When lightning strikes like it did in Johnson City this year for ETSU Football, bottling that bolt, and creating a full-fledged firestorm with it, is the only way to go.
In a tale made for Hollywood, the Bucs, just four years after bringing their program back following its demolition 12 years earlier, plowed through the regular season to a Southern Conference championship and their first NCAA Playoff berth since 1996.
But that narrative barely scratches the surface of the story ETSU had to tell.
The Bucs did it behind 11 players that had been with ETSU since day one of the program’s reformation: Cory Colder, Dylan Dockery, Alonzo Francois, Austin Gatewood, Asley Haynes, Austin Herink, Keanu James, Adam Mullins, Matt Pyke, Mike Scates and Dylan Weigel. Those 11 came to ETSU when winning was nothing more than a glimmer in the eye of those behind the sport’s return, and they suffered through losses to Division III teams, blowout dismantlings by FCS teams, and two seasons of off-campus home games at nearby Science Hill High School. Today, they see the program they helped mold boast an on-campus stadium that led the country in stadium capacity percentage in 2018, an indoor practice facility featuring brand new turf complete with the Bucs patented “E” and Blue and Gold as far as the eye can see, and the program’s first conference championship in 50 years.
One of those men, Herink, had started all 33 games at quarterback that ETSU had played since football’s second iteration opened. That streak would come to an end September 1, as the redshirt senior lost the quarterback battle out of camp to Temple transfer Logan Marchi in August, forcing Herink to sit, wait, and hope his chance would come to reclaim the spot he had worked so hard to earn over his many years as a Buccaneer. In fairy tale fashion, and fitting of the Bucs season, that time arrived with ETSU trailing 27-6 to Furman in the third quarter at William B Greene Jr Stadium in late September. Herink was called upon to replace Marchi and promptly led the largest comeback in school history, throwing for 202 yards and a touchdown in the last 20 minutes of the game on the way to a 29-27 win.
The drama didn’t end there. In fact, it was an every Saturday occurrence.
ETSU made a living off of nail-biting, heart-pounding wins, going 6-2 in the SoCon with those victories coming by just 16 combined points, including a triple-overtime 45-43 triumph over Western Carolina after trailing by 15 points with more than half the fourth quarter gone. Every one of ETSU’s league wins came by three points or less, no other team in ETSU history ever winning more than three games by that slim of a margin.
So after winning just 11 combined games their first three years, how did ETSU pull eight total victories together and make the postseason out of nowhere?
Many thanks, undoubtedly, are due to first-year head coach Randy Sanders, though it wasn’t the smoothest of starts.
A two-time national champion assistant coach at Tennessee and Florida State, Sanders was suspended in April for making contact with a player during an offseason drill. But rather than tear the team apart and pit staff v. players, it united the unit following Sanders admission of guilt and apology to his team, allowing them to grow together and become closer than ever before. Sanders would win Southern Conference Coach of the Year, and the player who was involved with the incident, Tyree Robinson, would flourish into an all-conference performer.
A first-year head coach. 11 from the first recruiting class since football’s return. The first quarterback for ETSU Football 2.0. The first Southern Conference championship in school history.
Those many firsts for this football community helped heal many painful memories for those hurting from the scars of the past.
Source: Bristol Herald-Courier
A program left for dead, now reaching unseen heights.
Lightning doesn’t get much brighter than that, and it needed to be seen, heard, and spread, because it’s not every day that a program does something this miraculous.
So while Randy Sanders and his team were trying to do something that had never been done at ETSU, we figured we better do the same, and in a big way.
The only schools ESPN’s College GameDay had ever visited at the FCS level were perennial No. 1 squads North Dakota State and James Madison, as well as Harvard on a weekend one of the oldest rivalries in all of college football was taking place as the Crimson took on Yale.
To get them to ETSU was going to be a task, but we were sparked by Kennesaw State, the nation’s FCS No. 2 team, who pitched GameDay to bring their show to SunTrust Park (home of the Atlanta Braves), where the Owls would be playing Jacksonville State.
Seeing as we didn’t have a venue at our disposal like SunTrust Park (let alone Yankee Stadium where Notre Dame and Syracuse were playing that weekend), we felt like we had to make some waves to compete. We planned on those waves coming in the form of an alternate ending that was MUCH different than the one we ending up using (at the urging of a few that are about as high up in the university’s pecking order as you can get). While we were disappointed with not being able to use the original ending that we felt would’ve sent shockwaves through the collegiate landscape, we had made this video and the story on the field, at the very least, deserved its release.
Two days after the video was published, we got a call from an ESPN producer who told us we were in the top three candidates for the weekend of Nov. 17.
That was all the motivation we needed to keep pushing.
When the time came for ESPN’s decision, they didn’t go with Yankee Stadium, SunTrust Park, or ETSU’s own William B Greene Jr Stadium, instead opting for the University of Central Florida, who were carrying a 21-game win streak into their matchup with Cincinnati. During that streak, GameDay had not been to UCF, and tensions surrounding ESPN’s supposed snubs of UCF during that time regarding recognition and coverage often seemed to boil below the surface. The time was perfect for the sides to bury the hatchet and UCF get the stage that they did.
While it stung not to get GameDay as our campaign had hoped, it didn’t dissuade one final piece of content made specially for their trip to the NCAA Playoffs.
To be the face, voice, and creative lead behind telling this story was unexpected and one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had as a professional. Special shoutout to Mike White for handing me the reigns on this, and to Steven May for making sure these looked as good as they could and also steered me back toward the right track when I wandered astray. The most talented and hard-working co-worker I’ve had, Steven can do anything.
And of course, a big thanks to the 2018 ETSU Football team, who gave us a great story to tell. What a group, what a year, what a ride. If this story came about at Notre Dame, Alabama, Ohio State or any FBS school for that matter, it would be a box office smash in a second. That it was at an FCS school doesn’t diminish it one bit in my mind, and it’s a three months I’ll never forget.