Free at last

Sporting News, The, Sept 11, 1995 by John McGrath

On the field, Washington's marching band was performing its standard pregame salute to its campus and country. And though a medley of "Footloose" and "California Dreamin'" might have fit the mood better, a band's gotta do what a band's gotta do.

Inside the Huskies' meeting room, however, anticipation of the 1995 opener was palpable enough to make 76 trombones in a parade sound like a doleful campfire harmonica. With the blessings of Coach Jim Lambright - "My spine started tingling Thursday night" - senior tailback Leon Neal set an unofficial school record for most consecutive attempts at jumping through the roof.

"Our energy," Lambright said afterward, "was enough to light up the whole city of Seattle. It was hard to hold (the players) in the room before the game."

So went the Huskies' unchained melody. On the first day of the rest of their lives, the emotion that generated enough electricity to illuminate a million dim bulbs transformed into shaky hands against Arizona State. Only a boldly calculated tailback-pitch pass from Rashaan Shehee to flanker Fred Coleman, with just under three minutes remaining, gave Washington a 23-20 victory over the Sun Devils and a head start in the race for the conference championship.

"Now," Lambright says, "I can enjoy looking at the Pac-10 standings."

As freedom rang Saturday afternoon for Lambright's Huskies, it also rang at Texas A&M, where bowl-ban sanctions have expired on the Aggies after one season. It rang, too, at Auburn, where the Tigers won an astonishing 20 of 22 games during a two-year exile.

If the players at Texas A&M and Auburn weren't exactly jumping in the air the way Neal was, the air was jumping around them. Despite oppressive 100-degree temperatures in College Station (the playing surface at Kyle Field registered 120 degrees), a virtual capacity crowd of 70,057 turned out for the Aggies' 33-17 victory over Louisiana State.

Outside the stadium, Glenn Baker, Texas A&M class of 1979, embodied the renewed spirit of Aggies fans. With his wife and two young sons, he had set up a tent over his van and was barbecuing on a cooker with an Aggies handle on the lid. He was wearing sunglasses tinted Aggies maroon, with an A&M insignia in the corner. "We go to all the games, home and away, and it was fun last year even though we weren't playing for a championship," Baker says. "But there's an extra excitement this year knowing we could be in Tempe, Ariz., on January 2. I don't know if I remember a year when there was so much excitement and talk about a possible national championship."

At Auburn, where quarterback Patrick Nix threw for a school-record 382 yards in a 46-13 thumping of Mississippi, linebacker Anthony Harris heralded a new era in War Eagle history when he said: "We've got a chance to go out and compete for everything - the national championship, the SEC championship, it's all out there for us. The sky's the limit."

Actually, the Fiesta Bowl, prearranged home (maybe) of the 1995 national championship, is the limit. But after you've done time on the dark side of the moon, Sun Devil Stadium must look like center stage of the universe. Which is why Texas A&M Coach R.C. Slocum recently placed a poster-sized picture of the Fiesta Bowl near the door of the Aggies locker room.

"We're playing for a lot more this year, and we know that," Aggies running back and Heisman candidate Leeland McElroy said before the LSU game. "But it's not weighing us down. We have a legitimate chance to be in the Fiesta Bowl. That's the goal. We had goals last year, too, and I think we responded pretty well in trying to reach those."

Aggies Athletic Director Wally Groff concurs with McElroy's spin on the mind games wrought by probation: "I really don't know if the atmosphere is that much different among the players," Groff says. "R.C. did a tremendous job last year getting them to focus on football, and not the problem. There is excitement, but it's pretty much the same as last year."

Auburn Coach Terry Bowden insists the post-probation horizon is a sort of optical illusion.

"Everybody acts like it's some kind of black to white experience, from day to night," he says. "But we've known it was coming.

"It was great to think about in the offseason and during summer conditioning and an those things, but I'm not sure it's going to be an extra motivator at this point. By midseason, if we're lucky to be in the hunt, it will start being something people will talk about."

In Seattle, it's all college football fans did talk about in the months preceding last Saturday's opener. Having endured what they perceive to be an unfair double whammy - the Pac-10 gave Washington a harsh spanking in 1993, before the NCAA slapped on its probation in '94 - Husky Stadium audiences can see clearly now; the rein is gone, if not the rain. With the approximate civic hoopla accorded a lunar equinox, two years of Pac-10 sanctions expired August 22.

"We forgot to have a party," Huskies Sports Information Director Jim Daves says.

In contrast to the aggressive campaign behind the Heisman candidacy of former star running back Napoleon Kaufman, the school's public relations department is keeping an unassuming profile toward the team's born-again bowl aspirations. But then, this is an issue that cuts much deeper than a few pithy words in a slogan.