The Wrong Side of History

A tale of football in Monroe (one year later)

The Wrong Side of History might be the best thing I’ve ever written. And I’ve written a lot.

Probably the most obvious cause of that is simply that it’s a story I think is really worth telling, for a number of reasons. Way back in 2020, when I was testing the waters with my first major writing project in a series of college football previews (and keeping myself entertained during a national lockdown), ULM’s called out to me as one worth spending time on. I really love odd occurrences and stats, and I found a killer one for the lead: the Warhawks had missed bowl eligibility and let their rival clinch the division in back-to-back years by missing last-second field goals inside the 40 in back-to-back seasons. Now that’s just heartbreaking.

Every time I came back to Monroe, I felt like an explorer in uncharted waters, uncovering a little bit more of a tale that I was stunned nobody else cared to tell. This is how most of my longform stories start—it’s not something that can be forced, but something that happens naturally in the process of more mundane research. Leave the Edges Wild, the other major contender for the best story I’ve done, was born out of a similar string of discoveries: Edwin Jackson threw a 149-pitch no-hitter? And the only other no-hitter in Diamondbacks history was a perfecto by Randy Johnson? And those two players just so happened to have a ton in common, despite being so completely different? It felt like a story that wrote itself; so did The Wrong Side of History.

This one was much more of a slow burn, though. Two full years went by before I felt like I really understood what ULM means, and why it matters such much in the broad context of college football. More than that, it took a while before I felt my writing skills were remotely qualified to tackle a story of such depth. Leave the Edges Wild was the only extremely longform piece I’d written before then, and as much as I enjoyed it, it had a somewhat casual tone that I refined over time. Today marks a year since I originally published The Wrong Side of History on my previous site, and while it shows a few signs of its age, it’s one of the oldest things I’ve written that I have no qualms about recommending to people even today. There’s a reason I’m re-releasing it, after all!

I’ve made some light changes to this version, both to match my current editorial style and to update some relevant statistics to account for the 2022 season; otherwise, I’ve left it untouched. Finally, I’d like to add something I’m surprised I didn’t include in the original story: the song “Rules” by the Hoosiers, from which the epigraph of each section is taken.

And now, without further ado, I’ll yield the stage to my past self and once again offer the tale of college football’s perennial underdog.

College football is full of inspiring lessons about how one upset can propel a team on the path to greatness. No other American sport has so little upwards mobility—making the Browns a title contender is a very different proposition from doing the same with Brown—but no other sport celebrates its ability for advancement like this one. And while countless attempts to rise through the ranks have sputtered and fallen short, there are success stories to point to. App State, already an FCS titan by the time they stunned #2 Michigan in 2007, used that publicity to skyrocket straight past the struggles most new FBS teams face and immediately dominated the Sun Belt upon their arrival. Around the same time, Utah parlayed a Mountain West season with a legitimate national title case into a Pac-12 bid, then kept using the winning formula to rise up the ranks and reach their first-ever Rose Bowl in the 2021 season.

But there’s clearly another side to the coin, and it doesn’t get nearly as much attention. It’s apparent that a high-profile win, like App State upsetting Michigan or Utah defeating Alabama, can prove the catalyst for an ascent, but it’s worth noting in those stories that the groundwork had already been laid beforehand. The Mountaineers and the Utes didn’t win those games in one-off fluke performances, although they certainly brought their best. Both programs had been building for years: App State was two titles into a three-championship streak when they beat Michigan, while Utah had seen steady improvement under Kyle Whittingham after displaying their potential in a 12-0 season under Urban Meyer.

So what happens to a team that pulls off a historic, monumental upset—but doesn’t have the consistency, the resources, and the investment to back it up and continue to rise? Could such a piece of history truly fade into the past?

Sense never seemed to make sense to me
And not the sense you administer repeatedly
Fled to the hills so I could clear my mind
I couldn’t swallow the pills that I was prescribed

”Rules”, by the Hoosiers, first stanza

“The Sun Belt’s Louisiana-Monroe,” opines the AP’s recap of this game, “which beat Nick Saban and Alabama 21-14 in Tuscaloosa, is not a good team.” On that point, it is correct: not only was ULM a bad team in 2007, they were a bad team just about every year. The Warhawks’ football program had been chugging along in some form since 1931, and in 1950 it left junior college play behind to join the NAIA. Incumbent coach James L. Malone started off the era with a 6-2 season, then 5-4, and then ULM joined the Gulf States Conference and lost nine straight, whereupon he resigned. The Warhawks named their stadium in his honour.

The early history of ULM football is hardly thrilling stuff. Even at this low level of the college football ladder, the team was generally outmatched, and it rounded out the 1950s by going 1-8-1, 4-6, 7-3, 2-6, 6-3, and 2-8. The Warhawks had their moments, but generally the program was defined by chasing .500 in a conference full of teams that would eventually end up in FCS. Their usual opponents during this era include Southeastern Louisiana, Northwestern State, Delta State, McNeese State, Western Kentucky, and Louisiana Tech. And most of the time, facing that level of competition, they came up short.

With the exception of the bewildering 1987 season, in which ULM came out of nowhere to beat eight ranked opponents and win the Division I-AA national championship (directly before and after 5-6 campaigns), they had pretty much no significant history to speak of when they took on heavily-favoured Alabama in 2007. Their only real accomplishment since jumping to I-A in 1994 was employing the best-named OC/DC pair in college football history: Ed Zaunbrecher and Dave Dunkelberger, who sadly mustered nothing better than a 5-17 record across two seasons. In 2001, they’d joined a Sun Belt in flux: of the conference's other six members, Idaho, New Mexico State, North Texas, and Middle Tennessee would all depart in the next two decades. They were, at least, playing their biggest rival, the ULL Ragin’ Cajuns (formerly Southeastern Louisiana), but the process of realignment had also broken up their rivalry with nearby Louisiana Tech. At the time our story begins, ULM’s most notable achievement in the Sun Belt was managing to tie for the conference title with a losing record overall—a dubious honour that occurred when they went 5-6 and 5-2 in the Sun Belt, promptly losing to fellow co-champ ULL by 33 points in the season finale. When they walked into Bryant-Denny Stadium in November 2007, they had started the season 0-4, had just one win over an FBS opponent with a winning record, and were at that point the only win in North Texas's 1-9 start to the season. Just one week ago, they’d been in a one-score game with Grambling State deep in the third quarter.

Looking at this unimpressive record, the question naturally arises: why are the Warhawks playing in Division I-A, considering most of their historical opponents reside in the I-AA’s Southland and that they appear obviously incapable of finding any top-level success? Well, to take a big step back, let’s stop looking at ULM and look instead at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. This is what makes college football’s grand illusion of upwards mobility just that—an illusion. To go back to our examples of successful rank-climbers, App State is a public university with a student population of around 20,000 and an endowment of $133 million; that formula makes it possible for them to stand atop the Sun Belt, but it would be difficult to rise much higher. Our P5 self-starter, Utah, is a flagship school with research recognition, over 30,000 students, and an endowment that recently reached $1 billion. What’s more, both are located in cities that stand out as fitting bases for their level of attainment: Boone, North Carolina is a solid but unexceptional mountain town, while Salt Lake City, Utah is a thriving capital at the heart of a huge metropolitan area.

