Back When: Fourth and Forever

Jacksonville State played its final Division II football game on December 12, 1992, at Braly Municipal Stadium in Florence, Alabama. The Gamecocks were moving up. Division I-AA was next, then FBS — where they sit today, three seasons into Conference USA. Whatever they were going to accomplish as a Division II program, they had one more game to do it.

They won a national championship.

“On paper, this team wasn’t supposed to win the national championship,” offensive coordinator Charlie Maniscalco told the Anniston Star. “It just goes to show you what can happen when you have a group of young men that believe in themselves and believe in what they’re doing.”

Every championship team is a collection of individual stories, with players whose paths converged at the right time for the right reasons. One of the men on that 1992 team was a defensive tackle named Curtis McDaniel, and this is one of those stories.

I played with him in high school. This is what I remember.

The first time I saw Curtis McDaniel, he was walking through the hallway of the Fort Payne middle school gym carrying a Bible and a backpack.

I was heading into the ninth grade. My dad was a teacher and basketball coach there, so I lived in that gym — shooting around after school, putting in offseason work, looking for anyone who might help us win. My best friend Lee Dobbins and I had just come back from basketball camp at the University of Georgia. We were in the gym when a tall figure passed by the doors. A few minutes later, we saw the same head move past again. We went out to investigate.

A 6-foot-2 young man stood in the hallway. He had an athletic build, a deep voice and the beginnings of a beard — he looked like he could have been a senior. We asked who he was. He told us his name was Curtis McDaniel, and he was there to enroll in the Fort Payne school system.

Lee and I looked at each other.

“You gotta come out for basketball,” we told him. We were always recruiting.

Our jaws dropped when he told us he’d be in the sixth grade.

Bill Burgess had built something at Jacksonville State. The former Auburn fullback took over the Gamecocks in 1985 and turned them into a Gulf South Conference power — four conference titles in five years, five consecutive Division II playoff appearances and championship game appearances in 1989 and 1991.

The Gamecocks lost both. Before that, they’d been shut out 33-0 by Lehigh in the 1977 title game.

They had taken three shots at a national championship and lost all three, and by 1992 the window was closing. Jacksonville State was preparing to transition to Division I-AA. This was the last season they would play in Division II.

“We wanted one so bad,” Burgess’s father, known as Shorty, told the Anniston Star after the championship game. “They’ve come so close. I knew someday he would, but I just didn’t know when. This was the last chance.”

Curtis was a preacher’s kid — soft-spoken and well-mannered, the kind of kid who knocked the hell out of you on a football field and then looked almost sorry about it. He didn’t know his own strength, and no amount of coaching seemed to give him the mean streak he probably needed. He just played, politely, violently and without any apparent awareness that what he was doing was unusual.

By my senior year, Curtis was a freshman on the varsity — 6-foot-2, about 220 pounds, built like Bo Jackson. We played him at running back in our veer offense and nose guard on defense.

In our second game, we played rival Cherokee County in a mud bowl. On fourth and 1, Curtis, from his nose guard position, destroyed the center, drove through the dive fullback in almost the same motion, and got his hands on the quarterback. The quarterback managed to pull away and pitch the option, but Curtis flung him to the ground, then ran down the running back who’d caught the pitch and dropped him for a loss.

Every player who touched the ball on that play wound up on the ground at Curtis’ hands. Fourth-down stop. The play sealed a 13-7 Wildcats win. It was a game-saving play in only his second varsity game, and Curtis had no idea he’d done anything special. He was just playing and having fun.

Curtis went on to start four years at Fort Payne — All-Area three straight years, All-State honorable mention twice. After high school, he went to Hinds Community College in Mississippi, where he was a two-year starter on the state runner-up team with 134 tackles and 17 sacks in 20 games, plus All-American honorable mention.

Then he came to Jacksonville State.

“I kind of felt like I was a better defensive tackle than a running back when I had to make a choice for college,” McDaniel said in 1993. “We had winning seasons at Fort Payne, we’d make it to the playoffs and then get beat in the first round.”

In high school, I held the delusion that I myself might be Jacksonville State football material. It was the nearest college to Fort Payne and the school my mother had attended. Trying to tackle and block Curtis McDaniel in practice — a freshman, three classes behind me — cured me of that notion with a clarity that only repeated physical failure can provide. My path to college football was going to involve a notebook and a press box, not a helmet and shoulder pads.

Curtis, though, was just beginning to tap into his talents.

Jacksonville State went 12-1-1 in 1992 and won the Gulf South Conference title. McDaniel finished third on the team with 113 tackles, earned First Team All-Gulf South Conference honors and recorded 39 tackles in four playoff games. The Gamecocks powered through the Division II playoffs — past Savannah State, North Alabama and undefeated New Haven — to set up the rematch.

No. 3 Jacksonville State against No. 1 Pittsburg State, the defending national champions at 14-0, riding the Harlon Hill Trophy winner, running back Ronald Moore — 2,502 yards and 39 touchdowns. Pittsburg State averaged 353.8 yards per game on the ground.

“He’s a power runner and he’s got speed,” JSU’s Ja’Karl Barnett said of Moore. “He can run over you as well as run by you.”

ESPN broadcast the championship game nationally. The crowd was 11,733.

