UB notebook
Bowl practice gives red shirts some work
For the players a bowl appearance is the reward for a successful season. For coaches, it’s that and a head start on next year.
“It helps your program immensely,” Connecticut coach Randy Edsall said at Thursday’s International Bowl news conference. “When you look at the game being played on Jan. 3, we’re going to start practice on Monday, we’re going to get 15 practices in before the game.
“What it allows us to do, especially in the first five, six practices, we’re going to take our young kids — we got 20 kids this year we’re going to red shirt — and it’s going to give us extra time with them, to develop them and get them running our plays instead of off the cards,” Edsall said. “It’s a big boost, and we’ve seen that happen in the other bowl games that we’ve gone (to). It’s a big advantage. It’s something that you want as a coach because, again, it really gets you just another spring practice, so to speak, where you can develop your players.”
University at Buffalo coach Turner Gill said he will take a similar tack, working red-shirted players and underclassmen into the mix, especially in the early going.
UConn players will be off Dec. 23-25, UB players Dec. 24-26. Both teams will begin practicing at the Rogers Centre on Dec. 30.
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UB Athletic Director Warde Manuel is hopeful the Bulls can sell as many as 10,000 tickets for the game, which would be 8,000 more than Western Michigan sold two years ago in the inaugural International Bowl. If so, the Bulls could have a distinct home-field advantage, even though UConn supporters are known to “travel well.” Edsall understands. In fact, he applauds the enthusiasm surrounding the Bulls.
“Nobody thought that we would ever get to a bowl game . . . so I know what they’re going through and I know all the excitement and exhilaration that’s happening in Buffalo because we went through that in 2004,” Edsall said. “And everybody should be excited because I think when you have great leadership in Turner and Warde and what they’ve been able to do, that’s only natural. And the proximity with Toronto and Buffalo, you understand all that.”
A good part of the news conference was spent with the two sides expressing mutual admiration. UConn and UB both went Division I nine years ago, with naysayers a plenty saying the programs were facing insurmountable odds. UConn rose relatively quickly under Edsall, and Manuel said that it became UB’s mission to emulate the Huskies’ model. Edsall responded by hailing what UB has rapidly accomplished under Manuel and Gill.
“I’ve been one of those guys where my whole life being told that ‘you can’t do this,’ ” Edsall said. “I came from a town where we had one signal light in the whole town. So I like when I see people have these opportunities and they overcome the obstacles and the hurdles and the doubt that you can never do anything. . . . This is what the bowl experience is all about. This is what college sports is all about.”
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Manuel said he’s had the International Bowl dancing through his head since becoming the school’s athletic director prior to the 2005 football season. Buffalo and Toronto? What could be more of a natural?
“I had a dream, and it’s fulfilled today, that we would be here,” Manuel said.
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Contrary to reports, the teams will not receive $750,000 payouts. Instead, the universities retain the proceeds from their ticket sales. They also have to pay their expenses. The national exposure is priceless, but UB’s take is looking like a maximum of $300,000 if it sells 9,000 tickets.
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UB is inviting the 35 living members of the 1958 squad to the game as guests. That team, as you probably know by now, voted down a bid to the Tangerine Bowl when its two black players, Willie Evans and Mike Wilson, were forbidden from participating.
So when the Bulls were asked about possible pitfalls of spending a week in Toronto, Manuel quipped: “I’m worrying about how our ’58 team is going to behave itself. Our student-athletes will be fine.”
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Take note, Buffalo. The Toronto Convention & Visitors Association sent a representative to the news conference to alert the media to attractions in the city as well as sporting events book-ending the game. The Raptors are home the day before and after the International Bowl. The Sabres are playing the Leafs at the Air Canada Centre on Jan. 1. A listing of events and information disseminated at the news conference is available at www.seetorontonow.com .