This is all very dry, but there is a lesson here. Investment is required for teams to move up in the NCAA system, but investment alone can’t do much if the underlying truths about the university stunt its growth. A simple glance at ULM’s revenue, the smallest in FBS, is enough to suggest that they should probably be at a different level. Every major fact about this university—its student body (just shy of 9,000), its endowment ($73 million), and its city (Monroe, larger than Boone but not as developed)—suggests it is fighting an uphill battle. Which begs the question: why?

There’s a tendency to respond to that question with a shrug of the shoulders. Most of the sweeping realignment scenarios you'll see batted about quietly demote ULM to an FCS conference (typically the Southland). And that’s a shame! Questions about institutional goals and program values can reveal not just what a university is looking to gain from hosting a football program, but insights into what all universities are ultimately trying to do. Why do Ivy League schools play a sport that can lead to concussions and long-term brain damage? Why do UConn and UMass stubbornly persist in trying to make FBS work? What's up with those non-scholarship teams in the Pioneer League? Investigating those mysteries can lead to some very interesting places; writing them off as weird, ongoing mistakes does an injustice to the hundreds of people who pour their effort into trying to keep these teams afloat.

So what’s the story at ULM? We'll piece that puzzle together more later on, when fellow Sun Belt member Idaho makes the decision that the Warhawks won’t, but for now, rest assured that there are reasons. Football at ULM isn’t something that's been forgotten; on the contrary, this is a program that has been trying to succeed for a very long time. It’s just...very bad at getting off the ground.

So: back to 2007. At the end of the previous year, four days before Christmas, then-Dolphins coach Nick Saban had outright declared he wasn't going to be Alabama’s coach; then, two days after New Year’s, he signed the contract and headed to Tuscaloosa, agreeing to a staggering eight-year, $32 million deal. Of course we all know how this story ends, but suspend disbelief for a moment and suppose this situation were to happen today. A blueblood struggling to get to .500 shells out one of the biggest contracts in the sport to a coach who, while solid when he last led a college team, has just watched the Dolphins go completely off the rails and finish 6-10, then bailed for Bama. Not exactly a home-run hire, although to his credit, he gets to 6-4 in his first season, pulls off ranked wins over Arkansas and Tennessee, and puts up a fight against quality Georgia and LSU teams. There’s optimism in the air...even if he did just lose to Mississippi State, the exact thing that lost Mike Shula this job a year ago.

And it's at this moment that a Sun Belt team that has never so much as made a bowl comes to Tuscaloosa and wins. Okay, yes, it’s a bit of a flukey loss—Alabama outgains ULM 409 to 282 and turns the ball over four times, which is usually not a particularly repeatable formula. But how exactly do you envision recovering from this? What’s the analogue for a hire in this situation panning out? What coach has taken on one of college football’s biggest paydays in the mighty SEC, then gone and lost to one of its worst teams, and still ended up as a success? Well, nowadays we have one example in Saban himself. (Two if you’d like to count Ed Orgeron as a success at LSU, I suppose.) But there was every reason to believe his days were numbered on that fateful November afternoon. It would be hard to imagine a more catastrophic outcome in his first season on the job.

In 2017, a decade after this phenomenally unlikely upset, Steven Godfrey interviewed Alabama’s then–future starting QB Greg McElroy on the subject for an SB Nation series about the 2007 season. “The UL-Monroe game,” said McElroy, “it was definitely eye-opening in the sense of...just because we’re Alabama, and we have this history and these uniforms, and we have this stadium and we have this coach and these players, doesn’t mean that we were any better than anyone else. You just had to experience such bitter, incredible disappointment to fully comprehend what it takes to prepare week to week to be successful.”

I like this line of reasoning. I mean, you can certainly see how it makes narrative sense. McElroy was a freshman in 2007 and didn't play against ULM, but it must have been agonizing watching his team lose to Division I-A’s lowest of the low, particularly with the Tide’s starting quarterback throwing two interceptions. (Of course, even with his starter underperforming, Saban would surely never pull him in favour of a freshman. That’d be crazy.) And in the wake of this shocking game, Alabama immediately turned the ship all the way around. They hung with a talented Auburn team in the Iron Bowl, beat Colorado in the Independence Bowl, and then kicked off 2008 by blowing out #9 Clemson by a 34-10 margin and rattling off eleven more wins after that. Their only losses of the season came back-to-back at the very end, to #2 Florida and #7 Utah; in the thirteen seasons since then, they have had exactly one other losing streak (at the end of 2013, against #4 Auburn and #11 Oklahoma). Oh yeah, and they went undefeated to win the 2009 title. In the sixteen years since the ULM game, Alabama has unquestionably been the best team in the sport, and there’s a pretty good argument that their dynasty has become the greatest in football history.

Seeing all this, you can present a pretty good surface-level argument that Saban masterfully turned this moment of extreme adversity into the source of the dynasty that followed, as McElroy suggests. That's all well and good, but college football’s roster turnover is too quick for that to literally be the case. I'm sure Saban brings up the ULM game in his locker room from time to time—I mean, he seems like the kind of guy who would make a lesson out of it, yeah?—but a great number of Alabama players have come through this program, won titles, and departed without ever finding themselves on the receiving end of a truly embarrassing upset. There were those upsets by Ole Miss in the mid-2010s, sure, and a recent defeat in 2021 at the hands of unranked Texas A&M that will make a fine addition to Saban’s woefully-tiny collection of bad losses. But players like DeVonta Smith and Mac Jones, who won national awards, earned first-round picks, and claimed a national title with the Tide? They apparently didn’t have many lessons to learn, considering they never lost to a team that finished outside the top fifteen in the final AP Poll.

But that’s not the most damning argument against McElroy’s too-good-to-be-true, sports-movie moral. No, for that we ought to look to the other side of the field. This game is one of about three times in the entire history of the ULM football program that could be considered anything but adversity. If whatever doesn’t kill you is supposed to make you stronger, well, the entirety of the sport has been doing its utmost to kill football in Monroe for the better part of a century. By all rights, they should be a national powerhouse by this point.

To McElroy’s credit, his broader argument is not wrong. Generally speaking, especially when a coach knows how to use it as a motivational tool, a bad loss can certainly inspire a team to greater heights of glory. Less than a year later, after all, was perhaps the most iconic case of such a comeback: the 2008 Florida Gators, spurred to a 10-0 finish following a one-point loss and Tim Tebow’s impassioned promise to play harder than anyone else for the rest of the season. It's not a hard-and-fast rule that bad losses lead to good wins, but under the right circumstances, it can certainly happen. Momentum is a powerful thing, but it can be disrupted.

