The Plight of Akron Football

Michael Weinreb wonders what the University of Akron, and new coach Terry Bowden are thinking:

Roughly 25 years ago, the powers that be at the University of Akron decided to chase after the dream of big-time college football. Never mind that Akron was, at that point, a grubby urban school with little on-campus housing; never mind that the Zips played their home games in the Rubber Bowl, a nondescript concrete edifice three miles south of town, set near a former Goodyear Zeppelin hangar and the Soap Box Derby track. Akron was going to become the first football program in America to jump from Division I-AA to Division I-A, and they were going to play as an independent, and from there, well, who knew how far they might go?
In the process, the administration shunted off longtime coach Jim Dennison, who had led the Zips to the Division I-AA playoffs in 1985. They brought in the biggest name they could lure to Northeast Ohio: Gerry Faust, whose jump from a high-school football program in Cincinnati to the University of Notre Dame resulted in such a spectacular flameout that no major program has tried it since (one of his assistant coaches, for a year, was a young Terry Bowden). "They wanted to go as big as they could," Dennison recalls. "And that was a mistake."
It is hard to say precisely why Akron presumed this would be a viable plan, except perhaps that they had no template to follow. Regardless, they handled the transition so badly that the program has yet to recover. (Other schools have since made the same leap and had national success: Boise State, for instance, became a I-A program 10 years after the Zips did.) By the time I arrived in Akron to work at the local newspaper in 1995, the Zips had begged into the MAC and were mired at a comfortable level of mediocrity; in one of the most passionate sports towns I've ever seen, Akron football barely made a ripple. During the year I covered the team, they had one outstanding player, a defensive lineman named Jason Taylor, a late bloomer from Pittsburgh who, by the time he finished his career, was competing in an entirely different universe from his teammates. The Zips have always had trouble recruiting locally despite the wealth of talent in Northeast Ohio; in a region accustomed to losing teams, the Zips have lost for so long that most people don't bother to pay attention anymore. "As you lose, it becomes what people associate Akron with," Bowden says. "So far it's been easier to recruit further from home."

It seems appropriate that an article looking at the plight of a mid major football school would be located in a mid major city.  Akron is to Cleveland what Dayton is to Cincinnati and in a way Toledo to Detroit.  Kind of the little brother who can't quite get out of the shadow of the older brother.  The mid majors in the MAC are in the same boat with the instate Big Ten Schools, whether it is Ohio State versus the city name schools, or Michigan and Michigan State versus the directional Michigans.  Coming from a smaller high school, you learn that sometimes it doesn't how often you lose, because that one unexpected victory is worth a thousand expected ones.