LUT WILLIAMS, BCSP Editor
Jackson State head coach Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders leaves the HBCU ranks for the University of Colorado with a lot of accomplishments.
One of them is not a Celebration Bowl win.
That’s because Trei Oliver and his Mid Eastern Athletic Conference champion Eagles of North Carolina Central administered another dose of winning HBCU football in the closing game Saturday of the 2022 season (See CELEBRATION BOWL VII RECAP).
The MEAC coaching tree
Oliver, you see, is a disciple of Rod Broadway, Sam Washington and Buddy Pough. They are HBCU head coaches he has worked under (Broadway and Washington), admires and is close to (Pough). The three also constitute and represent the five MEAC victories in the six Celebration Bowls vs. SWAC champions before Saturday’s game.
In fact, Oliver referred to them as “like my fathers” in his Celebration Bowl postgame interview. The three veteran coaches sat in the same section behind the end zone at Saturday’s game (along with NC A&T and NFL superstar Tarik Cohen, the MVP of Celebration Bowl I).
NCCU did what 2021 MEAC champion South Carolina State and Pough did to Sanders and the Tigers in last year’s Celebration Bowl. That 31-10 upset win sent JSU home humbled and hungry and vowing to erase that memory this season.
Coming in undefeated at 12-0 this year, JSU appeared to be on track to do just that. But something happened along the way. Sanders halted a dream dalliance with HBCUs by bolting to Colorado after the Tigers won their second straight SWAC championship a couple of weeks ago.
Sanders and his players tried to play down the effect of his decision. “Keep the main thing, the main thing,” they said in pregame interviews. It was hard to ignore that the main thing was that Coach Prime was leaving.
In reality, there’s not much more you could ask of the Tigers. They battled valiantly Saturday and for all practical purposes, were in position to continue the game if not for an unfortunate drop of a wide-open touchdown pass in overtime.
The disrespect was real
One of the first things Oliver seized upon in his postgame interview after Saturday’s win was the disrespect his NC Central team faced.
It began in the preseason, he said, when his team was not picked among the top ten teams in one HBCU poll.
“They said there were ten teams in HBCU football better than us,” Oliver said.
It continued through the weeks prior to the big game up to incidents before Saturday’s game began.
In last week’s press conference, Oliver said, “their athletic director (JSU AD Ashley Robinson) addressed us as North Carolina A&T State University. I mean, c’mon.”
Oliver said his team pulled up to the bowl game dinner a couple nights earlier and his team was dropped off “in the middle of the street.”
In the pregame, he said, his team was scheduled to come out before the national anthem but was stuck in the tunnel for ten minutes, waiting to come out because the JSU team wasn’t ready.
“You know, they had a chip on their shoulder,” Oliver said of his team. “You know, the disrespect was real since we’ve been down here (in Atlanta). But, it doesn’t matter,” Oliver said. “We’re a resilient group. We play good football. I’ve said that before and I’m proud of my guys. Like I said, they’re going to put some respect on our name in black college (football),” he said. “And I think they’re going to do that now.”
Bigger than Deion Sanders
Deion Sanders has garnered so much attention for black college football and HBCU sports in general over the last two-plus seasons that many could easily make the assumption that he “was” black college football.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
A national television audience seeing Sanders and his JSU teams lose over the last two seasons was the best thing for black college football. It lets the world know that HBCU football is a lot bigger than Deion Sanders.
Trei Oliver and the Eagles were the latest to prove that.
