EMU Football's Futility Dwarfs That of the Lions

Ypsilanti, Michigan is 45 minutes west of Detroit, a dreary drive from downtown along I-94, a stretch of freeway that is as hard on the eyes as Rush Limbaugh in a Speedo.

You’d think you’d get rewarded for traveling such an unpleasant interstate, but when you exit the freeway toward Ypsi, you actually consider getting right back onto 94.

Ypsilanti is the town you pass through on your way to Ann Arbor, similar to how a root canal is something you have to endure before your toothache goes away.

Ypsi is a burg with sniffles and pain in its joints. The faucets in town should release NyQuil, not water. You can spend a weekend there and keep the change.

Its culture is a cross between down south country and the red light of Times Square. If they charged a toll to leave town, the city would make a mint.

Michigan Avenue is the dividing line; north of it is 1985 and south of it is 1967.

No one settles in Ypsilanti; they give up there.

But despite all this, the city does contain Eastern Michigan University, my alma mater (class of 1985). The home of one of the best teaching colleges in the state and a football program that should lose accreditation.

If anyone cared about EMU football, you’d have a real story on your hands. For what has gone on in Ypsilanti over the decades when it comes to football makes the Lions’ situation seem like a 24-hour virus.

At EMU, the season records every year look like ranges of numbers, not won/loss marks.

1-11. 0-12. 2-10.

When I arrived at Eastern as a freshman in 1981, the football team was in the throes of a losing streak that had passed adolescence and had entered the teens.

By the end of my freshman year, the (then) Hurons had lost 19 games in a row. During that season, the president of the student body delivered a petition to school president John Porter calling for the firing of head coach Mike Stock.

Porter passed on the suggestion.

The Huron losing streak reached 27 before they finally won a game on November 6, 1982—a 9-7 decision at home over Kent State, who was in the middle of their own 21-game losing streak.

EMU and KSU had quite a thing going on in those days.

EMU broke its 27-game streak by beating Kent, which was the Golden Flashes’ 11th loss in a row at the time. Kent’s last win before the streak began was against EMU.

Kent would go on to lose 10 more games in a row after the 1982 game in Ypsilanti, the losing streak reaching the aforementioned 21 games. Their next win wouldn’t be until November 5, 1983—over Eastern.

If it hadn’t been for each other, the losing streaks of EMU and Kent State in those days would have been even more outrageous.

It got so bad in Ypsilanti that the Mid-American Conference (MAC) looked at EMU’s football program and threatened to boot Eastern out of the conference.

They called it the “MAC Attack.”

We had some clever folks at EMU, eh?

It’s surreal even now as I recall the state of football at EMU circa 1982-84, when the program turned to desperate acts of marketing just to get fannies into the seats, thus meeting the MAC’s quota for attendance so the school could stay in the conference.

They brought in B-list acts like comedian Skip Stephenson and singer Lynn Anderson and even the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to perform at halftime of games.

I remember the male fans booing the poor cheerleaders because instead of wearing their famous fringed halter tops and go-go boots, the girls came out in spandex bodysuits to combat the chilly weather.

Lynn Anderson was a joke, as she resorted to lip-synching—quite poorly I might add—her big hit, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” She, too, was booed.

Football games at EMU back then were about 25 percent football and 75 percent circus.

But it worked; the school met the MAC’s attendance requirements and was allowed to remain in the conference.

Aside from a brief rise to power that occurred between 1986 and 1989, EMU’s football program has been among the worst in the country. Despite being closer to Detroit than its fellow MAC schools in Michigan like Western and Central, Eastern routinely gets its ass kicked in recruiting the PSL high schools.

CMU and WMU’s campuses are no nicer than Eastern’s, and the enrollment is about the same. But both of those schools have enjoyed more football success—by far—than Eastern has, and as an alumnus, I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of seeing EMU’s losses reach double figures every year while CMU and WMU can seem to field competitive teams almost routinely.

