A large portion of Kent State’s student body wasn’t all who heard it. Kent State football coach Doug Martin had been listening to it for years. So had Athletic Director Laing Kennedy.

It had been the subject of sports-talk radio, a topic on discussion boards on the Internet and a university-wide rumor for a decade.

“When is Kent State going to dump the football program?” fans and media would ask. “The university just needs to focus on basketball.”

And the criticism didn’t come in the absence of good reasoning.

The Golden Flashes’ football team has captured just a single conference championship in its 55 years in the Mid-American Conference (the last in 1972 when NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert played on the team). The team holds the same number of one-win seasons as winning seasons (seven), and before that ’72 season, the last time Kent State entered a bowl game was the 1954 Refrigerator Bowl (yes, it really was a bowl).

Recent seasons weren’t much different with Kent State sporting a 31-101 record during the past decade. The program reached a low point in 2005, Martin says, as the team went 1-10 despite high expectations.

Then came the 2006 season. How quickly things can change.

The Golden Flashes burst into the national spotlight last year by winning their first five MAC games and leading the conference for much of the year. They were one win away from a bowl appearance (no, not the Refrigerator Bowl), and media outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today and ESPN.com took notice — writing stories and discussing the team on national broadcasts.

Now comes the real challenge — maintaining success at one of the most traditionally futile programs in the nation.

But Martin isn’t backing down. He is aggressively attempting to continue the reversal of the program and steer away from the trend of following one winning season with several losing ones. And he wants to start by assembling the rest of Kent State on his side.

Kennedy is already beside him. The 13-year director of athletics has been waiting for one of the only sports that hasn’t excelled since his arrival at Kent State to prosper, and he is no longer pleading to keep the program afloat. In fact, Kennedy says the idea of terminating football “was never talked about here. I’m sure it was outside of the program, but never in here.”

His cries are now directed toward a student body that may not understand how a successful team can substantially benefit Kent State.

Keeping the faith

Martin worked vigorously to instill a positive mindset when he was hired in 2004 (shortly after former coach Dean Pees departed for a job in the NFL). The problem, he admitted, was the negative attitude that engulfed Kent State football had spread beyond his realm of control.

“It wasn’t just the players,” Martin says. “Everybody had this negative feeling or thought that Kent State was something other than what it could be. And getting through that is difficult.”

So Martin embarked on a journey to change the hopeless attitude of the students. And he left no stone unturned.

“It started by going to talk to student groups — as many groups as I could get to — dormitories, sororities, fraternities, any group that would listen,” Martin says. “I just began to explain to them what we could have here and what my vision was for this place.”

The plan seemed to be on track when Kent State finished with a respectable 5-6 record in Martin’s first year. But the negativity quickly swelled throughout the university yet again after the 1-10 season in ’05. Martin says that’s when he started to notice the players doubting themselves and buying into the downbeat attitude that surrounded the program.

“That’s tough because to keep the players in a positive frame of mind, I can talk to them for an hour or so at practice,” Martin says, “but then they’re going to spend the rest of the day around people in the community, the student body, and all they’re going to get is bombarded with negativity.”

And bombarded they were. When senior defense tackle Daniel Muir came to Kent State from Maryland, he says he never saw such pessimism surrounding a football program before, and he was confused as to why it was so harsh.

“It was hard coming from a place where they love the football team and love the football players,” Muir says. “You think it’s going to be the same in college, but it wasn’t. It was like the student body didn’t even respect the football team — like we were a bunch of jerks. That was hard to deal with.”

Muir says the discouragement slowly crept into the minds of the players and when the losses began to pile up, the players began to give in.

“It was frustrating because a lot of guys accepted losing,” says Muir. “It was just like ‘OK, we lost ­— let’s go party.’ And it was weird because we just lost; we just got blown out. So I was like, ‘Wow, guys are just going out and partying, and this team just ran up the score 40 points on us. It was different.”

A big reason for that, Martin says, was because there were players he wouldn’t have recruited on the team — some who weren’t giving effort and were merely content with a scholarship.

The combination of losing, a student body that mocked its team and the bad attitude of the players soon created a team in turmoil. And the only way to fix it was to ignore the negativity.

“I think you just have to out-stubborn everybody,” Martin says. “I was not going to listen to (the negativity). I was not going to be a part of that. I was going to keep banging the drum of what could be here, potentially.”

Patience is virtue

The relentless attitude emanating from Martin wasn’t just by chance. Martin knows all too well what it takes to transform a losing team into a winning one. He experienced change firsthand as a player at the University of Kentucky and then as an assistant coach at East Carolina University.

“We were 0-10-1 my coach’s first year (at Kentucky), and the next two years we actually made bowl games,” Martin says. “And I saw how he did that.”

Before Martin and former head coach Steve Logan took over at ECU, the Pirates suffered losing seasons in 10 of their last 12 years. But in the 11 years Martin and Logan coached, they jointly led the team to six winning seasons.

“At East Carolina, (the rebuilding) took a little longer — about three or four years — which is about the same pace we’re on here,” Martin says. “I know it (the turnaround) is not going to happen overnight. But I know if you can do it at a place like East Carolina, you can do it here.”

Martin says it was at these places he attained the mindset of not giving up when something bad happens and to keep the “vision” he imagined for the program paramount in his mind.