It started badly. Ronald Moore took the opening kickoff 99 yards for a touchdown — the first time a Division II championship game had ever started with a kickoff return for a score. Pittsburg State led 6-0 after 13 seconds.

“I did a great job,” Burgess said. “We kicked the ball off to Ronald, and that was not real smart on my part. It’s like playing Russian Roulette with four shells.”

That was the last time Moore hurt them. After the 99-yard return, his longest gain was 12 yards. He finished with 83 yards on 20 carries. He never scored a rushing touchdown. The only other team to hold Moore under 100 yards was Jacksonville State in the 1991 championship.

“We felt like we had to stop the dive play, then work hard to get support from the secondary in hopes of keeping Moore from roaming free,” defensive coordinator Roland Houston told the Anniston Star.

“We practiced that every day,” Barnett said, “that if he did break through, there would be three or four of us running to make the tackle.”

Moore saw it.

“They did a good job,” he said. “Their defense was pretty good just because of their speed. They pursue really hard.”

Pitt State pushed the lead to 13-3. Backup quarterback Corky Gordon — pressed into duty when starter Chuck Robinson injured his leg — answered with a 78-yard drive capped by Danny Lee’s touchdown. Halftime: 13-10.

In the second half, Robinson came back and Burgess went exclusively to the wishbone ground game. Jacksonville State held the ball for more than 38 of the 60 minutes, ran for 390 yards on four pass attempts and took a 17-13 lead.

“That’s just our offense,” Robinson said. “We’re going to do that against anybody until they stop it.”

Stinnett missed field goals from 36 and 43 yards. Jacksonville State led by four. Pittsburg State had one more chance.

The Gorillas drove to the JSU 22 with 29 seconds left. Fourth down at the end zone.

As Wayne Martin wrote in the Birmingham News: “But for Jacksonville State’s defense it was fourth and forever. There could be no next year for the Gamecocks, no second chance. There could be no more rebuilding and coming back for another shot.”

“We pulled together as a defense,” Barnett said. “All we kept saying in the huddle was that this is what we had been wanting, for the game to come down to us to win.”

Hutchins threw for Shad Klinge in the end zone. Eric King got there.

“I was lucky to get to it,” King said. “I saw him look up for the ball, and I looked up. The quarterback kind of floated it, and I was able to get a hand on it and knock it down.”

Jacksonville State 17, Pittsburg State 13.

“‘Finally,’ was the word Gamecock coach Bill Burgess shouted in the middle of a crowd at midfield that seemed to be half the town of Jacksonville,” Bryant Pitchford wrote in the Anniston Star.

Marty Bridges cried and trotted around in a daze. Tim Sudduth, Wendell Kelley, Danny Lee and Eric King pointed the Gamecocks’ big trophy toward the late afternoon sky. Burgess kept asking where his wife could be found.

“It’s over,” Carlos Sheppard said.

“It’s a dream come true,” Barnett said. “We finally won one. We’re national champions!”

“It was a long wait for 365 days,” King said, “but nobody can take it away from us now.”

“The other two times we were up here it hit awfully hard,” Burgess said. “But being No. 2 in the nation is not that bad. We know how it feels. But this is the ultimate.”

The football title made Jacksonville State the first school in NCAA Division II history to win national championships in football, basketball and baseball — adding to the men’s basketball crown in 1985 and back-to-back baseball titles in 1990 and 1991.

“Winning the Division II title was special to me,” McDaniel said, “since it was the first championship team I’ve ever played on.”

The following year, Jacksonville State went 3-7 as an independent during the transition to Division I-AA. Curtis McDaniel stayed for his senior season. He recorded 96 tackles, eight tackles for loss and three sacks. He earned All-American honors — on a team that won three games.

“We want to go out as a winning team,” McDaniel said that fall. “We want to set the table for the future.”

After Jacksonville State, McDaniel signed with the Seattle Seahawks in 1994 and played a season with the London Monarchs in the World League of American Football in 1995.

Football had taken him from the foothills of the Appalachians in Northeast Alabama to the shadow of Big Ben in the UK, something none of us saw that first day when he shuffled shyly into that new school carrying a Bible and backpack.

Curtis McDaniel died on November 7, 2013, at Stringfellow Memorial Hospital in Anniston, Alabama. A massive heart attack.

In 2024, he was inducted posthumously into the DeKalb County Sports Hall of Fame.

Curtis was what Jacksonville State football has always been built on. Underrecruited. Overlooked. Had to go the hard route — juco, prove it again, earn it twice. Suffered setbacks. Kept grinding. He came to Jacksonville with something to prove and exceeded every expectation anyone had for him — the same way the program itself kept absorbing losses and disappointments until it all came together on one afternoon in Florence. He won a national championship, earned All-American honors and played professional football.

Jacksonville State kept rising after Curtis left. Division I-AA. The FBS. Conference titles. Bowl wins. The program he helped launch into a new era kept writing chapters he never got to read.

Curtis didn’t get to grow old with the program. He doesn’t get to come back for the reunions. He’s not in the stands for the moments that his championship made possible. He was only 43 years old when he left this world.

But he had a hand in writing that story. And I’m glad I get to tell it.

Rest in peace, Big Mac.