Goose egg for EMU not out of question

Published 8:43 am Friday, October 2, 2015

I don’t know what to think of this Eastern Michigan University football team.

My first hunch is that the Eagles will be the worst football team to visit Tiger Stadium in many moons come Saturday night, a team that could possibly test even Les Miles’ penchant for slamming on the brakes once “victory is secured.”

Maybe Idaho in 2012 (LSU, 63-14) would compare.

Otherwise, I’m at a loss, a term with which EMU is quite familiar.

Only once in six years, for instance, have the Eagles won more than two games, and it’s not like they’re battling their way through the SEC West or anything. 

For further instance, last year, Florida coach Will Muschamp got fired in midseason for his shenanigans with the Gators. But he beat EMU 65-0, one supposes, as something of a parting gift.

The Eagles are halfway to the season’s pair this year at 1-3.

That’s my first impression.

My second inclination is that the whole bunch of them are nuts or crazy and quite probably both. 

Tiger Stadium knows nutty and crazy, often with looney overtones.

But the trip to Baton Rouge’s Saturday night exotica shouldn’t be too much of a shock, at least not to the head coach.

Second-year coach Chris Creighton previously toiled at Ottawa University (which is, I believe, in Canada, but in a stunning development apparently has football) along with Drake and Division III Wabash before settling in at Eastern Michigan.

He knows road trips, having taken teams to Panama, Austria and Tanzania (for the only college game ever played in Africa).

But I’m not sure about this Eagle bunch, not sure I’d trust them amidst all of those stately oaks that LSU worries so much about.

The EMU campus is in Ypsilanti, located conveniently enough in eastern Michigan, a major manufacturing area for just about everything, apparently, except vowels, of which the campus hometown comes up severely lacking, causing great pain and suffering to the local tongue.

It’s also only 8 miles from the far more famous University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the Big House, the current khaki pants, and all of that.

So maybe you have to pull the occasional stunt to attract some attention. 

The Eagles evidently like to tear things up.

Tiger Stadium’s maintenance crew had best keep a close eye on these guys. 

Creighton may look like a well-groomed bank loan officer, but one of the things he brought with him to campus was a 51-pound pipe wrench, kind of to establish some identity.

Help me here. I’m not real familiar with pipe wrenches or any other weapon of mass manual labor for that matter, but that seems like a pretty fair-sized tool there. 

How a 51-pound pipe wrench fits the school’s academic mission is unclear, but the football team uses it as a symbol of some sort.

If I’m reading this right, the big pipe wrench typifies the team’s mission to — quoting here from the team’s media guide — “close the gap,” presumably over some of the lopsided losses in recent years.

The tool’s vices supposedly represent the “gap,” although they weren’t much help while giving up 38 points in a loss to Old Dominion or allowing 578 yards rushing in a 58-36 loss to Army.

There’s also a hammer, of unreported weight, but presumably big enough to fit into the Cajun maintenance mantra of “Get a bigger hammer” since it’s described as being a hammer from the “sledge” family of hammer tool tomfoolery.

Presumably Miles will go over some ground rules in advance and make sure these things aren’t allowed in the huddle. 

Oh, but that’s not the half of it. 

Players get their names put on these big sledge babies for big hits in actual football games, but they have more practical purposes as well. 

The Eagles can’t get on their home field — the industrial gray-colored artificial turf of Rynearson Stadium — without them. And, if you had a stadium named Rynearson, you’d come up with a nickname for it too. So the Eagles call it, continuing the trend here, “The Factory.”

But to take the field for each game, selected Eagles must first hammer and batter their way through “The Wall,” which isn’t just one of those paper thingies high school teams crash through but an actual wall made of cinder blocks.

No telling how many times visiting opponents have had to wait patiently on the coin toss, but it’s not starting until the Eagles hammer their way through regulation-sized cinder blocks to join the fray.

The wall has to come crashing down before the Eagles can take the field each week.

Do they do this on the road? Saturday in Tiger Stadium?

A lot of SEC teams would love to take a sledge hammer to LSU’s visiting dressing room. 

Maybe it happens Saturday. 

“The wrench, the field, the concrete wall, we know people will have comments,” Creighton is quoted as saying in the EMU media guide. “It all goes back to the idea of investing, and working for something. It is about putting on those steel-toed boots and going to work.” 

Steel-toed who?

Steel-toed boots? Are those legal on a football field?

I’d keep an eye on these Eagles.