2008 COLLEGE FOOTBALL PREVIEW
Famous in a Small Town
Troy is known for scheduling and beating some of the best teams in the country - but will it ever outgrow its hometown?
By Jamie Lay
Sitting atop Deer Stand Hill in southeastern Alabama, the town of Troy is known to travelers as a rest stop on the way to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. It is 50 miles from the nearest cities, Montgomery and Dothan. Both sides of the stretch on Highway 231 that is Troy are lined with gas stations, fast food joints and motels, the typical bright oversized signs seen in towns across the Southeast. Among the gauntlet of franchises are two local spots – Crowe’s (fried chicken and sweet tea) and Sister’s (a meat and three vegetables). It is, by no means, a destination.
Off the strip, about two miles to the east, is Troy University, a campus of nearly 6,000 students. It is sprawling but intimate. Two-storied brick buildings surround a rectangular patch of manicured grass. Standing guard at the center of a campus is a nine-foot tall bronze statue of a Trojan soldier, spear and shield in hand with a full breast plate of armor, a knee-length cape and a helmet with a Mohawk-like brush on top. The Trojan statue stares in the direction of the athletic facilities: the baseball field and the football stadium, the most prominent structure on campus.
Movie Gallery Stadium holds 30,000 fans – a third of Jordan-Hare and Bryant-Denny– but the size in respect to its surroundings makes it hard to ignore and easy to see its importance to this small town. The surface is FieldTurf, made of used rubber and painted green. It drains like a sieve. 
This was especially beneficial when lightning storms delayed Troy’s upset of Oklahoma State a pre-season Top 25 team last September. It was Troy’s third victory over a major conference opponent (Rice and Missouri were the others), the second at home, since they joined Division I-A only seven years ago. In that time they’ve come close to upsetting a host of other teams including Georgia, Florida State, Georgia Tech and LSU.
It’s easy to gloss over Troy and lump it with the rest of the mid-major athletic programs on the rise. South Florida, a program only 11 years old, received No. 1 votes in the Top 25 poll last year and Appalachian State, a I-AA team, upset Michigan. Troy’s speedy success, however, is remarkable in its own way. The university is now international and the town is more than just a stopover.
Along the hallway into Troy coach Larry Blakeney’s office are two framed photographs. The first depicts Troy fans tearing down the goal posts after Troy upset No. 17-ranked Missouri in 2004. The second is of a similar scene following Troy’s victory over rival Marshall in 2003. In Blakeney’s office are more photographs. Three lie on the couch, football action shots signed by former players now in the NFL. There is a table full of 4-by-6s and 5-by-7s and a variety of other framed pictures and various plaques on the walls for honors he has received.
“That’s the first thing I look at when I walk into somebody’s house, their pictures,” said Blakeney. “What pictures they have says a lot about what’s important to them.”
Analyzing his office, your eye is drawn to a table crowded with family portraits. Blakeney and his daughters. Blakeney and his wife. Blakeney and his daughters and his wife and his grandkids. Family is obviously the most important. Then the enthusiastic man tells you the story of how he became the coach at Troy and you begin to understand.
“During January 1990, the Marshall job came open,” he said sitting behind his desk. “I was one of the three they brought in. My girls were really young, all from the state of Alabama. My wife was born in Opelika, and she’s joined up at the hip with Auburn. Janice [my wife] and I fly up for the interview. I knew I was really interested in it from a football perspective.”
Once they arrived in Huntington, W. Va., the Blakeneys were unimpressed.
“I called [athletic director] Lee Moon from the airport in Atlanta,” he continued. “I said, ‘I can’t take the job. My girls are too young. I can’t move them all the way up there right now.’”
Since he started playing football at Gordo High School, he hasn’t coached or played for a team outside of Alabama. At Gordo he was a quarterback under the tutelage of Tommy White, who played on Bear Bryant’s first 1961 national championship team at Alabama.
“A lot of my influence as a coach comes from Tommy White, which came from Bear Bryant,” he said. “I was a quarterback and he was trying to coach me on something and I was looking the other way. The next thing I know my head rattles. He hits me with the ball.”
Before Blakeney entered coaching in 1969, he played quarterback at Auburn. It was there that he first heard about Troy (Troy State back then) football.
“In 1968 I saw them play three times,” he said. “I was injured at Auburn and redshirted. If our guys were out of town and I didn’t travel with the team, I would go watch my cousin who was playing at [Troy]. I saw him win the [NAIA] national championship in Montgomery.”
Three years later Troy moved up to Division II and joined the Gulf South Conference. At the time, Blakeney was rising through the high school coaching ranks, starting at Southern Academy in Greensboro, south of Tuscaloosa, and ending up at Vestavia Hills in Birmingham. By 1977 he was the offensive line coach at Auburn, where he would stay for 17 years. In that time, Troy won two Division II national championships (in 1984 with Chan Gailey and in 1987) and began to pursue Division I membership.
Once Blakeney returned from Marshall, he began thinking about being a head coach again. His biggest concern was taking a step down. He thought if he decided to coach at Division II after being in the SEC at Auburn, he might become trapped at the lower level. He heard about the Troy job and their desire for Division I status. He talked with friends who knew Troy and praised it. In December 1990 he became Troy’s 20th head coach.
