Mack Brown, Rich Rod, Halloween and the Heisman in 1998
Halloween eve 2021 marks an important Saturday for a couple of longtime fixtures in college football’s coaching ranks, Mack Brown and Rich Rodriguez. In a variety of ways, this weekend mirrors Halloween 1998.
Brown, the head coach at North Carolina, heads into Notre Dame with an opportunity to turnaround what’s been a disappointing season for the Tar Heels while Rodriguez — offensive coordinator at Louisiana-Monroe — looks to continue on what’s been among the most shockingly successful campaigns of ‘21.
The Warhawks are 4-3, two wins shy of bowl eligibility amid a two-game winning streak. They’re 27-point underdogs Saturday at Appalachian State, but are coming off wins over South Alabama as a 13.5-point underdog; and over Liberty as a 32.5-point ‘dog.
With or without the point spread, this will be tough to top as my favorite game of an all-around awesome season.
ULM’s pursuit of its first bowl game since 2012 and just second in program history is also one of the most fascinating stories of 2021. Historically one of the consistently worst programs in FBS, ULM made a gamble when it hired 65-year-old Terry Bowden as its head coach.
Bowden went to his roots when assembling a staff, going to a connection from tiny Salem University with the hire of Rodriguez as offensive coordinator.
A Louisiana-based team flourishing with RichRod’s offensive innovations under the direction of a Bowden head coach isn’t new because time is a flat circle.
True Detective may be a wildly dated reference, but just be glad for a reprieve from the endless stream of Ted Lasso and Succession callbacks sports journalists have started shoehorning into content lately. Anyway, True Detective is set in Louisiana, where Rodriguez’s offenses — now under Terry at ULM and previously under Tommy at Tulane — shocked the college football world.
The 1998 college football season is among my favorite over the years I’ve followed the sport. Being a kid in Arizona while the University of Arizona had its greatest fall in program history didn’t hurt, but there was so much to ‘98 that made it special.
The first year of a new system, the Bowl Championship Series, that promised to crown a true national champion (lmao); one of the single-most wild Saturdays in the game’s modern history, Dec. 5; and the revolutionary offense down in Tulane.
Remembering a time when literally every Div. I game wasn’t easily accessible makes me feel ancient, but alas, that was the ‘90s1. Tulane existed more as a concept to me in 1998, a team doing absolutely wild stuff I only saw as highlights on Sunday SportsCenter.
I was especially fascinated by Green Wave quarterback Shaun King, whose clips on ESPN’s flagship show reminded me of the player who I most credit for forging my college football fandom, Charlie Ward.
Similarities between Ward and King are probably no coincidence. As detailed in the below clip, Tommy Bowden sold players on his vision of Tulane football with reference to Florida State’s dominance of the national landscape.
It’s not often the vision a coach pitches and reality align, but Bowden made good on his promise of championships. Tulane went undefeated en route to a Conference USA title; a Liberty Bowl championship in which Rodriguez’s offense of the future surpassed BYU and the former offense of the future LaVell Edwards oversaw; and with the benefit of hindsight (and efforts of present-day American Athletic Conference counterpart UCF), an opportunity to stake claim to a national title.
Now, no official outlet has ever declared Tulane a 1998 national champion, but you can at least buy a t-shirt.
King was ridiculous in ‘98, completing more than 67 percent of his pass attempts in an era in which going over 60 percent was seen as a major accomplishment. He surpassed 3,500 yards through the air, passed for 38 touchdowns against just six interceptions, and rushed for another 641 yards with 11 scores.
Among the wins on Tulane’s road to perfection that gained Paul Bunyan-like mythical status in my teenage mind was a 72-20 drubbing of the former Southwestern Louisiana (now Louisiana-Lafayette, or just Louisiana depending who you ask).
King passed for 380 yards and rushed for 28 yards on the day — 102 more than the Ragin’ Cajuns gained as a team! — and did so with *Kurt Angle voice* a broken freakin’ wrist2.
King not being among the finalists for the Heisman Trophy that season haunts me to this day, and was the watershed moment in my continued efforts to bring attention to the most deserving from the non-power conferences. That he finished 10th in balloting that season is borderline obscene, though I suspect a fair number of votes were split between King and the other non-power conference candidate up for the award that year, UCF’s Daunte Culpepper.
Neither were invited to New York, but ultimately got the last laugh: Both King and Culpepper had better NFL careers than either of the quarterbacks who were Heisman finalists in ‘98, Tim Couch and Cade McNown.
Admittedly, both Culpepper and King had the ceiling of being finalists. The ‘98 Heisman clearly belonged to Ricky Williams.
On the same day that King and Tulane was dumping a basketball game’s worth of points on the future ULL, Williams rushed for 150 yards to pace Texas to a 20-16 defeat of Nebraska.
The Cornhuskers came into Halloween 1998 undefeated at Memorial Stadium since midway through the 1991 season. The 47-game home winning streak is fifth-longest in Div. I football history and the longest in Nebraska history.
But with Williams setting the table for the offense, and the defense limiting the Huskers offense, Texas scored a historic win with long-lasting impact. Twenty-three years after the Longhorns’ Halloween win in Lincoln, the trajectory Nebraska football has followed since bears similarities to The U following the Whammy in Miami.
This was the game that reestablished Texas as a college football brand name and launched the golden years of Mack Brown’s career.
In a neat coincidence, the ‘98 Tulane team was the first Green Wave squad to make a bowl game since 1987…when it did so under Mack Brown.
And the 2000s! ESPN GamePlan, a pay-per-view service akin to NBA League Pass, remained the only way to get a majority of games into the latter portion of the Aughts. Expect a deeper dive into GamePlan from yours truly some time in the near future.