Tarleton State makes history in historic NCAA spring football season
COVID has done nothing but take from sports, but one thing the time of the coronavirus handed us is spring college football, which will allow a local team to play two 2021 season openers, and for gamblers to live a little longer.
You may have forgotten last summer when the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision axed the 2020 fall seasons, and opted to play in the spring.
Less than seven days after the Super Bowl, football fans got their fix again.
On Saturday night in Stephenville, Texas, Tarleton State University began an historic year when it played its first ever college football game as an NCAA Division I institution when the Texans hosted McNeese State.
Tarleton State had it, but ... didn’t wrap it up. The Texans allowed 21 fourth quarter points, and lost 40-37 in double overtime.
McNeese scored two touchdowns in the final four minutes of regulation to force OT.
It’s OK, Tarleton. You’ll get another season opener here in 2021 in a few months. The Texans are scheduled to play its second 2021 season opener, against Lamar in September.
That season opener will, or should, look a little different than the one it played on Saturday night when the temperature in Stephenville hovered in the 20s. Kickoff at game time was 28 degrees.
“Hey, it’s football weather,” Tarleton State athletic director Lonn Reisman said in a phone interview on Thursday. “We are pretending we’re the Green Bay Packers.”
The high on Saturday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was 6 degrees.
Historically bad weather in Texas did not stop the historic kickoff from happening after everything Tarleton did to schedule, and play, this game.
Because of COVID protocols, 12,000-seat Memorial Stadium was allowed to be at 50 percent capacity; about 5,000 fans were expected, and the game was carried on Fox Sports Southwest Plus.
The weather kept them away; according to official stats, the attendance was 1,324.
What Tarleton State, and every other team that will play this spring, are currently doing has never been done before. Or not for more than 100 years.
According to the NCAA, via Tarleton State athletic media relations director Nate Bural, the last time there was any spring college football was in the late 1800s. The game looked more like rugby, but some teams had split schedules back then, including Auburn ... most likely as an excuse to fire its head coach.
As intriguing as it is to potentially play FCS football in the spring, and take advantage of the hole in the sports calendar for increased exposure, Reisman believes this season is a one-off.
“I just don’t think we’ll see it again,” Reisman said.
When Tarleton State announced it would join the NCAA as a Division I institution in November 2019, the Texans were scheduled to make their D1 debut on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, against Sam Houston State.
Like every other day planner on Earth, those plans were scrapped. TSU is now scheduled to play an 11-game schedule starting in the fall of ‘21.
Before then, TSU will play an eight-game spring schedule that will end on April 1. TSU will play Dixie State twice in a three-week span.
The Texans are scheduled to play New Mexico State on Saturday, Feb. 20, unofficially in ... the Sun Bowl in El Paso, of course. Everything in New Mexico is now in Texas, including Santa Fe, which is expected to relocate to Midland by the end of the month.
As of Friday, the game is less than seven days away and the contract was not yet signed.
Welcome to the big time, Tarleton State.
This is not how Reisman and the rest of Tarleton State envisioned leaving its status as a Division II school to join the elite NCAA Division I level.
“It’s been one day at a time, one week at a time, and we are keeping ourselves in a bubble here,” said Reisman, whose school is currently an FCS Independent, and will join the Western Athletic Conference in July of ‘22.
“When we asked our student-athletes if they wanted to play in the spring, 99 percent voted yes, that they wanted to play. We were all in. We’ve all tried to make the best of it.”
The same can be said for everything else since the middle of last March.
Nothing since then has gone the way any of us has envisioned, including Tarleton State’s first ever football game as a DI school.
At least they had football weather.
This story was originally published February 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
