MERCER’S DEFENSE CELEBRATES 1 of 5 TURNOVERS THEY
FORCED AGAINST AUBURN
In Macon, Ga., on Sept. 15, Mercer defensive coordinator Mike Kolakowski began his Friday meeting with his players by projecting a photo of Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium, packed with 87,500 fans, on the big screen at the front of the room. In 30 hours or so, the Bears would play the first of two FBS games this season that will add a combined $1,050,000 to Mercer’s $18.7 million athletics budget. With a click, the fiery 60-year-old Kolakowski replaced Auburn’s stadium with a shot of Mercer’s, capacity: 10,200.
"What do these places have in common?” Kolakowski asked his players.
“The field,” said senior end Isaiah Buehler.
“That’s right.” Click. “It’s 100 yards long and 53 1/3 yards wide. Goalposts are the same height and width as ours. Everything that’s not on the field is what?”
Silence.
“It’s clutter, men. We gotta eliminate the clutter.” Kolakowski pointed at Auburn’s massive upper decks, its skyscraper press box. “None of this stuff matters.”
Winning the turnover battle would matter, Kolakowski believed, which explained the signs throughout Mercer’s field house that blared: THE BALL IS THE ISSUE.
“I don’t know if I’ve seen 90,000 people in one place in my whole life,” freshman quarterback Kaelan Riley joked after practice. But his 19-year-old eyes had seen the highlights of Liberty’s win, and Howard’s, too. “Anything’s possible,” he said.
The three-hour bus ride to Auburn the next day was led by a police escort that blocked the main intersections in little towns such as Midland, Ga., and Smiths Station, Ala. Daniel Tate, the associate AD who had scheduled this game, was wearing the same orange-and-white buttondown he’d worn the day Mercer upset Duke in the 2014 NCAA basketball tournament. “We created an algorithm we called the Duke Effect,” Tate said, “to determine the effect that that game had on our national profile and our enrollment.” Coach Bobby Lamb’s summary of those findings was unscientific: “Applications went through the roof,” Lamb said in his Georgia drawl. “We didn’t have enough people to handle ’em all.”
Mercer officials will tell you that this is why its football team plays money games. Not to pay for scholarships or because it aspires to Division I relevance, but because, as university president Bill Underwood put it, “We are one of the top six private research universities in the southeast, but we’re not nearly as well known as the other five. When people think about schools like Vanderbilt, Duke, Wake Forest, I want them to think about us.”
But this was no basketball game. Mismatched bodies would soon be violently colliding on every snap. “Yes, that has crossed my mind,” said Lamb. “In games like this, your body soreness is probably more on Sunday than it would be if we were playing a team in our conference, just because of the size you’re playing against.”
All was quiet in Mercer’s locker room, where 70 players stuffed themselves into shoulder pads encased in new white jerseys. To the players’ surprise, their last names had been stitched on the back for the first time. But how many of those players had noticed that their win probability was 0.7%, or that Auburn was favored by 41 1/2 points—figures bleaker than the ones Liberty or Howard faced?
“We gotta eliminate what?” Kolakowski asked his defense.
“Clutter,” they replied.
“That’s right. And what’s clutter?”
The players pointed toward the rumbling stands above their heads.
“Lemme see everybody’s eyes right now,” Lamb said. “We put these names on the back of your jerseys today because that represents you. That represents your mama, your daddy, your brothers, your sisters. ... Here’s all I ask of you today, men. Go out there and expect to win the game when we walk through that door. Play your guts out! For 60 minutes! For four quarters I need your guts, you understand me? Play for each other! Bear down! Let’s go!”
The players rose and roared, each one slapping the sign that someone had duct-taped over the door (BEAR DOWN EVERY DOWN) as he ran into the overwhelming crowd noise.
Combine the attendance at FAMU-Arkansas (36,055) and Liberty-Baylor (45,784) and you’d still be 5,000 fans short of the sense-pounding mob of 87,033 that greeted Mercer’s players. On Auburn’s first series, 200-pound linebacker LeMarkus Bailey stripped the ball from an Auburn receiver who outweighed him, then Bailey fell on the ball—the first of five turnovers the Bears would force on the day.
“What’d I tell ya?” Lamb bellowed in the locker room, his team trailing just 10–3 at half. “We’re outplayin’ ’em. The defense is knocking the stem-windin’ crap out of ’em. We’re runnin’ inside zone just like we want to, we’re double teamin’ them two big ol’ fat asses outta there. We’re right where we need to be! ... The field’s 100 yards! The ball’s oblong! Goalposts are the same width! You got an opportunity, men!”
Auburn’s coaches may have been ambushed in the first half, but they weren’t going to be caught off guard in the second. They fed Mercer’s defenders a steady diet of Kam Pettway from halftime on, the Tigers’ 235-pound tailback capping a 10-play drive with a TD run that gave the Tigers a 17–3 lead. “In the third quarter, you could see the 85-to-63 scholarship factor,” Lamb said afterward.
With Auburn driving again, Mercer cornerback Kam Lott—a player Kolakowski had singled out at halftime, “We need all you got, Kam!”—jumped a slant route and made an interception reminiscent of Malcolm Butler’s in Super Bowl XLIX. Four Riley completions later, Mercer had third-and-goal at the Auburn six, with a chance to pull within seven. The clock showed 13:50.
Riley fielded a shotgun snap, calmly aimed his toes at the Mercer sideline, and fired a slant that receiver Marquise Irvin caught in the end zone, transforming the tiny square of Mercer fans in that corner into a white-and-orange riot. “We’ve got a game,” Joel Meyers told SEC Network’s viewers. “Ninety seconds into the fourth quarter, they are stunned in Auburn, Alabama.”
A 26-yard field goal try from Auburn’s All-America kicker, Daniel Carlson, hooked wide left with nine minutes left. The clutter fell quiet as Lamb walked to the hashmark with his offense, trailing 17–10. “Guys, I told y’all. Right now on ESPN it says, UPSET ALERT, MERCER BEARS.” The players laughed, which made Lamb laugh. Sure, they had dreamed, but now, as one player put it later, “the s--- was happening.”
Unfortunately for people who root for David over Goliath, what followed was Mercer’s “poorest series of the night”—as Lamb would describe it later—“and our poorest punt of the night, and then we get a [15-yard] targeting [penalty] on the punt return.”
Gifted with a short field, Pettway hammered away until his 34th carry of the game landed him in the end zone, sealing the 24–10 win. “Boy, y’all have got a good program,” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn told Lamb at midfield, the duration of his grip suggesting he wasn’t merely talking about talent.
On the moonlit bus ride home, Lamb turned on his iPad and watched his son, Taylor, quarterback Appalachian State, the program that had resurrected the idea of the FCS upset 10 years earlier, to a win over Texas State. Someone in the back of the bus cued up a playlist of ’90s R&B that, although it was kept at a respectful volume, jangled the nerves of a few exhausted O-linemen.
As the bus pulled into Macon, Lamb stood and acknowledged that Travel Rule No. 4 (“Keep your music to yourself”) had been violated, but he couldn’t bring himself to punish anyone, not after the effort he’d witnessed that afternoon.
“No big deal,” he said, cognizant that his team would face an even sterner test on Nov. 18, in exchange for $600,000 and more publicity for the school, when their buses left town for Tuscaloosa.
