The Perfect Pass by S. C. Gwynne

Author:S. C. Gwynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Though IWC was a small school that played at a tiny stadium, Hal pushed to play major Division II powers.

But it was just this sort of great idea that drove members of IWC’s administration and faculty to distraction. Most of them hated it. As they saw it—and here they were in agreement with the members of the I-B-H Conference—Hal was tampering with the very nature of the college. They did not want big athletic budgets. They did not want lots of athletic scholarships. They liked their antique gymnasium. Division II sports would happen at IWC around the time that goats and monkeys rained from the sky. Though Hal had become friends with a number of university people, he had always had the impression that many of them saw him as an arrogant cowboy. There was no longer any reason to doubt that.

If his plan sounded to cloistered academics like pure insanity, one might imagine their reaction when Hal scheduled two of his first three games with top NCAA Division II teams. It was as though he was carrying out his idea anyway. The first game was against traditional football power Morningside College, from Sioux City, Iowa. The second was against Portland State University, one of the elite teams of Division II football. It had been runner-up for the national championship in both 1987 and 1988. Because PSU was 2,000 miles and two time zones away, the Tigers would fly to the West Coast on a chartered aircraft and would be paid $10,000 for their trouble. The third game would be against Midwestern State, in Wichita Falls, Texas, a school ten times IWC’s size and a thousand miles from anywhere IWC had ever played before. The Tigers would need to charter a large airplane to fly there, too.

All of this was, or looked very much like, big-time football, something IWC had rarely, in nearly a century of playing the game, been within sniffing distance of. Here was the insanity itself, only not in some theoretical form. If the Iowa Wesleyan faculty could have stopped Hal from scheduling these games, they almost surely would have. But Prins was letting him run, seeing what would happen. Hal was merely being Hal: pushing hard, taking on things much bigger than himself. Playing great teams was always part of his ambition, even though the idea sounded, indeed, completely crazy, like a Division II college playing the Dallas Cowboys.

* * *

With such competition looming, Hal spent the off-season thinking about opposing defenses. He had deliberately built his offense around the idea of attack—aggressive, continuous assault of all parts of the field that would force the defense to adjust to his team, not the other way round. Still, he could not ignore defenses altogether, especially ones that were now being carefully adapted for the express purpose of bringing Iowa Wesleyan’s aerial circus down. When the Tigers’ offense had taken flight after the first two games of 1989, only one team had come close to stopping it—Trinity, which IWC had beaten, 28–18.

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