But corollary to these cases where a sudden stop gives way to a remarkable run of form, it follows that there are cases where a spark of life dies quietly and without further consequence. You'd think the universe would look at a team that had struggled to get literally anything off the ground for decades and throw it a bone, but...yeah, nah. ULM went down to Lafayette the week after beating Alabama to face an awful 3-8 Louisiana-Lafayette team (more about that rivalry later), and they eked out a 17-11 win to reach technical bowl eligibility at 6-6, but they unfortunately did so in the worst shambles of a bowl season the NCAA has ever had. In 2007, teams that ended up at .500 were eligible for the postseason, but only for their own conference’s bowl ties and only if the winning teams in their league weren’t sufficient to fill those spots. Fate actually played right into ULM’s hands here (don't worry, they’d be cruelly denied soon enough), because of the eight teams in the Sun Belt, only FAU and Troy finished with winning records, leaving the Warhawks’ mere 6-6 overall record third in the league.

So what was the problem? Surely the Sun Belt, a respectable Group of 5 conference that had been around for over thirty years and ended the season with two quality eight-win teams and another that stunned Alabama, had three bids, right? Even the lowly MAC had three tie-ins. But alas, somehow the Sun Belt had exactly one postseason spot. Not only was ULM stuck sitting at home, an 8-4 Troy team with only one unranked loss and a win over bowl-bound Oklahoma State was forced to join them on the couch. Even conference champ FAU, the only team from the league that did get a spot in bowl season, was disrespectfully matched up with the sixth-best team out of C-USA, a scuffling 7-5 Memphis squad that they dismantled for a 44-27 win.

The NCAA didn't immediately fix this backwards system of ruthless tie-in adherence, but they did immediately provide the Sun Belt with a second bid for 2008, and FAU and Troy filled both spots again, though this time the Trojans were the league champs. (They lost the New Orleans Bowl to Southern Miss in overtime, while FAU outlasted Central Michigan in the Motor City Bowl—in Detroit, which is a very silly place to put a bowl with a Sun Belt bid if you ask me.) But ULM? The Warhawks showed early signs of life, losing to a decent Arkansas team by a single missed field goal in September, but their worst defensive performance against ULL ever dropped them to 1-4 and made it evident that a .500 repeat was not in the cards. Ultimately, they finished 4-8.

By 2010, every conference had at least three bids—once again exactly one season too late for ULM, which tied for third in the 2009 Sun Belt standings and finished 6-6—and since 2015 every conference has had at least four bids in every season aside from the COVID-19 affected campaign of 2020. Single-bid conferences had been a thing ever since the first-ever bowl more than a hundred years prior, and precisely one season after they left the best team in ULM’s dreadful history bereft, they disappeared forever.

Well, them’s the breaks.

I read the news but it wasn’t good
Because the bad guys won when the good guys should
Who was it that told you that the world’s not flat?
Is it a reputable source, can it be taken as fact?

”Rules”, by the Hoosiers, second stanza

College football has a reputation as a sport in which it’s easy to fail upwards, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s more precise to say that once you’re up, it’s hard to fail. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of coaching hires: for both prospective HCs and for D1 programs, it takes effort to escape upwards out of the riffraff or collapse downwards from the upper class. There is, at least, a bit more logic to where teams rank than where coaches do—as we saw earlier, more resources and a larger student body tend to set your ceiling higher—but it’s still largely down to luck. Tuscaloosa is a significantly larger city than Monroe, with a population of about 56,000 more, but more than half of that gap is accounted for purely by the University of Alabama’s undergraduate population. Were it not for the fact that the state university was established in a twenty-year window where Tuscaloosa served as the capital of Alabama, it stands to reason that the city would probably be quite similar to Monroe, perhaps with a similarly-unremarkable university.

Back to the story: ULM, in 2010, had been performing decently as of late (16-20 across their last three seasons, including some fairly impressive showings against SEC opponents). You would think they'd be able to secure at least a decent coach, right? Sure, they weren't going to pick up any of the top candidates, like Jimbo Fisher and Brian Kelly (which aged well) or Charlie Strong and Willie Taggart (which aged...not so well), but other teams around them made some inspired hires. Nearby Louisiana Tech, fresh off a 4-8 season, picked up Sonny Dykes, who had impressed as OC at Arizona, and he dragged them to 8-5 in just two seasons; today, he's fresh off a national championship appearance in his first year at TCU. Losing 16 of 22 starters, East Carolina managed to keep its program afloat by hiring Ruffin McNeill, who would go on to lead a 10-3 season in a few years' time—oh, and give some guy called Lincoln Riley his first coordinator job in the process. Even awful San José State, which was coming off a 2-10 season that left them dead last in the WAC, managed to steal the reigning AFCA Assistant Coach of the Year: Mike MacIntyre, who engineered a total turnaround to 10-2 three seasons later and went on to coach for Colorado.

Thing is, though, all of those teams have a reputation for being at least competent. Louisiana Tech made the most obviously-good-at-the-time hire of these three, and they rank the highest of the trio in all-time winning percentage, at 50th overall. ECU’s pick was a bit more dubious, considering McNeill’s greatest accomplishment at the time was not being terrible as Texas Tech’s DC, and they rank 86th in win rate. The steal of the group belonged to SJSU, which saw something in MacIntyre that didn’t show up in the box score of a Duke defense that had apparently regressed in 2009. No surprise here: the Spartans’ .489 lifetime record is 98th in FBS and the worst of these three examples.

Good hires are still possible for teams of less historical accomplishment, obviously, but they do become more difficult. SJSU’s closest neighbor in winning percentage among the teams that debuted new HCs in 2010 is Memphis, and they hired Larry Porter, who had never even coached as a coordinator and went a horrific 3-21 in two awful seasons. For teams in the bottom rungs of college football’s top tier, hires are a lot more hit-and-miss. And for ULM, which currently ranks eighth-worst in FBS...well, you just have to cross your fingers.

That’s what the Warhawks did when they hired Todd Berry in the 2010 coaching carousel, a man who had led Illinois State from 3-8 to the Division I-AA semifinals, but flamed out spectacularly at Army, where his teams went 5-35 in Conference USA. Berry was a pick from the Atlanta Falcons school of thought: namely, he was a name ULM recognised, from his two-year stint following that Army debacle as the OC in Monroe. Problem was, Berry hadn’t actually done particularly well in his first appearance with the Warhawks: he took over an offense that scored 19.9 points per game and led it to marks of 19.2 and 21.7. Considering the lack of investment ULM has to put into its football program, I wouldn’t put it past them to have picked Berry solely because the 5-6 team of 2005 managed to steal a share of the Sun Belt title by going 5-2 in the conference, its miserable offensive production notwithstanding. Call that failing upwards, if you will.

