In their first football season in the Southern Conference, the Mercer Bears gave league champion UTC its toughest test, with the Mocs pulling out a 38-31 triumph at Finley Stadium.
The Bears did not field a team for 72 years before bringing football back in 2013.
“They’ve got good players,” UTC coach Russ Huesman said after the Oct. 25 game, “and they’ve gotten there in a hurry.”
Mercer had to revamp its basketball roster after stunning Duke last March in the NCAA tournament, but Bob Hoffman’s Bears pulled out a 75-72 overtime win over UTC on Jan. 29. Will Wade’s Mocs exacted some revenge Thursday by pulling away for a 74-61 victory in an energized McKenzie Arena, but has UTC found its long-awaited rival for both the autumn and winter months?
Jim Cole, the athletic director at Mercer, was a guest this week on “Press Row” on ESPN 105.1 FM to discuss the successful new kid on the block.
Q: Given what you’ve witnessed the past few months and the proximity of UTC and Mercer, do you sense this could be a budding rivalry?
A: “I would love to see that, because that would mean both of us are doing well. Usually rivalries are created when teams are succeeding, and Chattanooga from an all-around standpoint — football, basketball, women’s basketball — is a great program, and we would be honored to have a rivalry.
“Mercer had football until 1941, and after Pearl Harbor the school voted to discontinue it. The last game we played before we discontinued it was against UT-Chattanooga. We were a consistent homecoming opponent of each other back in those days, and it is a natural rivalry. We’re right up the interstate from one another, so that would excite me.”
Q: Who was Mercer’s biggest rival before you joined the Southern Conference?
A: “Before we switched leagues, we had developed quite a rivalry with Florida Gulf Coast in basketball. That had started to turn into a real donnybrook that was worth watching every time we got together. Things changed when we decided to start up football and change leagues, and we hated to lose that, but we’re excited to be in the SoCon and all the tradition it brings.”
Q: How much has coach Bobby Lamb helped accelerate the curve as far as expectations in football?
A: “We are very fortunate to have Bobby. The day we announced we were bringing football back, I called a dear friend of mine, former Georgia coach Ray Goff, and asked him to help find me a coach, and he said, ‘I think I’ve got one for you.’ We wanted to come in and build this the right way, and we didn’t have the expectations of going 10-2 our first year in the Pioneer League and then getting invited into the Southern Conference.
“We were competitive this past year and went 6-6, and that came down to Bobby and his staff and their leadership. We’ve given him the resources, and he’s run with it.”
Q: You had a landmark win for your athletic program last March with your upset of Duke. What has that meant for your university as a whole?
A: “It’s hard to quantify. We played them in Raleigh, which is Duke’s back yard, and we thought going in that they would have the home-court advantage, but I didn’t realize how many people hate Duke. When we got there, every fan of North Carolina and N.C. State and every fan not associated with the ACC was pulling for Mercer.
“That win really blew the lid off of things we had been working toward. In 2012 we won the CIT championship, and in 2013 we went to the NIT, so that win was really the culmination of three or four years. We had seven seniors on last year’s team and still try to hang on to that moment, but we know we need to go out there and get more signature wins.”
Q: I would imagine you can stay in state for all of your recruiting needs, but who do you compete with most for prospects?
A: “We do stay pretty much in Georgia. Metro Atlanta is hard to beat as far as talent and sheer numbers, and we do run up against Chattanooga, but because we’re a private school, we tend to run up against Wofford and Furman more due to the similar entrance requirements and financial packages.”
Q: Appalachian State and Georgia Southern have moved on to the Bowl Subdivision. When Mercer joined the Southern Conference, did you do it with the intention to stick around for the long haul or to potentially make another jump?
A: “I would like to be in the SoCon for a long time. The reality is that we’re 3,000 undergrad enrollment, so that would always be a factor in limiting where you can and can’t go. It’s hard to get 15,000 or 20,000 people to the stadium when you only have 2,000 people living on campus.
“We’re happy right where we are, and if that happens one day, I hope the next AD has fun tackling that.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.