After the 2008 season, Eastern went looking for another head football coach—think Joe Dumars and the Pistons when it comes to frequency in this area—and hired Ron English, who was minding his own business as the defensive coordinator at Louisville University when EMU came calling.

English was known to the higher ups at EMU because of his time spent down the road in Ann Arbor, coordinating defenses for Lloyd Carr at the University of Michigan.

English seemed like a good hire. I applauded it, for whatever that’s worth to you.

English’s inaugural season in 2009 didn’t go so good. The (now) Eagles went 0-12. English had done something that I thought was impossible—he took over EMU’s sorry football program and managed to make it worse.

This year’s squad played its final game of the season Friday, at home.

Northern Illinois beat them, 71-3.

I don’t have the school’s football media guide handy, but I’m pretty sure that’s among the worst losses in EMU history.

Eastern finished the season 2-10. As usual.

And as if the Eagles needed something else to make recruiting Detroit high schools hard on themselves, English opened his mouth a few months ago and inserted a big football cleat into it.

Speaking to a reporter, English basically said that he didn’t think a man could properly coach kids raised by a single mother. It was his sloppy way of trumpeting the virtues of kids who come from dual-parent homes.

Guess which city’s football-playing kids have a low percentage of dual parents?

English managed to offend not only single mothers but also the PSL coaches who coach those mothers’ boys.

Eastern Michigan University’s football program has had one winning season in the past 21 years. In just about every one of those 20 losing years, they haven’t come close to .500.

It’s a school plopped in a depressing town that has the amenities of a motel on Eight Mile Road and the culture of yogurt. The least they can have is a winning football team for the people sentenced to live and go to school there.

More than once every 21 years, that is.

EMU Finally Thinks Big With Hiring Of English

I didn’t know diddly squat about the Eastern Michigan University football program when I enrolled there as a freshman in 1981. It didn’t take me long to learn everything I cared to know.

There was a losing streak, which I joined in progress. In a heartbeat it turned into one of double digits. The EMU Hurons had managed to beat Bowling Green University, sometime early in the 1980 season. Then they lost their last eight games of ’80. Then they lost every single game of my freshman year, in 1981. It got so bad that the student council president presented a petition to the school’s president, Dr. John Porter, begging him to fire head coach Mike Stock.

The losing streak was 19 games when the 1982 season began.

An opening weekend loss made it an even twenty. In mid-October, the Hurons were driving for a game-winning field goal against Ohio University. I was a scraggly sophomore in attendance that Saturday afternoon, and we prepared to raid the field, perhaps to tear down the goalposts, as the Hurons crept closer and closer to the Bobcats’ goal. The drive stalled, and the EMU kicker trotted onto the field. His name was Bob Hirschmann. I’ll never forget it.

The kick couldn’t have been any longer than 25 yards. A chip shot. But Hirschmann missed it. The losing streak was now 25 games.

Two more losses ensued, before the 27-game losing streak was stopped with a 9-7 win over Kent State. Stock by this time was long gone, fired and replaced by interim guy Bob Lapointe.

There hasn’t been much to cheer about on fall Saturdays in Ypsilanti. Only a mini-resurgence in the mid-to-late 1980s. Other than that…

The Hurons aren’t the Hurons any longer; they’re the Eagles. But their football team still stinks.

It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that the EMU football program is constantly in the toilet because they’ve hired coaches on the cheap who had virtually no ties to the area.

Eastern is the closest Mid-American Conference (MAC) school in the state of Michigan to the metro Detroit area, by far beating out Central Michigan (Mt. Pleasant) and Western Michigan (Kalamazoo) in this regard. Yet they’ve never exploited this advantage, at all.

It’s because their coaches have been ill-prepared and under qualified. And not from anywhere near Ypsilanti. And they’ve been cheap.

The most recent of these overwhelmed men, Jeff Genyk, was given the ziggy by the school before the last game of the 2008 season. It was a 3-9 year for EMU. Typical.