ULM didn’t go much of anywhere in Berry’s first two seasons on the job, aside from gradually backwards. From 2009 to 2010 to 2011, the Warhawks regressed by one win each year in both overall and conference record, and their seasons featured some truly humiliating outings: a 52-3 loss to Auburn, a 51-0 massacre to LSU, a 34-0 shutout to FSU. But that’s at least standard fare for G5 teams; worse were the Battles on the Bayou, ULM’s meetings with in-state rival ULL. In both of Berry’s first two games against the Ragin’ Cajuns, his team entered with a decent shot at reaching 6-6 and getting a chance to go bowling; both times, they lost by exactly one point.

In 2010, ULM faced a terrible 2-9 squad that had no business beating them, but after taking a 13-3 lead early in the second quarter, they went on a scoring drought that lasted more than half the game and left them trailing 23-13. A touchdown with just under five minutes left made the score 23-22, and...they missed the extra point. ULL even graciously offered them an interception, which they promptly turned into four consecutive incomplete passes to end the game.

Well, that was bad, but at least ULM couldn't collapse any worse in such a critical game, right? Heh. In 2011, the Cajuns engineered a shocking breakout season in Mark Hudspeth’s first year, and they entered the Battle on the Bayou sitting pretty at 7-2. Five years later, the NCAA would vacate all but one of ULL’s wins for this season, with an investigation uncovering a scheme by assistant coach David Saunders to provide prospective student-athletes with fraudulent ACT scores. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, naturally, responded by suing the ACT for failing to detect their fabricated test results. A lot of the hate ULM has for ULL is for off-field reasons, and again, we’ll get to that later...but this is a good example of where the fire in this rivalry often comes from.

On the field, ULM entered the 2011 matchup at 2-6, but still had a mathematical chance to eke out a bowl bid. They'd ultimately win two of their last three, meaning a win over ULL wouldn’t quite have been enough, but you could argue that they might have played well enough to beat FIU in that closing stretch if a postseason spot had been on the line. It still was in this game, at least on paper, and you can’t say the Warhawks didn’t play their hearts out. They jumped out to a 14-0 lead in the first quarter, but ULL immediately fought back, scoring three touchdowns in the second quarter and adding a field goal at the end of the half to take a 24-14 lead. The Warhawks responded in kind, driving for a quick touchdown to open the second half, then adding another at the start of the fourth quarter to reclaim the lead, 28-24. Their defense, a serious liability all year, came out of nowhere to force a three-and-out, then another after ULL managed one first down on their next drive. As the clock ticked under five minutes, punter Aaron Munoz pinned the Cajuns at their own 15, edge rusher Troy Evans sacked ULL’s quarterback for a loss of eight, and defensive back Khairi Usher logged the one and only interception against an FBS opponent of his career, returning it all the way to ULL’s eleven-yard line. Three plays later, workhorse RB Jyruss Edwards punched it in for a touchdown to seal the win, giving the Warhawks an eleven-point lead with just three minutes left.

Okay, well, they did immediately give up a return to their own 48 thanks to a penalty, but that was no big deal, right? I mean, to blow this, ULM would have to do something really fantastically stupid, like calling timeouts on their opponent’s drive in a late-game situation with a comfortable lead. Surely no self-respecting coach would ever...oh, come on, Todd.

In Berry’s defense, there are logical reasons to defend both of the timeouts he called on ULL’s ensuing drive, which drove 48 yards in just over a minute to score a touchdown. The first might have been to get his defense set, judging by the fact that it appears to come late in the play clock on the play-by-play, though if you can find a video that confirms or contradicts that assumption, I’d love to see it. The second came after the touchdown and before the two-point attempt, which at least doesn’t keep time from running off the clock, but is still not ideal. In a late-game situation where you’re up five points, calling a timeout before a two-point play doesn’t seem like a great move—your opponent absolutely has to convert here, given how much easier it is to score a field goal than a touchdown in a late-game situation. They’ve just drawn up back-to-back successful plays to score a touchdown without much time to work with, and now you’re giving them more of an opportunity to think about the most important play of the game thus far? I don’t get it, but at least it's not as egregious as stopping the clock during an opponent’s desperation drive.

And hey, good news: despite being given an extra minute to figure out their call, ULL’s two-point play fell short! They couldn’t tie the game with a field goal, so all ULM really needed to do to put away the win was to recover their onside kick. Which they didn’t. Typical. The Cajuns immediately drove 39 yards in three plays, never faced a second down, and took a 36-35 lead with just over a minute remaining. Just to add insult to injury, they tried another two-point conversion, which likewise fell short to ensure ULM would lose to their rival by the smallest possible margin for the second year in a row.

This is, I assure you, the worst sequence of back-to-back losses ULM has ever had against ULL. Nothing will ever top this woebegone pair of games. Promise.

But hey, we’re not here to talk about 2011, we’re here to talk about 2012! Following that painful finish to the previous season, the Warhawks could justifiably have parted ways with Berry, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t really have anywhere better to go. So they brought him back for 2012, a season which they started by travelling to Little Rock for a date with #8 Arkansas. Okay, well, I say “#8”, but I’ll admit I’m being a bit misleading there. Immediately following this game, the Razorbacks would welcome #1 Alabama to Fayetteville and get completely run off the field to a 52-0 margin. The week after that, they would lose to Rutgers. Rutgers, folks. Ultimately, they finished 4-8 and fired John L. Smith after just one season, a move that is practically unheard of for a coach without major scandal. Suffice it to say that beating this team would not be quite as impressive as it appeared on first blush.

That being said, it's still ridiculously hard for any Sun Belt team to beat any SEC team, ever, and ULM’s 34-31 overtime win over the Razorbacks marked their second such stunner in six seasons. Arkansas seemed to be in cruise control midway through the third quarter, leading 28-7 with just over 20 minutes left, but the Warhawks slowly but surely clawed their way back. The Warhawks started a drive at their own 25, then converted a 3rd and 2 and a 3rd and 10. Facing 4th and 10 near midfield, Berry figured now was as good a time as any to try something and had quarterback Kolton Browning try to run for the first down. Somehow, this not only worked, it picked up 19 yards and left ULM on the doorstep of the red zone. A few plays later, Edwards picked up a touchdown, and the comeback was on.

As the Warhawks’ defense forced five punts in a row—four of them on three-and-outs—Browning led two more scoring drives. On the first, he barely converted a 4th and 11 with a thirteen-yard pass, then completed a touchdown pass on 4th and goal near the start of the fourth quarter. Then, after three of ULM’s own possessions fizzled out, Browning engineered a miraculous drive on which he passed on every play and went 6-for-10 for 90 yards and a game-tying touchdown. Brandon Allen, a quarterback who would later refine himself into an impressively accurate passer and remains active in the NFL to this day, tossed an interception on the Razorbacks’ final drive of regulation, and he went 0-for-5 in overtime, leading to an Arkansas field goal. Their last-ditch chance to escape unscathed came on ULM’s drive, as they managed to tackle receiver Tavarese Maye a yard short of the first down on 3rd and 8. Berry looked at the situation: 4th and 1, trailing by three in overtime...maybe just kick a field goal and live to fight another day? As if. The Warhawks put the ball in the hands of—who else?—Kolton Browning, who dropped back in the pocket, juked an edge rusher, picked up the first down and just kept running all the way to the endzone to walk it off.

