100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

Mel Long Jr. walked off the field at Beaver Stadium with tears in his eyes and a teammate's arm draped around his neck. The son of Toledo's all-time greatest player had just helped the Rockets do something no MAC team had ever done to Joe Paterno.

Toledo 24, Penn State 6. Sept. 2, 2000. The Rockets were 19½-point underdogs.

Jim Harding, the 6-foot-7, 305-pound offensive tackle from Maumee, choked up in his postgame interview.

"This is unbelievable," he said. "It's hard to talk. I have so many emotions."

"The big thing is our program wants respect. We had a chance to do that today. Penn State didn't schedule us (to lose) and we had to take advantage and get it."

Head coach Gary Pinkel allowed himself one moment of raw honesty.

"When it was about a minute and a half and it was over, I hugged (cornerback) Jehu Anderson and said, 'You know what, we did it,'" Pinkel told reporters. "And we gave each other a big hug."

"It's the biggest win of my career. It's great for the conference. It's great for the University of Toledo."

Chester Taylor, the junior tailback who had rushed for 141 yards and two touchdowns, was already looking ahead.

"It's the biggest win so far, but a bigger win is a Bowl game," Taylor told the AP. "That'll be the next big win. We proved we can play with anybody as long as we play together."

He never got the chance.

What this team was

The 2000 Toledo Rockets went 10-1. They scored 400 points and allowed 125. They won their 10 games by an average of 28.2 points. They shut out three opponents, including a 42-0 demolition of Marshall — the team that received the Mid-American Conference's only bowl invitation.

After the Penn State win, the Rockets shut out Weber State 51-0, beat Eastern Illinois 31-26, then lost their only game of the season at Western Michigan, 21-14. They responded by winning their final seven — outscoring opponents 280-72.

They finished the regular season ranked No. 25 in both the Associated Press and coaches' polls.

They did not play in a bowl game.

One of the greatest MAC teams of the century's first 25 years. And the system locked them out.

The game

Toledo was a 19½-point underdog. Paterno was seven wins shy of Bear Bryant's all-time Division I-A victory record. Penn State had never lost to a Mid-American Conference opponent — 11-0 under Paterno, 219-34 in combined scoring in the previous four MAC games. The Rockets were there to collect a check and a loss.

Except it didn't turn out that way.

"Penn State wasn't the best football team in Happy Valley yesterday," Toledo Blade columnist Dave Hackenberg wrote. "Wasn't even close. Wasn't even close to being close."

Taylor took the handoff on the fifth play from scrimmage, broke a tackle at the 5-yard line, dragged Boyd into the end zone and scored. Todd France added a 24-yard field goal on the next possession. It was 10-0 and Penn State hadn't recorded a first down. When the Nittany Lions finally moved the chains — a Casey scramble on third-and-one with 1:35 left in the first quarter — the home crowd responded with mock applause.

"Just because a school is from a bigger conference doesn't mean anything," Toledo defensive end Leo Frierson told the Centre Daily Times. "I think if you call this an upset that's cowardly."

The beatdown

Taylor, a 5-foot-11, 205-pound junior tailback, carried 29 times for 141 yards and two touchdowns. His longest gain was 13 yards. He didn't need the long run. He just kept finding holes between the tackles and dragging defenders for extra yardage.

"He didn't do nothing spectacular," Penn State safety James Boyd told the Centre Daily Times. "We were just overrunning and when we did get there, we missed the tackle."

Boyd finished with 16 tackles. It didn't matter.

The real damage came on two consecutive possessions that straddled halftime. With 6:07 left in the second quarter, Toledo's offensive line — tackles Harding and Noah Swartz, guards Michael Schaefer and Matt Comer, center Nick Otterbacher — went to work. They drove 83 yards in 14 plays, feeding Taylor 10 times. He scored from the 1 with 32 seconds left. Toledo 17, Penn State 0.

"It was crucial for us to go in with a score," Harding told the AP. "We knew they would make adjustments."

When the Rockets received the second-half kickoff, they did it again. Twelve plays, 80 yards. Quarterback Tavares Bolden rolled left, avoided an outside rush and threw a 13-yard touchdown pass to Lyle Green. Toledo 24, Penn State 0.

On those two drives combined, Toledo ran 26 plays, gained 163 yards and consumed 11 minutes and 58 seconds. They ran the ball 20 times for 136 yards.

"We sensed toward the end of the first half that we had momentum and we just fed off everybody's emotion," Comer told the Blade. "We just grinded out long drives and got points."

Penn State's lone score came on improvisation. Casey rolled right, ran out of room, pulled up near the sideline and heaved the ball back across the field over a crowd of defenders. Larry Johnson caught it and went 61 yards untouched for a touchdown. Ryan Primanti missed the extra point. It was Penn State's first touchdown of the 2000 season. It had taken 97 minutes and 33 seconds of game time to get there.