Genyk came to EMU from Northwestern, but was never more than a position coach at a school not really known for its football. Yet Genyk was charged with resuscitating Eastern’s moribund football program. And, like Jeff Woodruff before him, and Rick Rasnick before him, Genyk gave the Board of Regents exactly what they paid for. Which wasn’t much. It’s never been very much at EMU.

But it says here that finally, FINALLY, the administration at Eastern has gotten it right by thinking bigger than they have in years – decades, really.

Ron English doesn’t come from a Podunk school. His resume isn’t filled with years spent at institutions that you have to Google to find.

English is a Michigan Man. Last year he was a Louisville Man. But from 2003-07, English was the defensive coordinator for the Wolverines under Lloyd Carr. This past season, he performed the same duties for Louisville. That’s six years as a coordinator for a big time program. Or six years longer than the El Cheapo coaches EMU has been hiring for the past 15 years or so.

English took some heat for his defense while in Ann Arbor, but that’s part of the deal when you work for a university whose fan base lives and dies every Saturday with their football team. At Eastern, you just die, and then die some more.

“In 2008, there were five MAC schools who got invited to Bowl games,” English said to the media as he was introduced last week. “We want to be one of them. And we want to do it quick. Do it quick.”

The last time an EMU football team played in a bowl game, Ronald Reagan was president. It was the California Bowl, in December 1987. And Eastern upset San Jose State, who was supposed to make mincemeat of the boys from Ypsi.

It was the last hurrah for EMU football.

English (right) served five years as defensive coordinator for
Lloyd Carr (left) at Michigan

After coach Jim Harkema, who led that Bowl team, was fired in the early-1990s, Eastern started looking below them for coaches instead of above. It seemed as if the first qualification you needed was to have never been a head coach or a coordinator at anywhere of any significance. And you had to not be from this area, and you had to work for cheap.

So the Board tried a bunch of these cheap, overwhelmed, displaced coaches, and the football program, in the meantime, became a joke. The close proximity to Detroit and the outlying suburbs, which has often been rich in high school football talent, proved irrelevant. And all the while, Eastern’s sister schools in Mt. Pleasant and Kalamazoo were fielding competitive, respectable teams.

English, at his press conference, spoke of passion and commitment and of a sense of urgency. I usually wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for anything a football coach says at his first media gathering. But at least the words were coming from the mouth, this time, of someone who’s prepared young men to play before crowds of larger than 15,000.

“All you hear about when you talk about EMU football is losing,” English correctly pointed out. “But this campus has a lot to offer. We can do a lot of good things here.”

Carr, by the way, served as an unpaid consultant during EMU’s coaching search. And he was in attendance as his former defensive coordinator addressed the media.

“I’m happy for Ron, and I’m happy for Eastern,” Carr said afterward.

That makes two of us.

It only took the folks at Eastern a decade and a half to understand: you have a much better chance of making progress if you think big, rather than small.

They finally loosened the purse strings and hired a football coach cut from big time program cloth who knows the area. Goodness gracious, it’s about time.

Curse Of The Eagle? EMU Should Be The Hurons Again

Gretchen Borst and George Hanner meant no harm, I promise you.

They were the two students who, way back in 1929, entered a contest to determine the nickname of Michigan State Normal College. Today you may know that school as Eastern Michigan University – that is, if you can see it through the shadow of that other institution seven miles west on Washtenaw Avenue: something called the University of Michigan.

So Gretchen and George enter this contest, see, and the contest is run by a three-man panel, and on October 31, 1929, the panel announced its winner: Michigan State Normal College would forever have as its school nickname (drum roll please), the Hurons.

This selection drips with irony upon closer inspection, because Hanner worked at the Huron Hotel at the time. No doubt that had as much influence over his suggestion, if not more, than the fact that the school lie on the banks of the Huron River, or that the Huron Indian tribe once roamed southeastern Michigan.