It was the start of a miracle season for ULM. In their next outing, they hung with Auburn and scored two late touchdowns to take an SEC foe to overtime for the second week in a row, but Berry chose to attempt a field goal on 4th and 5 in OT, and ULM lost after missing it and watching Auburn make their own. Still, it was a pretty solid showing given the imbalance between the Sun Belt and SEC, and they wrapped up a three-for-three run of surprisingly competitive outings against P5 opponents when they lost to Baylor 47-42 in their next game (which also featured the largest home crowd in ULM history). To close out their non-conference slate, the Warhawks smoked C-USA’s Tulane to the tune of a 63-10 victory, marking their biggest FBS win in the 21st century and kickstarting a five-game winning streak. With an entire month of football left, ULM had already tied the second-winningest seasons in program history.

The Battle on the Bayou was a letdown after that remarkable run—the Cajuns led just 21-17 at halftime, but Browning went down with an injury late in the first half, and ULL pulled away to win 40-24 in the end. The Warhawks lost their next game with their QB unavailable as well, facing an Arkansas State team that was in the middle of a historic run of four winning seasons under four coaches in four years. Once Browning returned, though, they won their last two games of the season to finish 8-4 and officially break the school record for single-season wins.

The NCAA had, by this point, modified its postseason rules, and ULM would finally play in their first-ever postseason game in 2012. Funnily enough, though, they once again played witness to the bewildering farce that bowl season’s selection process was at the time. The Independence Bowl, in nearby Shreveport, was intended to feature two barely-eligible teams from the ACC and SEC, but its organizers were left scrambling when both conferences ended up exactly one bowl team short. They first approached 9-3 Louisiana Tech, home to the highest-scoring offense in college football, which unsurprisingly had several other suitors in the Liberty Bowl and Heart of Dallas Bowl. The following day, the Liberty Bowl’s executive allegedly guaranteed the Bulldogs a spot in their bowl, per LA Tech’s athletic director and the WAC’s commissioner. With their invitation to LA Tech having expired, the Independence Bowl offered its open spot to Ohio instead, whereupon the Liberty Bowl unexpectedly picked Iowa State. As for the Bulldogs? This bewildering game of musical chairs left them with nowhere to play in the postseason, and a nine-win team with a thrilling offense found itself at home for December. This, of course, resulted in former LA Tech star Karl Malone arguing on Twitter that “it's time to get former athletes to run our program. I’m 6”9 (sic) and not hard to find.” This did not ultimately result in Louisiana Tech athletic director Karl Malone, shockingly.

(There is another take on this whole story, which is that Louisiana Tech denied the Independence Bowl bid because it would have pitted them against in-state rival ULM. The two teams had played 43 times as of 2012, but their 2000 meeting was then, and remains now, their last game against each other. SB Nation reported that multiple sources framed the decision thus, rather than as an attempt by the nine-win Bulldogs to find a better bowl, but there’s not much to firmly confirm or deny that theory. If it’s accurate, though, it’s absolutely hilarious that Louisiana Tech cheated one of their best-ever teams out of a bowl as a result.)

Fortunately, ULM didn’t have nearly as much difficulty finding their spot. The Independence Bowl offered them its other available place, pitting them against Frank Solich's 8-4 Ohio squad on what was effectively home turf. The Warhawks were seven-point favourites; the Bobcats promptly set Independence Bowl records for rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, total offense, and margin of victory, dominating 45-14. Browning threw three picks for the only time in his career, and the best season in school history came to a jarring conclusion.

Still, ULM was in a good place as a program. Browning was named the Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year (despite not being selected to the first team, oddly enough) and was set to return for his senior season in 2013. Berry received a four-year extension, and the Warhawks had every reason to believe they could keep the party going.

People are always looking for something they can’t find
One man’s fact’s another’s trick of the mind
People are always looking for something they can’t find
One man’s fact’s another’s trick of the mind

“Rules”, by the Hoosiers, third stanza

It's natural that we want to narrativize college football, but annoyingly, fate doesn’t always do us the kindness of setting things up in such a way that we can tell a simple story with them. One of the defining elements of the ULM program is their rivalry with ULL, and it would be nice if a win in 2012 had propelled them to that miracle season, but they got blown out and still ended up comfortably above .500. Accordingly, it would make sense if ULM’s dramatic three-point win in the 2013 edition of the rivalry, made possible by a standout performance by Browning (18-for-28, 247 yards, 2 touchdowns, and a key two-point conversion), was the key to a second straight bowl. It felt like a symbol of the Warhawks’ slow-but-steady transformation into a program deserving of respect—this time, they weren’t collapsing or barely squeezing through to beat ULL, but rather dealing with a late Cajuns touchdown in perfectly sensible fashion, calmly recovering an onside kick and managing an unusual clock situation (one second left for a fourth-down play) without issue. The win brought their regular season to an end, thanks to the Sun Belt finally putting the rivalry game on Rivalry Week, and it got them to bowl eligibility with a 6-6 record. But alas, not all .500 teams were offered bowl spots, and of the seven that ended up on the outside looking in, four hailed from the Sun Belt, including our plucky, unlucky protagonists.

That was the end of the closest thing ULM has ever had to a golden era. In 2014 they beat Dave Clawson’s first Wake Forest team in a game that ended with a punt-punt-punt-punt-punt-touchdown-punt-kneels sequence; that win propelled a 3-1 start, and then the good days came to a screeching halt and the Warhawks finished 1-7, their only win coming over a similarly mediocre 2-10 New Mexico State. The following year, they picked up a win over Nicholls State on September 12 to reach 1-1, then did not win again until December 5, again while facing NMSU. Following a 59-21 loss to Arkansas State in mid-November, Berry was summarily dismissed, finishing 2-16 after that hot start to 2014. (In rivalry news, the 2014 team lost to ULL by a touchdown while rushing for negative 39 yards, and the 2015 team blew a 24-9 lead to ULL and lost 30-24.)

Matt Viator, who had built a contender at McNeese State and was coming off his fifth FCS playoff appearance, took over for the Warhawks, and his first team wasn't much better than Berry’s last. In 2016, ULM went 4-8, beating only FCS Southern, 2-10 Texas State, 6-7 South Alabama, and 3-9 Georgia State. Small mercy that the Battle on the Bayou offered no heartbreak, only hopelessness, as ULL dominated in a 30-3 win despite quarterback Anthony Jennings throwing just five passes through a torrential downpour. (Other fun facts: the most yards gained on a pass occurred on an 18-yard interception return by Justin Backus, the teams combined for four interceptions and five completions, and the victorious Cajuns gained no passing yards.) I’ll spoil this, too: the 2017 team was bound for a similar fate to the 2016 one. They’d go 4-8, and they’d only pick up one win over a bowl participant.