“I was an experienced assistant coach in the SEC,” Blakeney said. “I had been a head coach in high school. I think what they wanted to know was if I was confident that we could win [at the Division I level].”
Blakeney answered the question quickly. In his second year Troy went 10-1 and missed an undefeated season by two points. Then, they moved up to Division II. From 1993 to 2001 he developed Troy into a top I-AA team, making the I-AA playoffs five times and winning the Southland Conference title twice. “It was like a blur,” said Blakeney about his time in I-AA, traveling across the country to schools like Southwest Texas to play games.
Before Troy could be accepted in Division I, they had to have a full schedule. Athletic director Johnny Williams, who had coached with Blakeney, started calling friends around the country asking if anyone was looking for a game. Nebraska, Miami, Mississippi State and Maryland were the first four major conference teams to face Troy in Division I. Nebraska and Miami ended up in the national title game that year. Of course, Troy lost to both teams and Maryland, but remarkably upended Mississippi State 21-9 in Starkville. They finished 7-4 in the first year, earning the program instant credibility.
At the same time a shift was occurring. The definitive line between the lower and upper level Division I teams was disappearing and a middle class was forming. Troy understood it couldn’t (yet) complete for recruits with Auburn and Alabama, but there were talented players in the state overlooked by high profile programs.
“I tell recruits we’ve always got a kid who’s an inch too short or a second too slow,” said longtime strength and condition coach Richard Shaughnessy. “He is right on the borderline whether he could play I-AA or I-A. We try to develop those players now.”
On an evening in August about two weeks before teams report to training camp, the stands are empty. Blakeney is making his final calls of the day. On the field, though, the Troy football team is just beginning practice. There are no coaches in sight. Instead, quarterback Jamie Hampton is running the team through a series of offensive plays. The practice is more casual than the typical Blakeney session. Still, linemen are sparring against one another, practicing grabs and steps.
More than 90 percent of the guys on the field call Alabama, Georgia or Florida home. Blakeney focuses Troy’s recruiting on the talent-rich areas of south Alabama, southwestern Georgia and the Florida panhandle. On every Troy team there are a few players neglected by Alabama, Auburn or other programs in the area and transformed into NFL draft picks.
Demarcus Ware, the 11th overall pick of the Dallas Cowboys in 2005, is the story every coach, trainer and player at Troy repeats when they’re asked for an example. Ware competed in football, basketball, baseball and track at Auburn High School. On Saturdays during football season he was a vendor at Jordan Hare Stadium, selling Cokes. Auburn overlooked him.
“Demarcus, he was 196 pounds the first time I ever weighed him,” Shaughnessy said. “He played defense end. He played some tight end. He played safety. He was a receiver. He was an in-betweener. He was just athletic. He came here and the next thing we know he was at defensive end. And they say, can you put some weight on him? Within four years he goes up to 250 pounds.”
In 2003, Osi Umenyiora was selected in the second round of NFL Draft and last year cornerback Leodis McKelvin was the No. 11 overall pick by Buffalo. He is one of many Troy players who have added credibility.
“It’s different for us. They [Players at the major conference level] can have a bad game and still get drafted,” said Chargers wide receiver Gary Banks. “We have to play at a high level every game because we get less exposure and have to make the most of every opportunity.”
There are plenty of chances this year for Troy to shine under the national spotlight. They’ll play two BCS Championship teams, Ohio State and LSU. But how close is Troy to upsetting another Top 25 team? Blakeney and his players believe they aren’t far away.
“We’re two plays from beating Florida State, Georgia and LSU,” said defensive end John Mark Patrick. “A couple plays away from beating Georgia Tech.”
“I honestly believe if we can get one or two more players,” Blakeney said after the Georgia game last year, “we can win games like this.”
A conference opponent of Troy’s, Louisiana-Monroe, helped to start another debate amongst football fans in Alabama last year by upsetting the Crimson Tide at home. Later in the season Troy defeated ULM by 20 points, leading Trojan fans and players to speculate whether or not Troy was better than Alabama. At least for the next two years this debate will be nothing more than that – Alabama and Auburn aren’t scheduled to play the Trojans.
“We would relish the opportunity to play them,” Blakeney said. “Both of them play teams from our league from outside the state and pay them pretty good money. We could probably save them a little money and
there would probably be a lot of interest in a game with either or both. I hope I live to see it happen.”
Most at Troy believe it is “football politics.” Alabama and Auburn are traditional powers in the state. They see no benefit to playing Troy.
The next step for Troy is moving up to a major conference, maybe the C-USA. One obstacle on that path, however, is Troy itself.
“The town itself isn’t all that big,” said play-by-play announcer Barry McKnight. “If you are looking at conference realign-ments, you look at the reason why South Florida is in Big East and they’ve only been playing football for 10 years or so. Or a school like UCF. It’s not because of school size,
school history or source. It’s because of the market size.”
This, in the end, may be their lasting identity. SU