As Russ Huesman left Furman’s football stadium last Saturday following the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s 36-28 win over the Paladins, the Mocs head coach counted 41 text messages on his cell phone. Twenty-six of them were from former UTC teammate Bobby Parlo.
“I just wanted Russ to know how proud we all are of him,” said Parlo on Tuesday from his wholesale carpet business in Calhoun, Ga.
“It’s so great to see one of the guys you played with doing what he’s doing with this team. What makes it even better for me is that I’m working with Mark Davison — who was in school when Russ and I were — and his son Nick is playing on the defensive line. It’s just like Russ said — he’s restoring the glory.”
When the 5-2, 20th-ranked Mocs host Elon this Saturday afternoon at Finley Stadium, Parlo will be watching his alma mater play for the second time in 25 years. He will also be watching it play for the second time in two home games.
“For a long time I didn’t want anybody to know I played football for UTC, everything was so bad there,” said Parlo, whose quarterback career was cut short by an injury. “Now I want everybody to know I played there.”
No one may better understand Parlo’s words than Moc senior running back Erroll Wynn, who played on some of the worst teams in school history from his freshman year through his junior season, UTC going 6-28 over that period.
Asked what the final score of last week’s comeback win over Furman would have been if those old Moc teams had entered the fourth quarter trailing 28-10, Wynn — who redshirted during last year’s 6-5 campaign — replied, “Oh, probably 40-something to 10. It would have gotten ugly.”
But a few days before UTC staged its brilliant 26-0 final quarter run to shock the Paladins, Wynn was at a local Wal-Mart clad in some of his Mocs workout gear.
“A woman asked me, ‘Are you on the football team?'” recalled Wynn. “When I said, ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Great job, good win [over Georgia Southern], I enjoy watching you all play.’ That’s something that had never happened to me before.”
But if the Mocs win this weekend against the Phoenix, it’s going to happen again and again. Everybody loves a winner, especially when they haven’t seen UTC win anything important for more than 25 years.
“I hear it all the time walking to Scrappy [Moore Practice Field],” said Huesman. “And it’s not the same people every day. They’ll honk horns and wave, or roll down the window and yell, ‘Go Mocs,’ or ‘Good luck,’ or ‘Keep it going.’ That’s pretty neat.”
Pretty neat was Huesman doing a radio show from Buffalo Wild Wings the other night when former teammate Don Lepard wheeled in fellow teammate Curtis “Boo Boo” Rouse, the ex-Minnesota Viking now often confined to a wheelchair.
“We start telling old stories and Boo Boo remembers everything, and I mean everything,” said Huesman. “It’s kind of been everything I thought it could be when I took the job.”
The job is far from finished, of course. Five straight wins are nice. But a FCS playoff bid would be nicer.
There’s also the rather stunning development of UTC possibly facing the top-ranked team in big-boy ball for the second year in a row. Last year it was Alabama. If top-ranked Auburn survives Ole Miss at Oxford, Miss., on Saturday, the Mocs will travel to the Loveliest Village on the Plains the following week.
“It’s an incredible thing,” said Parlo. “I’d completely lost interest in the program. Now it’s the first thing I check on every day. I’m on the Web trying to find out everything I can about the Mocs.”
Wynn said you can find out everything you need to know about these Mocs from a single, simple truth.
“Everybody talks about winning attitude,” he said. “But a winning attitude comes from a winning work ethic. It comes from saying, ‘I’m going to work hard so I can win,’ then doing it.”
Still, even Wynn admitted that if someone had told him two years ago that he’d be playing on the nation’s 20th-ranked FCS team today, he would have said, “I’ll have to see it to believe it.”
Now he need only walk through Wal-Mart wearing his UTC gear.