If you’ve made it over six thousand words into this sorry story, you’re probably still wondering the same thing many others have wondered before: why on earth is ULM still plugging away in FBS? Again, most of their historical opponents play in the Southland, which is a better fit for the Warhawks on every conceivable front. They’ve never put together anything approaching consistency at this level, and even when they have dallied with being half-decent, fate has gone out of its way to personally ruin every good thing they’ve ever had.

Well, allow me to introduce a foil to the Warhawks in fellow Sun Belt member Idaho. (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, Idaho is about as far as you can possibly get from the Sun Belt in the continental United States. Football realignment is just weird that way.) The Vandals’ history is generally comparable to ULM: they’ve had periods as a low-level contender struggling to put something of substance together, separated by long stretches as a bottom-feeder in the Group of Five. Idaho’s been slightly more successful at their best—they managed to put together three bowl appearances in separate eras of decency, winning all three—but they belong to the same general tier as our heroes.

The difference is that, effective after the 2017 season, the Vandals became the first program in history to voluntarily and individually drop from FBS to FCS. It's exactly the kind of move that has long been proposed for ULM, complete with a waiting conference full of Idaho’s past foes—in their case, the Big West. The decision was, in part, spurred by the Sun Belt’s decision to drop the Vandals, along with fellow non-regional member NMSU, but they still had the option of pursuing the Mountain West or electing for independence, both of which the outbound Aggies attempted. Then again, it’s not Idaho whose decision has been more second-guessed, but New Mexico State, who had every reason to drop down and perhaps join the burgeoning effort to relaunch the WAC, for which they were already a member in other sports. By and large, the Vandals were respected and even praised for finding a more fitting home for their football program, which had almost always been overmatched at the FBS level.

Over their history against each other, Idaho went 6-3 when facing ULM, including three straight wins to finish their tenure in the Sun Belt. In their 2017 meeting, the last time the two would face off at the top level, the Vandals stormed to a 31-7 lead, and ULM’s attempted comeback fell short in a 31-23 loss. It was Idaho’s second-to-last win over an FBS opponent, and in five FCS seasons since, they have just one winning season after the drop. But they’re playing the teams they want to, and they’re not shelling out Sun Belt money to drudge along in the back end of a conference whose other members are thousands of miles away. They’re happy, more or less.

Are the Warhawks? They could have made the same choice as Idaho, in 2017 or in any other year. The Southland is waiting with open arms, particularly in the present day as they struggle to keep their status as an FCS conference alive. Certainly, ULM can’t think there’s much to be gained at their current level, not if they’re being realistic. So what’s keeping them? Is it just the unlikely, over-optimistic hope that after decades of spinning their wheels, they'll finally find a way to build something of value in Monroe?

That's probably part of it. And hey, I can’t act like I think they're ridiculous to believe in that, even though there’s very little objective reason to expect success at ULM. I personally have more than a little investment in this team, just by virtue of piecing together their story and wanting it to be told, and I will shamelessly admit that I want them to keep trying in FBS, as illogical as it may be. Someday, their luck has to change, right? And when it does, it’ll be one of the purest, most lovable underdog stories in the history of sports. But if the fates have any interest in giving ULM a chance, they haven’t shown it yet.

Before we move on from 2017, we should at least take a parenthetical look at one of ULM’s rare modern victories over ULL. For reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension, this matchup was scheduled in September for the first time in 25 years, but that didn’t prevent it from carrying all the drama of a season finale in Lafayette. The winless Warhawks took a 16-0 lead early in the second quarter, thanks in part to a gorgeous punt that pinned ULL at their own one-yard line and set up a safety three plays later. But the Cajuns woke up and scored a pair of touchdowns, with kicker Stevie Artigue missing his second PAT to make the score 23-13 Warhawks at halftime. ULM’s offense scored three touchdowns after halftime—one with a second missed PAT in the game, this by Craig Ford—to take a 43-22 advantage, but with less than ten minutes left, ULL staged a furious comeback. Putting together two drives of over 80 yards, with a 25-yard return and short 37-yard possession in between, ULL got within a touchdown before facing the critical final play of regulation. Cajuns quarterback Andre Nunez evaded a diving tackle and found Ja’Marcus Bradley in the back of the endzone with no time left on the clock, and Calvin Linden replaced Artigue to hit the all-important extra point and send the Battle on the Bayou to its first-ever overtime.

The teams traded touchdowns in the first extra period, with ULM converting a pair of 3rd and 1 situations thanks to Derrick Gore’s rushing and Nunez coming through on 4th and 7 before scoring the Cajuns’ TD on a six-yard scramble. ULL got the ball to start the second overtime, but facing their second 4th and 7 from the Warhawks’ 22, they decided not to press their luck and sent Linden out to attempt his first-ever college field goal in double overtime of a rivalry game. No pressure!

Linden’s 39-yarder missed, and all ULM had to do to finally close out the win was kick a field goal of their own. Instead, Warhawks QB Caleb Evans rushed for six yards and Gore added 19, picking up the game-winning touchdown on 3rd and 4 to seal a 56-50 victory. The fantastical final stats included 1119 total yards, four missed kicks, a 28-for-34 performance by Evans, and 59 combined first downs. Both teams rushed and passed for over 230 yards and lost no turnovers, which had only happened twice before in the 21st century and has only happened twice since.

Looking back at it, it feels like the last time you could really consider ULL and ULM equals. While they would remain competitive on the field in the years to come, the Cajuns would separate themselves in the hierarchy of college football programs with their hire of Billy Napier in the following offseason. For years, artificially separated from most of their past opponents by the FBS-FCS divide, the Warhawks at least had company in their misery, with ULM’s arrival in Division I-A coinciding with the start of a 25-season streak by ULL in which they never won more than seven games. But under Napier, the Cajuns would swiftly build a powerhouse, becoming a leader in the Sun Belt and one of the best-respected programs in the nation. The rising tide of college football’s steady growth in the south had finally come to lift ULL’s ship, and only one seaworthy vessel across the sport’s most beloved region still found its efforts in vain.

ULM had stunned the greatest program in history, found their way to a bowl and gotten run off the field in humiliating fashion, beaten and lost to their main rival in every way you could think of, and none of it had ever changed what they were at their core. They were still, as they had ever been, eternally stuck spinning their wheels in four-win purgatory. And now the team they hated most, the only one they’d ever been able to call a close competitor, was leaving them in the dust, while the only pair of teams in the conference that had tried and failed to find consistency as long as ULM had were moving out of the Sun Belt.

For the first time in their history, the Warhawks were alone.

One man falls, another takes his place
He chases the wind until the end of his days
One man falls, another takes his place
He chases the wind until the end of his days
One man falls, another takes his place
One man falls, another takes his place
One man falls, another takes...

”Rules”, by the Hoosiers, bridge

ULM’s results between 2007 and 2017 fit any number of synonyms for “unlucky” you could think of. Missing bowl season after finishing 6-6 on three occasions certainly qualifies as “snakebit”, missing out on a chance to beat an in-state rival in a bowl and bring energy to the program thanks to a grudge feels awfully “hapless”, and having the third-worst rushing performance of the 21st century in a competitive rivalry game fits the bill for “star-crossed”.

