Tough First Year...

I was looking into the past trying to remember my time at ASU when we had this junior college transfer from Kansas playing safety for the football Indians.  I wanted to try to remember our new AD when he was on the field.  I remember him on campus as a fellow athlete but what I wanted to remember Terry Mohajir as an actual football player.

So I began to dig through some of my older media guides.  It was then that it hit me how tough Terry Mohajir's first year at Arkansas State really was as a football player.  I bet some of you guys that complain about our schedules will find a guy in Mohajir that really knows what a tough schedule is.  It may not have been a tough schedule by name teams, but you will see how tough it was.  I take a look back at a time from December 1989 to December 1990

Mohajir was a mid semester junior college transfer that was recruited by the Larry Lacewell staff and brought to Jonesboro in December of 1989.  He arrived on campus only to have his head coach jump to University of Tennessee as the defensive coordinator.  On January 30, 1990, Arkansas State brought in former Wyoming head coach Al Kincaid to run the "Triple Shoot" offensive.  On February 10th, 1990 it was announced that the A-State Board of Trustees were in favor of moving the program from I-AA to I-A.  The excitement I'm sure was very high!

The school would work toward making the full transition to 1A by the 1992 season.  The tough part of it was that the upcoming fall of 1990 would be the first year that Arkansas State would be ineligible for the I-AA playoffs and Indian stadium would need to be renovated to go from 18,709 to near 31,000 seats. And the 1990 season would also be the first season that the Indians would face 7 I-A opponents but still would not be up to par with the 95 (it was 95 in 1990) scholarship athletes that other I-A teams would have. Lacewell has been quoted before by saying that the 1986 and 1987 long runs into the 1AA playoffs hurt his coaching staff's chance to recruit as successful as they had liked so the talent level was down as well. 

A lack of scholarship athletes and perhaps a lack of talent was just a couple of factors that led to a 3-7-1 record in 1990.  But it was another factor that I want to look at.

Game 1 in 1990 was a 24-24 tie AT Memphis State.  The Indians came home and defeated Northeast Louisiana (ULM) 23-18.  The Tribe then went on the road and took it on the chin AT Wyoming (27-34) and Louisiana Tech (7-40).  A-State went into Carbondale, IL and picked up a win over Southern Illinois 20-17.  A home game the next week put the Indians record at 3-2-1 with the win over Northwestern (LA) State (16-8).  It was then the season went down hill with 5 consecutive losses.  Two big road losses AT Northern Illinois (0-35), Ole Miss (13-42) and one tight loss AT North Texas (26-35) put the Tribe at 3-5-1.  The Southwestern Louisiana (ULL) Ragin' Cajuns tripped up A-State in Indian Stadium 16-17 before the ASU went up to Toledo (28-43) face the Rockets for the last game of the season.

For those of you that were paying attention or counting, that was 3 home games!  That is correct - Terry Mohajir's first season as an Indian he was on the road 8 times and got to play in Indian Stadium just 3.

While I know that ASU was working on upgrading facilities for "The Move", I expect that Mohajir will work with Gus Malzahn to make sure the Red Wolves have more home games as they work on upgrading our football stadium and complex!  It was a tough first year for Mohajir, I expect his "first year" on his second time through will be much better!