The Nittany Lions never threatened again. Toledo's defense finished with seven sacks and held Penn State's quarterbacks to 10-of-24 passing for 136 yards. The Rockets committed zero turnovers. Their first penalty didn't come until the fourth quarter.

Toledo ran 82 plays to Penn State's 51. Gained 385 yards to 166. Held the ball for 40 minutes and 19 seconds. Rushed for 245 yards. Penn State rushed for 30.

Thirty.

Toledo defensive coordinator Tom Amstutz, who grew up in Toledo, played at Toledo and coached at Toledo, put the win in terms everyone understood.

"Remember when you were a kid and if you were the last one picked for a pickup game you were really pissed and always wanted to go out and prove them all wrong," Amstutz told the Centre Daily Times. "Well that's the way I felt in the defense. We had something to prove to Penn State, the Big Ten and the whole country that we had a pretty good team and we could compete with anyone."

Johnson, then a sophomore, was more blunt. He called Penn State's offensive system outdated and predictable.

"We have coaches who have been here 20, 30 years," Johnson told the Centre Daily Times. "It seems like things never change. We run the same offense. Teams that play us know what we're going to run. They can pull out tapes from '96 or '93 and we run the same offense. The same plays, same system."

The staff

The coaching staff that built Toledo's 2000 machine scattered across the sport — and proved what it was.

Pinkel left for Missouri three days before the bowl snub became official, taking all but one assistant with him. He coached the Tigers for 15 seasons. Amstutz, the defensive coordinator who grew up in Toledo and bled blue and gold, took over as head coach and in 2008 led the Rockets to a 13-10 win at Michigan — the MAC's only victory in the Big House to date. Offensive coordinator Dave Christensen followed Pinkel to Missouri and later became head coach at Wyoming. Defensive assistant Matt Eberflus became the head coach of the Chicago Bears.

Three FBS head coaches. One NFL head coach. All on the same G6 staff.

Taylor played 10 NFL seasons, including a 1,216-yard year with the Minnesota Vikings in 2006. Johnson — the Penn State sophomore who ripped his own coaching staff after the Toledo loss — rushed for 1,750 yards with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2005 and 1,789 in 2006.

The snub

The MAC had one bowl tie-in — the Motor City Bowl — and it went to the conference champion. Toledo co-owned the MAC West title with Western Michigan but lost the tiebreaker because of the head-to-head result. Marshall — the same Marshall team Toledo had shut out 42-0 a month earlier — upset Western Michigan in the MAC Championship Game and took the conference's only postseason bid.

The Rockets' only hope was an at-large invitation. The remaining bowl slots filled without them.

Of 116 Division I-A programs, 50 went bowling. Toledo was not among them. Neither was Western Michigan, which finished 9-3.

"It's incredibly unfair," Liske said. "The only game that is selected for competitive reasons is the BCS championship game. There isn't any other bowl game that is decided wholly by competitive merit."

Harding, the same lineman who had choked up after beating Penn State three months earlier, didn't choke up this time.

"If there is someone who can tell me how a 10-1 team doesn't make it to a bowl game and it isn't about money, I wish they'd tell me," Harding said. "If it is just about money, then why play the games? We lined up 11 times this year and 10 times we destroyed our opponent. They can't take that away from us."

The aftermath

DeJuan Goulde, senior co-captain and one of the defensive ends who had terrorized Casey in Happy Valley, said what he could.

"It hurts that all the good teams in the country get a chance to play in bowl game this year except us," Goulde said. "But they can't take this year away from us. I had enough memories from this season to last a lifetime."

Toledo finished the regular season ranked 25th. When the post-bowl rankings came out, the Rockets had dropped out entirely. They didn't lose. They just weren't allowed to play.

The MAC got the message. For 20 consecutive seasons, from 1981 through 2000, the conference received exactly one bowl invitation per year. After the Toledo snub, the league pushed to secure more postseason access. In 2001, the MAC established a primary partnership with the GMAC Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, pairing with the existing Motor City Bowl in Detroit. By 2004, five MAC teams reached the postseason — Toledo, Marshall, Miami, Bowling Green and Northern Illinois.

The system that locked Toledo out forced the conference to change the system.

But the broader math has not changed. The mechanisms evolve — BCS tie-ins became BCS access became the College Football Playoff became the 12-team bracket. The programs that need the opportunity most are still the ones most likely to be told they haven't earned it.

"What better place for the Rockets to show we can play than here," Frierson said after the Penn State game. "They're Penn State."

They showed it. And then they went home.

They told you it didn't matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.