Forever lasted approximately 62 years, turns out.

First, you should know that the author is a proud alumnus of EMU, having graduated in the latter part of that 62-year Huron reign. And you should also know that he is still ticked off about the absconding of the nickname “Hurons” in exchange for the decidedly more mundane, lame “Eagles”, which occurred in 1991.

I’ll stop referring to myself in the second person. It’s me who’s the proud alumnus. Me who is still ticked. I’m a Huron, always will be, and I’m not alone.

EMU has had it rough over the past year or so. There was the infamous Laura Dickinson controversy of 2007, which led to the ziggy for the school president due to some less than forthright ways information was disseminated in the tragic death of Dickinson, an EMU student who was found dead in her dorm room in December 2006. No foul play, school administrators, led by president John Fallon, declared. Uh-uh. No way, no how.

Months later, it was revealed: the play was the foulest – rape and murder had gone on in Laura’s room. And you know when her parents and family found out the truth? About the same time the rest of the public did. Fallon and his minions knew that there was strong evidence that suggested Laura was murdered, yet chose to keep it to themselves, like some nasty family secret.

I would have liked my size 10s to be among those kicking Fallon in the ass on his way out the door.

On the far less important side of things, the sports in Ypsilanti have been foul, too.

The mens basketball program still can’t find its footing. And the football team? Only Pepe LePew could love them.

EMU just canned another football coach. Jeff Genyk got the ziggy on Monday after five miserable seasons. Genyk was yet another who could do absolutely nothing with Eastern’s football program. His was a tenure filled with the typical records at EMU: 2-9, 3-8, an occasional 1-10.

Funny, but ever since EMU’s Board of Regents foolishly voted to change the nickname to the Eagles, the football team, especially, has been grounded. One (1) winning season since ’91 – and that was just 6-5, in 1995. Eagles with clipped wings, apparently.

As I said, I’m not alone in my outrage. It’s been over 17 years, and I still can’t get past it. Other alumni, many others, feel the same way. Some of the more belligerent (and wealthy) ones have told the school that there will be no more donations forthcoming until EMU is once again known as the Hurons.

The Regents caved to pressure and ordered Hurons dropped as part of an NCAA-wide push to eliminate as many nicknames as possible that supposedly fueled racial stereotypes. It was a broad-stroked brush that the NCAA, as usual, used. They failed to take into consideration the dignity with which some of those “offensive” nicknames carried.

The Huron logo was anything but cartoonish or offensive. It was the profile of a very proud-looking Native American. Even the word “Huron” couldn’t be considered offensive, because it was simply the name of the tribe. We’re not talking Redskins here.

Yet the Regents caved anyway, and if it wasn’t bad enough that Hurons had to go, the choice of Eagles to replace it was a double whammy.

Eagles? You mean the nickname used by countless high schools across the country, and dozens of other colleges?

Not only that, but Eagles was chosen as the result of another one of those contests, like the one Gretchen Borst and George Hanner entered in 1929. So they have a contest, get hundreds of entries, and choose … Eagles? If there’s a punch line here, I’m still waiting for it.

There’s politically correct, and there’s being stupid.

I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that EMU alienated way more people than they satisfied when they switched from Hurons to Eagles. Lord knows how much money they’ve lost out on, to boot.

There are precious few supporters of the decision, but the ones who are point out that the diploma says Eastern Michigan University. The logic says that it shouldn’t matter what comes after that – it’s still the same school, whether that school goes by Hurons or Eagles.

Nice try, but I’m not buying it. Nicknames are part of school pride. And EMU, I thought, had one of the more unique ones in the country. And the facts back that up.

But there’s hope. A group called Huron Restoration continues to try to bring back the name, and claims to have the support of Chief Leaford Bearskin of the Wyandot Tribe of Oklahoma and former Grand Chief Max Gros-Louis of the Huron-Wendat Nation of Quebec.

It’s not too late to get this right, after all. Hurons, unite!