5 record, his Mississippi State team is heading to its first bowl game in seven seasons.

There’s talk of a bigger payday. He was recently named the Southeastern Conference coach of the year by The Associated Press and the league coaches.

And he’s The Clarion-Ledger’s Mississippi Sportsman of the Year, an honor he’s sharing with Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

To think: Some 16 months ago, even the always-confident Croom wondered if it were all worth it.

“As hurt as I was by the sign being in my yard, you know what I finally figured out? It’s that these people don’t hate me,” Croom said.

“I came to realize it wasn’t me. It was whomever was sitting in this chair anyway. It was the head coach. Not me, Sylvester Croom. It was the head coach. Whoever was sitting in this chair was going to get that same criticism.”

Croom learned how to deal with it: Stick to The Plan.

This is a reprint of a Story in the Clarion Ledger News by Kyle Veazey

High School football season is over and basketball season is in full swing. About a third of basketball games have been played so far. Just like in football, there have been many upsets so far.

High school football is a sport that is played with more things to think about. Basketball is another thing. For example in basketball, a team can elect to keep the ball for a whole quarter if they choose to do so. All a team has to do is pass the ball back and forwards between their teammates. Teams often do this when they are leading by a few points. This really forces the opponent to foul a good free throw shooter.

Smart teams can keep the away from the other team since there is no shot clock, as there is in college and the NBA.

The way WPHS basketball has been going so far, there is no reason for any Green Wave fans to bring pompoms. We will do better by wearing MSU Bulldogs gear.  I wouldn’t go that far but the Green Wave faithful will continue to wear their green and white to the games to support the girls and boys basketball teams, even if their records are less than anticipated.

Well Michigan has found their man in Rich Rodriguez. They have lured him away from his Alma Mata. The temptation to play in the big house I guess was to big for Rodriguez. Michigan is a storied program even though it has been down the last few years from what it was in the past. Coach Carr had done a good job but the pressure to win in these kind of programs can be too great sometimes. Coaching in the big leagues can take a big toll on a man and his families. So Gods speed to all these men who take on these challenges for the game they love. And fans give them a break. Know that they are doing the best they can. They work extremely hard to get the right players. Then they work even harder to take those young men and teach them the discipline it takes to win. So just know that on Saturday afternoon when the coach doesn’t make the call that you may think is the right one that he has probably put in a lot more hours deciding on which play to run than you have. And also know that football games are usually not won by plays but by execution and strategies that are developed off the game field. At a place where very few fans are involved. Understand that good coaches put their players in positions to win and then give the discipline to achieve the victory. Good luck Coach Rod up their in the big house next year. Maybe Michigan and LSU will meet someday and we’ll see how it goes.

LSU T-Shirt

December 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment

bcs-truth.JPG LSU T-Shirt - A great selections of LSU T-shirts can be found at SportsFanTreasures.com This site has some really great T-Shirts. Not just the regular old shirts you find in the book store but some really great LSU Shirts that tell it like it is. These shirts are for the true Tiger fans. They also have great selections of LSU gifts that would be great Christmas gifts.

The North Mississippi 4A championship last week didn’t feature the best teams in football. Kosciusko won the game primarily because it was revenge for them. We had bad play calling on many of our drives and our defense was not as good. Besides the trick plays that Kosciusko loaded their offense with, there wasn’t too much more that impressed me about their team. I think we were and are a better team than them. Kosciusko’s fans seem to think so too. Kosciusko went to play Noxubee County and Noxubee came out victorious. Had West Point won against Kosciusko, there is no doubt in my mind that West Point would have ended Noxubee’s Cinderella season. Kosciusko got the job done and we didn’t. Noxubee folks feel their luck right now so they are encouraging us to come to the basketball game in Noxubee this Friday for what they say will be a whipping. I doubt that will happen because Noxubee’s girls and boys teams are not as good as they were last year, as our teams have gotten better. Knowing that Noxubee is a rivalry in any sport is enough explanation to get West Point to go to the game. Since MSU is liked a lot in this area, I’m sure there will be plenty of MSU gear like tags seen as people get out of their cars.

lsu-tee.jpgLes Miles is taking the Tigers to the national championship game. LSU Tigers merchandise will be everywhere. Something that most people have been feeling like was going to happen all year long. The tigers have been dealing with lots of injuries in their last few games. Most people are thinking that the likes of Ken Dorsey and the rest of the tigers are going to be well by the time January 7 roles around and Ohio State is going to be in some serious trouble. The whooping that they got at the hands of Florida last year is not going to compare with what Dorsey and Company are going to put on them this year. The speed of the SEC is going to rule.

blackout-on-bourbon-med.jpgGerogia Bulldog T-Shirts are available at SportsFanTreasures.com. They have a huge selection of the best t-shirts for going to the bowl games. The Georgia Bulldogs should be playing in the National Championship game. But since the BCS has messed up and sent us to the Sugar Bowl I am going to support Coach and Black out Bourbon Street and Black out the super dome with these shirts. They also have another black shirt that talks about how the BCS messed up. I think I am getting both. They have a great deal here where if you get two shirts you only have to pay for shipping on one. Also it says free shipping on orders over $100 so I may get a few Christmas presents while I am there.

super-t.jpgTim Tebow Super T T-shirt is available at SportsFanTreasures. This online store carries some of the best t-shirts for the Florida Gators and more. They also have the HE15MAN shirt that has been to hottest thing for Gator Fans.

— keep looking »

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