This morning I finished reading "The Marshall Story", which was written by four different reporters. I have not yet seen the movie "We Are Marshall", but this book was written after the movie was filmed. I'm interested to see if they took as much dramatic license with this story as they did with "Friday Night Lights".
Anyway, while it was an interesting story, the subtitle was a bit misleading. It says "college football's greatest comeback". To me, a comeback is a year or two, right? Well, what happened at Marshall University was that in 1970 a very tragic plane crash killed most of the football team, coaches, and friends and fans. Now, this was not a winning team to begin with: they hadn't had a winning season in 5 years and in fact in 1969 had been kicked out of the MAC conference for shady recruiting practices. Marshall made the decision to try to rebuild the team, which was undoubtedly very difficult. They went on to have many, many losing seasons before they finally began winning again...in 1994! Twenty-four years after the plane crash. I'm sorry...does this qualify as a comeback? Really? Once they started winning, they won big, and it was an uplifting and inspiring story. I just think that it's a stretch to call it a great comeback. Give any team a quarter of a century and they can rebuild their team, no matter what has happened to them. A lot of great players played for Marshall in recent years, like Randy Moss (who has said publicly that the Marshall tragedy was no big deal--yikes). I remember when he first started playing for the Vikings. I always hated Vikings/Packers games because they always won against the Packers, and I hated that!! No denying he's a good player, though. With that being said--Go Green Bay!! (They're my team, have been since '97). Okay, I'm officially in full on football season mode. I wonder what else is out there that I can read pertaining to football...?
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