But “cursed”? It's an overused term, obviously—in the NFL alone, claimants to the term include the Vikings, Bills, Falcons, Cardinals, Lions, and anyone who’s ever shown up on the cover of Madden. It's human nature to assume that if a team just can’t seem to get over the hump, it must’ve been magically jinxed at some point, but folks, I’m afraid to say that sometimes your team just sucks. As of 2017, you could have made that argument to a ULM fan. Sure, they’d gone through some unfortunate stretches, but hasn’t every team? And it’s not like you can really claim that losing 39 yards on the ground against your biggest rival is anyone’s fault but your own. A lot of the pain had been self-inflicted.

To those who would doubt that some higher power has a personal vendetta against the Warhawks, though, the last five seasons have removed all doubt. Start with 2018, a season where ULM’s distant hopes of a return to the postseason looked dead in the water at midseason. Following a horrific 70-21 blowout by Ole Miss, they sat at 2-4 and had lost both of their Sun Belt games, including a 32-point defeat by a Georgia State team that would finish 2-10. But the Warhawks caught fire down the stretch, winning four in a row to secure bowl eligibility with two weeks to spare. That being said, we know by now that the six-win barrier is hardly a comfortable position for ULM, and in a bowl season where only 10 of the 14 eligible teams at .500 earned berths, they couldn’t be assured anything. A loss to Arkansas State set up a critical showdown with ULL, themselves seeking a win to clinch the Sun Belt West title.

The Ragin’ Cajuns stormed to a 21-7 lead early in the second quarter, but ULM climbed back into the game on the back of a 66-yard pick-six by star cornerback Corey Straughter. With time running out, Caleb Evans engineered a miraculous 76-yard drive in just 1:37, scoring a touchdown with 4:47 left in the game to make it a three-point affair. The defense forced a punt, giving ULM the ball back with about two minutes left, but their offense sputtered to a stop near midfield. On fourth and one, third-year HC Viator drew up a desperation play—and Evans converted, completing a 30-yard pass to get a first down in the red zone. But too quickly, the Warhawks ran out of time. Stuck at the ULL 19, with seconds left on the clock, Viator sent out Craig Ford to kick a relative chip shot, a 36-yard field goal to send the game to overtime.

He missed. The Warhawks fell to 6-6, ULL won the West, and ULM was left out of bowl season despite being eligible. Quelle surprise.

There’s always next year, though, and 2019 opened with a surprisingly familiar P5 upset bid for the Warhawks. Florida State did what they were expected to do for the first half against ULM, pulling out to a 24-7 lead at the break, but Straughter got another long pick-six to key a comeback, and the Warhawks took a shocking 35-31 lead with 7:41 left. FSU finally woke up at that point, putting together a methodical five-play drive to reclaim the lead, and Jacob Meeks (ULM’s new starting kicker) made a 24-yard field goal near the end of regulation to take the Seminoles to overtime. The Warhawks’ defense twice got Florida State to third down on their OT possession, but they still managed to convert for a touchdown, forcing ULM to do the same—which they did, only for Meeks to miss the all-important extra point. At least you can say it wasn't the worst one-point loss in Warhawks history, eh?

Nevertheless, ULM had gotten the season off to a decent start, and even a 72-20 loss to Iowa State in their next game didn’t kill all their momentum. The Warhawks found wins here and there, and after a back-and-forth run of seven consecutive touchdowns in their meeting with Coastal Carolina, they eked out a 45-42 win over the Chanticleers to reach 5-6 going into the final week of the regular season. It would be natural to assume that even a win in their last game wouldn't be enough for ULM, but the number of bowls was finally starting to approach the number of .500+ teams, and just one eligible team was left out in the end (a 6-6 Toledo squad that finished on a three-game losing streak). There was hope! And fate had even deigned to offer the Warhawks a second chance at breaking up ULL’s hunt for the division title, which they were once again seeking to clinch.

By this point in the season, Meeks was solely handling kickoffs, while punter Jared Porter had taken over on field goals and extra points. Porter had done well, missing just two PATs thus far, but when ULM scored a touchdown to go up two in the fourth quarter, he missed the extra point that would have made it a three-point lead. The Cajuns took over with 7:56 to go and commenced a mammoth drive, working their way towards the ULM endzone at a snail's pace to take as much time as possible. Averaging 26 seconds between plays, they faced seven third and fourth downs and bled 6:35 off the clock, making it to the ULM ten-yard line before finally stopping. Artigue hit a 27-yard field goal, and the Warhawks were faced with the need to put together a similarly-long drive in about a fifth as much time. But out of determination or desperation, ULM charged downfield at breakneck speed. Delicately managing the clock, their timeouts, and tricky down-and-distance situations, they converted a 3rd and 11 and a 4th and 6 to set up a game-winning 35-yard attempt with just seconds remaining.

I'll say this about fate: at least it’s got a sense of humour.

Porter missed the field goal, and the Warhawks could only watch as ULL celebrated a division title that everyone thought they’d blown, the end poetically similar to the previous year’s. I’ll spare you the details of 2020—in which ULM went 0-10, lost to the Cajuns by 50, and fired Viator—and swiftly move on to 2021. Starting in this season, the Warhawks were led by Terry Bowden, who built longsuffering Akron into a solid program and won the MAC East in 2017, only to be fired a year later after a 4-8 finish. There was stirring optimism in Monroe for Bowden's tenure—it was that time again in their unending cycle of dashed hopes—after two four-win seasons in which ULM proved very punchy. A bowl even looked possible in 2021 when they reached 4-3 with upsets over Liberty and South Alabama, but a five-game losing streak aborted that premature postseason bid.

At long last, we've arrived at the present day. The original impetus for this lengthy look at Louisiana-Monroe was a non-conference game scheduled for 2022: ULM returned to Alabama for just the second time since 2007, though on this occasion, it was safe to say no upset is in store; the Crimson Tide rolled 63-7. As ever, the Warhawks had to believe there was a path to the postseason, despite it all. As ever, it all had the final say, and despite a delightful September upset of ULL (just listen to this radio call!), ULM came up just short too often to make a run at a bowl.

I don’t have anything more to say on the football program’s story—I doubt hammering in the continuous pain of ULM fandom any further would have much of an impact. But before I try to wrap this wandering narrative in a neat little bow, I feel I ought to explain why the Battle on the Bayou is such a big deal. So if you’ll indulge me for a few moments more, I’ll offer up the messy underside of the Warhawks’ wretched tale.

People didn’t always get along though, did they?
People didn’t always like each other, did they?

