UConn opened as a 17-point underdog shortly after their pairing against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl was announced, and not surprisingly, few people outside of the state of Connecticut are giving the Huskies a chance.
But to coach Randy Edsall, upsetting a 17-point favorite isn’t wishful thinking. After all, he’s already coached a team that pulled it off once before, and that team had a lot in common with this year’s UConn team.
A couple years before becoming the head coach at UConn, Edsall was the defensive backs coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars under Tom Coughlin. While at Jacksonville, he was a part of the miraculous 1996 season where the Jaguars won their last five games to rebound from a 4-7 start to make the playoffs.
Once in the playoffs, the Jaguars faced John Elway and the Denver Broncos, who at that point were considered the odds on favorite to go all the way.
In that game, the Jaguars were a 17-point underdog, but they beat the Broncos 30-27 in what is considered by many to be one of the biggest upsets in the history of the NFL playoffs.
The memory of that season has lingered with Edsall, who spent a good 10 minutes recounting the story at his Fiesta Bowl press conference on Monday.
“[My son Corey and I] were talking one night towards the end of the season and he was saying ‘Dad this reminds me of that second year at Jacksonville, where you guys made that run,'” Edsall said before going on to talk about the team’s dire situation going into their Week 13 game on the road against the Baltimore Ravens.
“We ended up winning the game in overtime, and that propelled us to a five-game winning streak,” Edsall said. “We got to the last game of the year and we had to play Atlanta at home, and we needed to win to get into the playoffs.”
That game against Atlanta wound up coming down to a Morten Andersen field goal. Andersen, who is arguably the best kicker in the history of the NFL, missed a 30-yard field goal for the Falcons that would have ended the Jaguars season. Instead the kick went wide left, and the Jaguars won 19-17, clinching a playoff berth.
From there the Jaguars faced Jim Kelly and the Buffalo Bills in the first round of the playoffs. Up until that point, the Bills had never lost a home playoff game in their history.
“We had a pretty good running back, Natrone Means, and Natrone was a horse,” Edsall said. “We rode Natrone pretty good, and we had a quarterback [Mark Brunell] who was a very good athlete, and maybe wasn’t the best thrower, kind of like what we might’ve had here a little bit, but we beat Buffalo.”
And then, the next week, there was Denver, who were 17-point favorites and had already put up a stage for the AFC Championship game the next week.
“That kind of fueled our guys,” Edsall said. “And we ended up beating them.”
The Jaguars would lose 20-6 to the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game, but Edsall said that looking back, there are a lot of similarities between that season and this one.
“[My son] was trying to say that certain games were this game as we were going down the line and I was trying to say that the game against South Florida was the game against New England,” Edsall said. “And he was saying ‘no that was like the Atlanta game’ and I said ‘no it was more like that because now we get to go to the BCS, that’s where you want to be,’ and it’s like you want to get to the Super Bowl.”
Since there is no college football playoff, the Fiesta Bowl is the best thing that UConn could have hoped for, and by making it this far, the Huskies have a chance to do what the Jaguars did against the Broncos, prove everyone wrong.
Tom Coughlin, Edsall’s old mentor, knows a lot about proving everyone wrong. Years after coaching the Jaguars to within a game of the Super Bowl in the franchises second season of existence, he would end up coaching the 2007 New York Giants to 11-straight road wins, culminating with a stunning 17-14 win over the unbeaten Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
Coughlin is a notoriously serious coach, a fact that Edsall underscored with a story from his time with the Jaguars.
“I was up in the press box, and before the game we’re up there and I’m on the headset, and Dick Jauron is down on the sidelines,” Edsall said. “And they had Michael, the guy that’s like ‘lets get ready to rumble,’ and he comes out and I say ‘Hey Dick, look at this, look who’s there,’ and Tom’s on our line and I didn’t know it. He says ‘Now lets get serious up there we’ve got a game to play!'”
Coughlin knows what he’s doing, and following this season’s win over Cincinnati, when UConn came within a win of reaching the BCS, Coughlin reached out to Edsall to offer some words of advice.
“He texted me and said ‘persevere until victory is yours,'” Edsall said. “Boy if that wasn’t truer of this team this year in terms of persevering and overcoming things.”
This year’s Huskies overcame a 3-4 start to win five games in a row and make the BCS, despite numerous distractions and some deep fluctuations in the depth chart well into the season. Now everyone thinks that Oklahoma is going to run right over UConn and ride off into the desert sunset as Fiesta Bowl champions.
But if the 1996 Jaguars proved anything, it’s that pre-game odds don’t matter come kickoff. What does matter are the characteristics that the Huskies have demonstrated ever since knocking off West Virginia, focus, character, attention to detail and perseverance.
If the Huskies persevere against Oklahoma, then even the Sooners, with all of their talent and tradition, can be beaten. After everything that has happened the past couple years, Edsall and his team know that by now, and come Jan. 1, they’ll be ready to play.