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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


A Dramatic Jump

Randy Edsall Has UConn on the Map for Football - Not Basketball
by: David Purdum
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It’s not supposed to be this easy. Teams simply cannot make the jump from Division I-AA to D I-A and immediately be competitive. The talent, the depth, it just isn’t there. Division I-A has the SEC, the ACC, the PAC-10 and the Big 12. That’s where the athletes are. That’s where the good teams are. Not in Maine, Delaware... or Connecticut?

The game is ‘a-changing.’ The once hip and fresh spread offense is not so hip and fresh anymore. Freshmen are increasingly making an impact. Black Bears from Maine are making an impact. And so is UConn.

Some call it parity, but that’s an insult to the up-and-coming programs.

Some call Randy Edsall’s Huskies competitive. That’s also an insult. UConn was competitive in it’s first eight games in Division I-A. Since then, the Huskies have been among the nation’s winningest teams. Only 10 Division I-A teams won more games than UConn did from November 2002 to the beginning of this season. That means 2-year-old Connecticut was as good as or better than 106 established programs. During that period, the Huskies posted wins over schools from the ACC, the Big East, Conference USA, the Big 12 and Big 10.

“We had to take the mind set of a Division I-A institution from the beginning,” said Edsall, who became Connecticut’s 27th head football coach in December,1998, when the Huskies were still a member of the Atlantic 10. “We needed to set the program in motion, doing everything the way I was going to do it once we got to a full complement of 85 scholarships.”

Upon his arrival at UConn, the former Georgia Tech defensive coordinator scrapped everything, saying he wanted to start over from scratch. It was a bold move. The Huskies, under Skip Holtz, were coming off their first and only 10-win season in school history. But Edsall had experience building programs from scratch. As the secondary coach, he helped Tom Coughlin transform the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars into a playoff team in only two seasons. He also coached under Coughlin at Boston College.

“When I arrived at UConn, I was the only person that had any experience at a Division I-A program, me and the coaches I brought in with me,” said Edsall, who had never seen the Conneticut campus before accepting the job. “When I first got here, I really had to lay the ground work for what a Division I-A program was all about, not only to the players, but also to the administrators, as well.”

Not everyone was happy about the changes, though, and the success was far from instant. UConn suffered losing seasons in Edsall’s first three seasons, including a 2-9 mark in its last season (2001) in Division I-AA.

“It was difficult, because some of the people that had been here had one or two years of eligibility remaining and weren’t going to be able to reap the benefits of what we were trying to do,” said Edsall.

“I know it was tough on them, but I felt this was what needed to be done in order to build a program that could stand the test of time.

“I knew that if we didn’t put that foundation in then, if we tried to go back after two years and rework it, that would have been very difficult. I really tried to wipe this thing down and start from scratch, from the intensity we did things, to practice, to our demeanor, our mind set, everything.”

From a recruiting standpoint, Edsall started by looking for players with enough athleticism to compete and play special teams on a Division I-A level. This would give a base talent group to build from.

“A lot of your depth that you try to build as a D-1 program comes from the guys who play on special teams and then gradually move up to where they become players for you on offense and defense,” Edsall said.

“The more you have those kids in the program, the more that they are around, the better off that you are.” We’re still faced with not having the kind of depth that we need all around. We’re still trying to create that depth each and every year. We’ve gotten a lot better, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

Edsall also wanted to recruit confident players, leaders, like quarterback Dan Orlovsky, who threw 33 touchdowns last season.

“We went out and tried to recruit kids that were not only good players, but were also leaders on their high school teams. We sold them the dream and the vision of what we wanted to do, and they had their own natural abilities where they were leaders and had the will to win and the will to prepare to win more so maybe than some other guys. That way, even if they were young, they were still going to instill that kind of confidence into the other guys that were here.”

The Turning Point

Edsall says he prides himself on taking advantage of opportunities. When building a program, every game is an opportunity not only for a win, but also to add another stable piece to the foundation. UConn’s opportunity came in Edsall’s first year as a Division I head coach.

The Huskies had mushed out to a 2-6 start in 2002, but they were respectable, especially for a up-and-coming program. They lost at Boston College by eight and at Vanderbilt by only four.

“You have to be able to walk before you can run,” Edsall said. “We couldn’t have been expected to go out and beat all these teams right from the very beginning. I had to give our kids some realistic objectives and goals to go and try to obtain.

“I came into the locker room after the Vanderbilt game was over and everybody was frustrated, because we got so close. I said, ‘Guys, you know what, we need to change what we’re doing. We’ve proven that we can get the game into the fourth quarter with a chance to win; what we have to do now is go right from the beginning and win the game.’”

UConn responded with four straight wins, including a 38-0 shutout at Navy and a program changing 37-20 upset at bowl-bound Iowa State. “We just needed an attitude adjustment, and as a coach, you have to be able to see those things,” Edsall said.

“The Iowa State win really helped us because of the fact that it was at the end of the year and we were moving into Rentschler Field the next season. The amount of season tickets we sold, a lot of it was based on how we finished the season at Iowa State.” In their first season in Rentschler Field, which is built on a 75-acre former airfield, the Huskies enjoyed the nation’s largest attendance increase, gaining more 21,000 fans a game.

UConn rewarded their new fans with 5-1 mark at the “Wrench,” and a 9-3 overall record, which some thought was deserving of a bowl berth.

Along with the new 40,000 seat stadium in East Hartford, Conn., the Burton Family Football Complex and Mark R. Shenkman Training Center are scheduled to be open in 2006. In September, Edsall was rewarded for his success with a six-year, $5.3 million contract that made him one of the highest paid coaches in the Big East and put him in line with UConn basketball coaches Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma. Not bad, considering Edsall’s first team meetings were held in a trailer.

Presently, UConn is enduring its first season in the Big East, as the first Division I-A program to move into a Bowl Championship Series conference. Edsall insists that his program would not be where it’s at today without the support of the community. Gaining that support would not be easy, because as everyone knows, UConn’s where they play basketball.

“The fact is you have to have people in the seats when you open a new stadium,” said Edsall, who is highly involved at The Children’s Home in Cromwell, Conn., a center for more than 100 neglected and abused children. It is among many other worthy causes in the community. “I tried to look at this as a grass roots project when I came here. I went and spoke at all the different organizations you can speak to, trying to beat the drum and create interest. There was not a big interest in football when I first got here. I tried to let people know what the experience of Division I-A is all about, the tailgating, the camaraderie. I just thought it was important. But at the same token we had to have a good product on the field and have kids that represented this university in a first-class manner.” Despite his involvement in the community, Edsall says he would hardly ever be noticed on the streets. That changed after the Iowa State game.

“I could pretty much go around town and within the state and nobody would recognize me, which was fine with me,” he said. “But after that (Iowa State) game, the very next day I go to the same breakfast place in the community where I live and six, seven families came up to me and said something about the game, where as before we’d go there nobody would say a word to me. You knew it was all changing.”






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