Seniors sacrifice today for tomorrow
By Tom Carpenter
Daily Cougar Staff
Dana Dimel is a wizard or a fool. His vision of Cougar football has
manifested losses faster than a vaudeville magician's top hat produces
rabbits, but I'm betting his magic will turn this program around and
make UH conference champions again soon.
Lorrie Novosad/The Daily Cougar
Sophomore quarterback Nick Eddy breathes a sigh of relief
as he walks off the field at the end of UH's longest season — its first
winless
year in school history.
We've seen his disappearing act: Poof! There went the wins. In the
next two seasons when Dimel sticks his hand into his top hat, it won't
surprise me if he pulls out a grizzly bear and sets it loose to gnaw
on the Carcass-USA.
Some of this year's losses were a sharp backhand across the UH face.
It's akin to the new sheriff getting pistol-whipped by the bad guys in
the Wild West, then put on his horse backwards and run out of town
while the local yokels laugh at the sight.
No one forgets it when the competition runs up the score, whether it's
on the football field or the work place.
Dimel sacrificed wins this year to build a solid foundation for the
teams that will be wearing crimson and white in the near future. I don't
mind
that one of the talented sports writers following my trail will get
to write about the glorious resurrection of Cougar football that's coming
Houston's way. I'll take the 0-11 guys any day. They're my kind of
team.
A winless season isn't a hijacked jet slammed into the World Trade Center.
A winless season is a teacher. Our football team learned more
lessons about life this season than any team in the country, except
maybe Duke and Navy, who also failed to win a game this season.
Many of you will learn down the road what the football team learned
this year: We're expendable. Our gridiron heroes learned it crossing
the barren wasteland of a winless season, drifting to a halt at the
nadir of Cougar football history.
Our guys got dealt a bad hand before they ever stepped on the field.
Dimel had all the aces up his sleeve and he kept them there. He
redshirted 22 players, sacrificing three wins from a possible 3-8 season
this year to add them to next year's win column when the good ship
Cougar quits foundering in winless seas, starting with the season opener
against Rice.
The juniors and seniors on this team were Kim Helton recruits who got
caught in the transition from Helton to Dimel. Like infantry troops on
the front line ordered to move out, this team sucked it up and plodded
onward down the torturous trail of trial and tribulation.
Unlike last year's team that won three games while wracked by a player
revolt, the 2001 Cougars appeared to endorse the camaraderie of
the Three Musketeers: All for one, and one for all. They didn't quit.
They missed a ton of tackles and dropped a lot of passes, but from the
stands it looked like they played hard on both sides of the ball every
down.
The 22 seniors who endured this death march of a season deserve praise
for their stoic determination to teach the underclassmen and
fair-weather fans that no matter how tough the going gets, you don't
quit and you do your best.
Sometimes life hammers you. These guys got bludgeoned. I can relate
to bloodied warriors who did their job to the best of their ability and
accepted the results without complaint.
This team's legacy will be the valiant sacrifice it made to stop the
momentum of a program spiraling ever downward.
When the sophomores on this team become seniors and sink their teeth
into Carrion USA, that first Cougar touchdown in the Liberty Bowl
should be dedicated to the 2001 seniors who did the dirty work of building
the foundation for future gridiron glory without complaint.
For the past three years I've been surfing on my pen, kicking up a glittering
rainbow spray of words that splashed across the pages of my
favorite newspaper for my fellow Cougars to read.
My days writing for The Daily Cougar end with the final punctuation
mark at the conclusion of this article about a group of guys I've come
to
admire and respect.
Go Coogs!
