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Trying TimesRip Scherer’s Tigers can’t win for losing.by Dennis Freeland
I wrote that in my notebook during the first quarter of the U of M game Saturday. It’s the story of Job acted out on a football field and it continued throughout the game, with Scherer being teased untill the final seconds. His counterpart from Mississippi State, Jackie Sherrill, made the unusual decision not to run the clock out at the end of the game when Memphis, which had wasted its time outs, had no way to stop the clock. Instead of taking a knee and ending the game, Sherrill ran the football and scored a touchdown. That stopped the clock and forced MSU to kick the ball to Memphis which had a chance then to score and tie the game, forcing overtime.
Whether you saw the game in person, on TV, or just read about it in the Sunday newspaper, you know the story. Even if you had been out of the country for the past couple of weeks, you could guess the plot. It’s an old story. The Tiger defense shut down Mississippi State all day. The Bulldogs scored on their first and last possessions. Meanwhile the Memphis offense moved the ball with some consistency, but penalties and mistakes stopped them again and again. The Tigers committed three or four game’s worth of mental mistakes, including 13 penalties for 121 negative yards. Time management was terrible. With an offense as fragile as this one, there is no room for error. It was another devastating loss for Scherer. Not just because it was another mark on the right side of the ledger, but because, like games agasint MSU, Minnesota, and Cincinnati last year, it was a contest the Tigers should have won. Over the past two seasons, Mississippi State and Memphis have played eight quarters as close as two teams can be in every category accept the only one that really counts. Saturday Memphis had more first downs, more total yards, and more time of possession. Last year Memphis never trailed until the last tick of the clock, when a 53-yard field goal sent them home 13-10 losers. So if these two programs are so close when they play each other why did MSU finish last season 7-4 playing a tough, SEC schedule, while Memphis finished 4-7. Why is MSU a contender in the SEC West while Memphis is predicted to finish near the bottom of C-USA? The answer has to do with the fine line that separating winners from losers. Only six players on this team have ever experienced a winning season playing college football. When the going gets tough these players, probably unconsciously, expect something bad to happen – a penalty, a dropped pass, a rushing play that comes up six inches short of a first down. The opening series against Ole Miss serves as a perfect example. The Tigers move the ball to midfield then suffer a major setback when an offensive pass interference call forces a punt. One week later, the Tiger defense has stopped Mississippi State on downs when a facemask penalty gives the Bullies new life. The next play is a 62-yard touchdown run. This is the hardest job facing a coach like Scherer, who has to overcome almost three decades of losing in order to turnaround this program. It is a task so monumental that even though he says he knew how tough it would be when he first came here in 1994, it seems doubtful to me that he could have been prepared for the depth of despair surrounding Memphis football. The strain is starting to show as Scherer faces what could be a make or break game this weekend at Minnesota. If the Tigers lose this week (and the odds are stacked against them: they are 2-14 on the road under Scherer and the school has never beaten a Big Ten team) the chances for a winning season begin to fade. A 3-8 start would require a 6-2 finish to hit the winning side of the realm. That might be too much to ask. The coach tries to ignore the negative columns, the rude calls to sports talk shows, the snide comments from football fans throughout the city. But it is getting harder to do. He actually talked to his team recently about the importance of staying positive in the light of an increasingly negative environment. But he knows, as the players know, as we all know that only winning can solve the football problem at the University of Memphis. After another frustrating loss last week, Scherer must be feeling
more and more like the Old Testament patriarch who didn’t know
football, but certainly understood pain and suffering.
Tiger Coaches vs. the SECRip Scherer’s 0-2 start this year, with losses against Ole Miss and Mississippi State brings his record against SEC schools to 1-7. Scherer isn’t the first Memphis coach to have trouble with the big boys of the South. In fact, no Memphis coach has ever had an overall winning record against SEC opponents. The following chart shows the records of Memphis coaches against the SEC since 1972, when Fred Pancoast took over the program from Billy Murphy. Note that in many seasons the Tigers played up to five SEC schools, including Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Vanderbilt. Since 1992, only the two Mississippi schools, Arkansas, and Tennessee have appeared on the Memphis schedule. With the advent of Conference USA, Memphis only played one SEC opponent last year (a 13-10 loss at Mississippi State).
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he football gods are testing Rip Scherer.
