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KSU football team is ready to deliver season for the ages

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By David Carducci
September 2, 2010

 

By David Carducci | Staff writer

If first-year Murray State coach Chris Hatcher had his druthers, he’d rather not bring his Racers to Kent tonight to kick off the 2010 college football season.

“My thing has always been, if you are at a certain level of ball, you ought to play at a certain level of ball,” Hatcher said during a Monday press conference in Murray, Ky. “If you want to play at the next level, you ought to move up to that level. If you want to play down, you ought to move down to that level. That’s my head-coach lowly opinion that I have.”

Hatcher knows Football Championship Subdivision teams like Murray State are prohibitive underdogs whenever they move up to play a Football Bowl Subdivision team, even if it is against a program with little winning tradition like Kent State. 

Typically, the FCS team just takes its lumps and cashes a big check.

In the case of tonight’s opener at Dix Stadium, Murray State will be paid $275,000 for taking on the role of sacrificial lamb. At least, that’s the part KSU hopes the Racers will play.

“I do understand why we do these things,” said Hatcher. “It’s not like we have to play a (Mid-American Conference) schedule. We have to play only one team, and hopefully we can rise to that challenge.”

While they have yet to enjoy a winning season, the Flashes are 5-0 against FCS/Division I-AA teams in the Doug Martin era, winning those games by an average score of 30-6. The Flashes’ last loss to a Division I-AA team was in 2000 — a 26-20 loss to Youngstown State.

It’s hard to imagine Murray State pulling off a similar upset. Kent State is perceived to be a mid-major team on the rise, picked to finish third in the MAC East in the preseason poll.

The Racers, meanwhile, are coming off of a 3-8 campaign in 2009. Tonight, their lineup features mostly freshmen, sophomores and junior-college transfers, and all will be playing their first game under Hatcher’s new regime.

The few veterans who remain, like Racers senior wide receiver Marcus Harris, are still learning a thick, new playbook. But according to Harris, that newness could be his team’s biggest advantage over Kent State.

“I don’t think the other team is going to pick up on what we are doing, because it is going to be happening so fast,” said Harris, a 6-foot-1 burner who caught a team-best 46 passes for 425 yards last season. 

Kent State’s coaches and players admit if they have any anxiety about tonight, it is with the unknown.

“It’s really going to be interesting, because we don’t know a lot about these guys,” said Martin. 

The Flashes’ coach has some idea of how well Hatcher can strike a golf ball, and not much more. The two hit the links together in 2004 during an outing for head football coaches. Martin had just been promoted from offensive coordinator at KSU and Hatcher was then the head coach at Valdosta State.

In the last two years, Hatcher served as head coach at Georgia Southern, where he ran the same “Air Raid” spread system that made Tim Couch famous at the University of Kentucky. Hatcher is a former Wildcats assistant who worked with the quarterbacks during Couch’s junior and senior seasons.

“I don’t think they will change much, on offense,” said Martin. “They’ll be in a lot of shotgun. They’ll be in the spread. They’ll throw the ball very effectively and you’ll see a lot of wide receiver screens.”

But, Martin added, “they have so many different guys, with a lot of junior-college transfers they’ve brought in, there really isn’t a anyone who stands out from last year that you would say ‘that’s a trouble guy.’ ”

From what little film of Murray state KSU’s players have watched, safety Brian Lainhart thinks Harris will be a difficult cover. He has also identified running back Dexter Barnett as a possible problem.

“(Barnett) is from Alabama-Birmingham, so that’s a I-A running back we are going to be facing,” he said.

What little KSU knows about the Racers’ offense may actually be comforting, because defensively, they are a complete mystery.

Last year, the Racers ran a 4-2-5 scheme. Hatcher’s teams at Georgia Southern were a 3-3-5 stack, and he brought his old defensive coordinator, Ashley Anders, with him to Murray State.

“But everything coming out of Murray State says they’ve switched to a 4-3 defense now,” said Martin. “Everything we’ve been able to figure out kind of leans that way, but we don’t know. We have to kind of prepare for both.”

KSU quarterback Spencer Keith said the gameplan on offense will be to simply worry about Kent State.

“We are going to go out there, run our plays and execute,” said Keith, who returns as the Flashes’ starter after an impressive freshman debut last season. “Then we’ll see what defense they are in and adjust to that.”

To be honest, what Murray State is in shouldn’t really matter. The Flashes understand if they really are going to be a contender in the MAC’s East Division and make a run for their first bowl bid since 1972, they should be able to handle whatever an FCS program rebuilding under a new head coach has to offer. 

Failing to win convincingly will only lead to fans and opponents applying the label of “the same old Kent State.” That’s not the image the Flashes want to encourage coming out of the gate.

“We would definitely like to come out and make a statement,” said Lainhart.

•••

Contact David Carducci at dcarducci@recordpub.com

 




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