As bad as the ’05 season was for Kent State, maintaining that focus wasn’t easy. But Martin says he started to see signs of his determination paying off in the off-season. The players witnessed how passionate he was about making this a winning team, he says, and they began to rally behind him.

“Our team just seemed to be bonding together,” he says.

The attitude the players exhibited at the ’06 spring practices was one which Martin had never observed before — even when he chose to hold every practice outside in the snow, something few coaches attempt.

But the camaraderie didn’t show right away. The Golden Flashes started the season 0-2, and another season of struggles seemed imminent for Kent State. Then came a turning point, Martin says. Strangely enough, it came in a loss.

The Golden Flashes suffered a heartbreaking 17-14 overtime loss to Army in their second game of the year. Kent State tied the game late in the fourth quarter, but a fumble early in overtime set up Army’s game-winning field goal.

“That was about as down as I’d ever been in my three years here because I really wanted that game for our kids,” Martin says. “We played a great game at Army. We played with passion, we played with intensity, it was hard-hitting, it was fast — we just didn’t win.

“When we got back that night, we had a meeting in the locker room. I told them I had a vision in my head of what I wanted our team to look like and today was the first time that team showed up. And I think they believed me and knew that what I was telling them was from the heart.”

The following week, the Flashes beat MAC-rival Miami on the road in another close contest. And the victory ignited the team to five straight wins.

“Those two weeks right there really made us,” Martin says. “We had been in a lot of those close games but hadn’t won them. There’s something about close games that go down to the wire that really pull a team together.”

Sustaining success

As excited as Martin is about last year’s success, maintaining that progress is his goal. And he makes sure his team knows that, too.

“That is the issue right now,” Martin says. “And I throw it in the players’ faces every day — that everybody is expecting them not to be around this year because that’s been the trend here. So I don’t try to duck that, I don’t try and hide it — put it right in their face and I make them embrace that fact.”

A big step in that process was bringing in quarterback Julian Edelman. A junior college transfer, Edelman earned the starting job after returning starter Michael Machen was injured. Edelman wasn’t highly recruited out of high school because of his height — about 5 feet 11 inches — but Martin says he’s a perfect fit for Kent State.

“Being able to add Julian Edelman made a huge impact,” Martin says. “He’s the perfect fit for our team because Julian plays with a chip on his shoulder. A lot of people overlooked him in recruiting, and he carries that around.”

The team embraced his attitude, Martin says, and Edelman says one reason he knows the team won’t cling to last year’s success is because the losses are the games that stick out.

“We really don’t have anything to be complacent over,” says Edelman, who says he never heard about the struggles of Kent State because of his lack of proximity — he’s from Redwood City, Calif. “I mean, 6-6 might be good for the old Kent, but we’re new out here. Guys are going to think about the Ball State loss and the Ohio loss and the taste that it left in our mouth after we lost and were eliminated from first place in the MAC.”

If football wins, KSU wins

A first-place finish in the MAC would be unprecedented for a program that was on a poll from ESPN.com of teams most likely to make the Toilet Bowl two years ago.

But as Kennedy says, Kent State could flourish in many other areas that may not seem as apparent.

“We were becoming a national story because we were one game away from a bowl. We were starting to get on the national radar,” he says of last year’s success. “The marketing experts who teach it and practice it on this campus say that’s a difficult price tag — you can’t buy it. What that should transfer into is more of everything — student enrollment, student retention, areas that hit the university’s priorities.

“We need to be a significant part of President Lefton’s strategy for enrollment and retention.”

Another example of how the team’s success can help the university is by attracting potential contributors, he says.

“Before every home football game, the president is entertaining major prospects and donors for the university,” Kennedy says. “And if they come in on a weekend like the Akron weekend, and we have a great environment, great crowd, great student attendance, suddenly more people want to come back. While they’re back, let’s talk about the needs of the library … and stuff like that.

"Athletics has to become more pro-active in that strategy with the university vision.”

Martin pointed out the impact the basketball program has created and how the football team can generate the same type of atmosphere. For that to happen, though, the Golden Flashes can’t be a one-year wonder. They have to come back this year and do even better, Martin says.

“We have a great window of opportunity this year,” he says. “If we’re complacent and think it’s just going to happen because we want it to or because we had a decent year last year, then it won’t happen. We’ve got to outwork people again. We’ve got to pay the price just as heavy as we did last year, and I think they’re doing that.”

Kennedy says he’s not ready to say the Golden Flashes “have turned the corner,” but he’s noticed drastic improvements.

“It was a hard, slow change — kind of like turning the Queen Mary around in the harbor,” he says.

Martin says he’s had enough with the bad attitudes and off-the-field issues of the past, and he’s ready to bring the ship home.

“I’m not going to try and hide from the history of Kent State football because it doesn’t have anything to do with me, and it doesn’t have anything to do with these current players,” he says. “So there’s no sense in worrying about that and there’s no sense in worrying about other people talking about that. You can change all that. Go out and win a MAC championship this next year and all that will change.

“You have to get a vision of what you want this place to look like and don’t take your eyes off it. Don’t look at what it is right now, just keep looking at what it’s going to be, and sooner or later you’ll get there. We’re almost there.”

Joe Simon is a senior newspaper journalism major.
This is his first story for The Burr.
Contact him at jsimon1@kent.edu.

STORY Joe Simon
PHOTO Stephanie Blackstone

ABOVE Chase Morris, a freshman offensive lineman, makes a cold trip from the training room to the field house for a spring training session.