Ooh, you know you’re never gonna get to find out anyway
The game plays us for fools
Ooh, you know you’re never gonna get to have the final say
You don't get to make the rules

”Rules”, by the Hoosiers, pre-chorus and chorus

When I initially wrote this story, my research led me to believe there was probably no trophy for the Battle on the Bayou. Wikipedia claimed that the “Wooden Boot” had been awarded since 2002, but it provided no source. Neither team’s official website had ever mentioned such a trophy, nor was I able to find any pictures of this purported limber loafer, so I was forced to conclude it does not exist. But as it turns out, it is real…sort of. It’s not actually a shoe, but rather a trophy in the shape of the state of Louisiana. (Because it’s shaped like a boot. Get it?) It was cheap, which everything had to be for deeply-indebted ULM during the 2000s, but it was theirs. Except that…well, nobody actually seemed to want it, least of all ULL, which wasn’t even aware the Battle on the Bayou had become a trophy game. The boot never ended up in Lafayette, which it should have after the Cajuns won in 2005, and then–interim coach Mike Collins (who left after the Boot’s first season to join none other than Nick Saban at LSU) discovered it in the back of a closet while serving as Viator’s DC in 2016. It’s been at his house on Lake D’Arbonne ever since. (Thanks to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser’s Cory Diaz for her excellent piece on the trophy!)

Knowing as we do now that the trophy isn’t used today, it’s a damn shame. There are worse games that have trophies—famously, for example, the manufactured Civil ConFLiCT (yes, that's the correct styling) between UCF and UConn, which has a trophy so meaningless that UCF all but lost it on purpose once they won. For my money, the worst trophy that’s still in use is the one awarded for the game between Bowling Green and Toledo, a rivalry called the Battle of I-75: the trophy is, rather unimaginatively, the Battle of I-75 Trophy, and features—you guessed it—a highway marker for I-75. It’s a doubly missed opportunity, considering the two used to share a more interesting Peace Pipe Trophy and that their rivalry is also called the Black Swamp Showdown.

From the glimpses we’ve seen of ULM-ULL on the field, I think you’ll agree it’s a good game. The series is historically close—the Cajuns lead 31-26, or 32-26 if you include their vacated win from 2011—and while ULL has won most of the recent games, they’ve been consistently competitive. Across all of football, few rivalries are as reliable a source of drama as this.

But what defines the Battle on the Bayou isn’t the football games; it's the name games. Way back in 1953, when the first game between the two schools was played, ULM was instead Northeast Louisiana State, while ULL was Southwestern Louisiana. In the late 1990s, the University of Louisiana system was created, and the two schools updated their current names in a corresponding move: Louisiana-Monroe and Louisiana-Lafayette.

It should be noted that there is no single school under the name “University of Louisiana”. This university system was created with the intent of unifying a diverse set of schools in a state that has historically struggled with regional inequality and education. That's part of the reason it has no flagship: placing its schools, from thriving New Orleans (metro population: 1.3 million) to tiny Grambling (population: 5,239), on the same level is a first step towards making education in the state more widely and fairly available. In the case of schools like UL-Lafayette and UL-Monroe, where the former has tighter admissions standards, more students and faculties, and better-respected research, that intentional movement towards equality is important.

I’d be remiss if I didn't note that Monroe’s population is majority black and Lafayette’s is majority white. There is a history of economic and racial discrimination underlying ULL’s superior educational status, and the fact that the UL system establishes them as academic peers represents a desire to challenge the imbalance that exists as a result. Even nomenclature matters to that lofty goal: it's important enough that when the system was established, the state legislature that handled the move went so far as to ban any individual school from calling itself the “University of Louisiana” or “UL”, preventing any of the larger universities in the system from posturing as the flagship.

So when, in November 2014, the Cajuns placed this prominent section in their game notes for the meeting with ULM, it was hard for it not to feel like a slap in the face:

WE ARE LOUISIANA

• There is confusion among the national sports organizations as how to refer to the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns.

• Our official name is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but much like our opponents around the country, we simply go by Louisiana when referring to our athletic programs.

• Although we proudly refer to our University with its full title for academic purposes, we ask that Louisiana, Ragin’ Cajuns or Cajuns be used to refer to us athletically.

UL-Lafayette game notes for 2014 football meeting with ULM

I should state up front that I have no problem with ULL’s actual football team. They’re a likeable enough bunch, and I cheered them on in 2021 as they won their first outright conference title since 1970. But when it comes to the UL-Lafayette athletic department, the group that decided in the 2010s to start calling its sports programs “Louisiana”? Now that is a group which has earned my ire. There are, of course, laws against using specific phrases and abbreviations to refer to a UL school as if it were the flagship, but technically ULL isn’t violating those rules, as they hastily point out whenever this conflict is brought up. “University of Louisiana” is prohibited, because obviously you'd need to use it in order to brand a school as such—but the possibility of just using “Louisiana” was overlooked. By the absurdly literal letter of the law, this branding decision is technically legal.

For a while, ULM held out as best they could. When ULL started asking the Sun Belt to style its name as “Louisiana” in its media guides and press releases, ULM made the same request to force an impasse and maintain the existing UL-Lafayette/UL-Monroe names. But in 2017, they gave up that small act of resistance. They’d already lost. ESPN and every other sports site and network had long since started using the Cajuns’ new preferred name. Who has the time to say “Lafayette”, after all?

I think, if you had one of the major athletic leaders at ULM on the spot and asked them why they really want to stay in FBS, despite so many reasons to drop down to a level more fitting of their football status, they’d say that this is the reason. Not just, specifically, the debate over athletic branding—but the bigger picture, the inequality that lurks behind so much of education and college athletics in Louisiana. The Warhawks and their university already stand at a severe disadvantage to ULL for too many reasons to count, of which this ridiculous semantic struggle is just one. To drop to FCS and leave Louisiana-Lafayette as one of only two teams in the UL system playing college football at the highest level? As much sense as it might make, as obvious as it would be to just about any other athletic department in the nation, there is a much grander vision underlying this seemingly-petty squabble, one that ULM is doing its part to bring to fruition.

It’s clear that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Louisiana at Monroe are not equals. And it’s equally clear that the Warhawks and Ragin’ Cajuns are not equals. But ULM knows that changing those facts requires believing in the unrealistic: believing that prospective students can see ULL and ULM as similar schools, and that athletes can speak of the 2021 conference champs in the same breath as a team that has never won a bowl. They have to believe still in the same things they have always foolishly, optimistically, illogically hoped for: an opportunity for a misbegotten football team at a dirt-poor university in a backwater southern town to rise to the top and pull off one more unbelievably unlikely upset. The people who live for this oft-forgotten program are people of hope, not reason.

It’s not easy. If you're a ULM fan sometimes you just have to laugh; if you started crying you might never stop, through the missed field goals and bowl snubs and legal battles alike. College football has a fascinating capacity for euphoric joy and heart-rending pain, the stirring emotion that can only be so keenly felt because it so often turns away underdogs empty-handed. I think, in the grand scale, that’s what the Warhawks are searching for: the ascent that will be all the more rapturous because of the agonising decades that preceded it. The rational among us would call it a sunk-cost fallacy, but this sport never was for rational people. And I think we have to be grateful that those who carry the torch for football at ULM are willing to forgo reason in the pursuit of that distant moment of glory—and the hope of equality and cooperation that it represents.