Little victories matter to Kent State and Kenni Burns

Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.

You know what? I love small bowls, and I don’t care who knows it. This stance probably isn’t too surprising given my feelings about ULM football, but if anything, the greatness of early bowl season is why I feel so strongly about the Warhawks. I couldn’t care less about “the integrity of the postseason”, or whatever logic people come up with to beg for less college football. Bowls are about the players, above all, and that’s hardly a given in this sport. Anything that places the interests of the until-recently unpaid student-athletes first is more than fine in my book.

Look no further than the 2019 Frisco Bowl to see what I’m talking about. From the Mountain West, this game featured Utah State, floundering to 7-6 with three 28-point losses under first-year HC Gary Andersen. On the other side was Kent State, outscored 156-49 in non-conference play and barely above .500 in the MAC. This is exactly the kind of game people want to see less of, which…well, I suppose it sort of makes sense.

On the other hand, we already have hundreds of meetings between middling G5 teams like this one. It’s really not that big a deal to add one more that lets northern teams take a trip down to Texas and enjoy the postseason festivities. Besides, who cares if we like it? So much of this sport is designed around sacrificing the mental and physical health of students and coaches on the altar of entertainment value. Is it so much to ask that those who carry themselves well during the season get a chance to take part in a low-stakes game where the announcers will spend most of their time discussing the CFP field?

This is all a roundabout way of getting to Kent State, the subject of today’s article, but there’s a reason for that approach. When the Golden Flashes won this game—in a 51-41 thriller that featured 39 points in the back-and-forth fourth quarter—head coach Sean Lewis and his team celebrated as if they’d just won the Super Bowl. There’s a certain kind of person who looks at that pure expression of joy and still thinks it shows everything wrong with college football today…and if, by some miracle, that’s you and you’re still reading, you should probably find something better to do with your time. There’s no real way to talk about Kent State without accepting that the little victories mean so much more here.

The Flashes are one of FBS’s historically impotent programs: that was their first (and, as of this offseason, only) bowl win in 61 seasons. Among teams with over 250 games played at this level, that mark barely a quarter of Kent State’s 977, not a single one has a worse winning percentage. It’s admittedly not all their fault, because the program is sufficiently cash-strapped that they typically schedule three P5 titans a season. (In 2019, they traveled to 8-5 Arizona State, 9-4 Auburn, and 10-4 Wisconsin.) That limitation naturally attracts the sort of person who doesn’t think a team should be written off for limping to the finish line at 6-6 or 7-5, which is how Sean Lewis ended up here and led Kent State from the basement to the MAC Championship Game in four seasons.

Now Lewis is Deion Sanders’ offensive coordinator over at Colorado—a lateral move that reinforces how low-ranking this job is in FBS—but what he built here still stands. The athletic department has actually made overtures at playing a normal non-conference schedule for once, providing some firmer footing for Lewis’ successor. That would be one Kenni Burns, who’s coached a stellar RB room at Minnesota in recent seasons. Burns oversaw more 4000-yard rushers in six seasons (Mohamed Ibrahim and Rodney Smith) than the Golden Gophers had in the previous 125, and in 2021 he found a way past three season-ending injuries to produce three 500-yard backs and help drag Minnesota to a 9-4 finish. He was considered seriously by power-conference teams, particularly Arizona State, but he’s ended up here. For the Flashes to swing such a strong candidate is another sign that the bedrock under Kent has shifted since Lewis took the reins.

If you’re that kind of person who doesn’t care about football without legitimate CFP stakes…well, hey, I thought I told you to stop reading! But I think it’s worth acknowledging that, from that perspective, none of this matters a bit. With all due respect to the foundation being built for this program to stay in MAC contention, Kent State isn’t exactly bound for a playoff bid or a P5 spot in the next few decades. The best coach in program history just peaked at seven wins, and while a more forgiving schedule could let Burns improve on that, the Flashes’ realistic goal is not necessarily national prominence.

If you’re still with me, though, I think you’ll agree that setting the bar of success lower for a team with Kent State’s historical struggles is fair. It’s nothing against this program—Lewis and Burns can hardly be blamed for the broad circumstances that put this team in this situation—but that doesn’t mean we can’t account for it in setting expectations. Ultimately, this team is playing for a chance to go to Frisco, or Boise, or Detroit, or Albuquerque, and that’s valuable in its own right. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter how you or I think about the Golden Flashes. What matters is that this team is enjoying every bit of the journey, and in picking up where his predecessor left off, Burns understands that better than anybody.

The Last Five Years

Note that, despite going just a game over .500 in the last four seasons as a collective, Kent State had three winning and one even season in MAC play. Of twelve scheduled non-conference games in that span, the Golden Flashes played nine P5 teams, and there weren’t any Vanderbilts or Rutgerses in that group. The schedule, as ever, held them back, but they did establish themselves as an offense-first force in the conference, making it to the MAC Championship Game in 2021 while allowing 36.3 points per game. Burns’s first hire at DC is one Dave Duggan, who Arkansas State fired halfway through 2020 (his second season!) after giving up a combined 97 points to Georgia State and Appalachian State. So…hopefully the offense is still good!

2022 and 2023

Regression wasn’t necessarily a guarantee in 2022—the MAC East looked weak enough for Kent State to defend their division title—but after the Flashes knocked off Ohio in their first conference game, they struggled to a 3-4 finish while the Bobcats rattled off seven straight wins. That offense was still every bit as good as expected, with QB Collin Schlee easing the loss of Dustin Crum and Marquez Cooper electrifying the rushing corps, but it wasn’t enough to overcome a defense lacking interior depth.

There will be more turnover going into 2023—Schlee went to UCLA and Cooper to Ball State—but Kent State also brought in some intriguing pieces. Ky Thomas had a key role in Burns’s next-man-up RB room at Minnesota, rushing for 824 yards in 2021, but he underwhelmed mightily at Kansas last year (162 yards, 3.1 yards per carry). Devin Nicholson was pushed out of a workhorse role in Missouri’s linebacker corps and could provide just the coverage Kent State needs on defense. Quarterback, however, remains an open question; Devin Kargman underwhelmed in 70 attempts last year and Kansas State transfer Jaren Lewis didn’t throw a pass last season.

The Next Five Years

Usually this section offers an opportunity to imagine what could happen if everything goes well, but that doesn’t require much imagination at Kent State. We know what the ceiling looks like, because we just saw it—and while restructuring the non-conference slate could give the Flashes better records, it’s a long shot for them to be outright better than Lewis’s teams.

Of course, if Burns can turn Kent State into a latter-day UCF or SMU, it’d certainly be exciting. But the goal here is less about improving on what Lewis did and more about building on it, turning it into something consistent. There’s no reason that this team, especially in this volatile conference, can’t stay in the annual race for the East title. (Well, unless the MAC ditches divisions, which seems to be quite the trend right now.) But complacence at a program losing the only bowl-winning HC in program history is not an option. Getting this move right is extremely important, and Kent State deserves credit for both playing it safe and finding an underrated coach at the level they wanted.

Obviously, the Golden Flashes would like Burns to succeed as a coach. But the process here is as much about the next fifty years as the next five—building an identity, establishing a place in the G5 hierarchy. To navigate all these needs with an inherently limited list of options, considering how unenviable this job has typically been, is a credit to Kent State. They may still be playing for small bowls and brief moments of glory, but football is not an afterthought here, not anymore. That, I think, is more than enough reason to get excited for what happens next.