It’s How You Finish: Troy Football’s 1-2 Starts
One coincidence between both seasons of the Jon Sumrall era was that his teams began each season with a 1-2 record over their first three games. Each rebounded into one of the best seasons in Troy’s FBS history.
That got me thinking: How many times has Troy started a season 1-2 and how has it worked out for them?
Of course, this being The Trojan Wall, we had to investigate.
A 1-2 start has happened 38 times in Troy’s illustrious 103-season history. The first thing I noticed was the era of Troy football was fairly indicative of not only how likely the Trojans were to start 1-2… but also how likely the season progressed.
Simply put, if the teams were bad during that time, they tended to start (and finish) worse.
Twenty seasons ended with a .500 record or better after the 1-2 start. Seventeen seasons, however, saw the team finish with a losing record.
Only one season (1930) finished at exactly 1-2. That Depression season saw Troy beat the squad from Maxwell Air Force Base by 1, but lose to Marion Military 61-0 and Troy’s alumni team 6-0.
It was surely one of the more forgettable seasons, but the team also didn’t have a coach, so there’s that.
To more accurately understand the context of these seasons, it is important to split them into the eras in which they occurred.
- Club Football – 1909-1937
- Early Conference Play – 1938-1972
- D2 – 1972-1991
- FCS/FBS – 1992-present
Club Football
The Club Football era is defined as the period when Troy was basically playing anyone and everyone – high schools, military schools, alumni teams. A few colleges were mixed in here and there, but not enough to say Troy was truly competing at a college level during this time.
This period resulted in five 1-2 starts, including the 1930 season referenced above.
In both Gladwin Gaumer’s 1927 season and Albert Elmore’s 1931 season, the teams rallied to get winning seasons after the rough start, going 5-3 and 6-3 respectively. Elmore’s 1936 Red Wavers only won 2 more games down the stretch and finished 3-4.
Early Conference Play
The Early Conference Play era is marked by the formation of the Alabama Intercollegiate Conference in 1938. This league was created to give smaller Alabama schools consistent opponents.
The charter members were Troy, Jacksonville State, Saint Bernard College, Snead Junior College, Livingston State, and Marion Military. Florence State (UNA) wouldn’t join until 1949, as the conference reformed after the war. In 1959, it would be renamed the Alabama Collegiate Conference.
This period was honestly one of the roughest in Troy’s history with many, many, MANY losses under long-tenured coaches. In fact, 15 1-2 starts happened during the 34 years Troy was a part of the AIC/ACC.
Only 6 starts, however, finished with winning records. After starting AIC play in 1938 (or 1939, due to a discrepancy in various sources), Troy would start 1-2 in 1939, 1941, and 1942, winning the AIC each time with 7-4, 5-4, and 4-3 records respectively.
Though no titles came with it, 1949 (6-3-1) was the last 1-2 season to end positively for a while.
Welcome to the Jim Grantham/William Clipson portion of our journey through history. These years can truly be called the doldrums of Troy Football, with both men amassing a stunning 37-91-1 record from 1951-1965.
Speaking extremely frankly about the school we love, this period is the reason that Ralph Adams had to fight against those who were willing to disband the football program early in his presidency.
Almost every year of these two men’s tenures started 1-2 and all but one of them ended in a losing season. It is honestly easier to put this in a list than a paragraph, so here it is.
The final 1-2 season of this era was the most surprising, by far. In 1964, William Clipson’s boys rallied after the 1-2 start to rattle off four straight wins over Delta State, Mississippi College, UNA, and Presbyterian to secure Clipson’s only winning season in 11 tries.
They dropped the penultimate game at UT-Martin and won over Louisiana College to close out the season at a nice 6-3, a rare bright spot during this period.
The next year, Troy went 1-8.
It boggles my mind how William Clipson remained the head coach of Troy for as long as he did with the results he put forth. That would not happen in today’s college football landscape.
Division 2
Beginning in 1972, with the creation of the Gulf South Conference, Troy made the move to Division II. The Trojans were to be competing at a much higher level after the success of the Billy Atkins era in revitalizing Troy football.
This period only featured 5 1-2 starts, a stark contrast to the previous era.
The unprecedented success that Troy would begin building in the 1970s and that would come to fruition in the 1980s didn’t give a lot of room for slow starts in the Wiregrass during this time.
Byrd Whigham’s final season in 1975 got to 6-4 after the 1-2 start, but Troy decided to change direction after this slow start and due to ongoing controversies.
Legendary Kentucky head coach Charlie Bradshaw came back to coaching after a 5 year hiatus to lead the Trojans in 1976. While he didn’t win a national title, Bradshaw did exactly what Robert Earl Stewart hired him to do: get Troy back to competing for them.
Bradshaw won the 1976 Gulf South title and Coach of the Year to go along with it.
In 1977, he had his first of two 1-2 starts for Troy, finishing 6-4. The 1979 season ended with a 6-3-1 record for the Trojans. While Bradshaw’s later teams slipped, he had built a foundation for winning that would pay off for his successor.
He left in 1982 after going 40-27-2, making him the third winningest coach in Troy history.
Fresh off the success of winning the 1984 Division II National Championship, Troy Head Coach Chan Gailey left to be the tight ends and special teams coach of the Denver Broncos.
Well, we can’t really blame him for that, but it was still a shock to the players and the fanbase.
For 1985, Troy tapped Defensive Coordinator Rick Rhoades for the job and the schedule was pretty difficult to start with, including eventual 1985 Div 1-AA National Champion Georgia Southern, to whom Troy only lost by 7.
Rhoades put together a great coaching job to end the season 6-4, including a 6-2 mark in the GSC. That was good enough for 3rd in the conference behind #2 North Alabama and #17 Mississippi College.
The final 1-2 start of the Division 2 era was in Larry Blakeney’s first year. He took over for Robert Maddox, who fresh off the 1987 National Championship, cratered the program going 13-17 over three years.
While rebuilding might have been a suitable excuse for starting 1-2 and finishing 5-6, the schedule that year had more to do with it.
Troy was beginning the two-year transition to Division I-AA and the schedule was full of D I-AA heavy hitters, such as Nicholls State, #5 Alabama State, Southern Illinois, Western Kentucky, #10 Samford, Arkansas State, and Georgia Southern.
Division 1
After his first season starting 1-2, Coach Blakeney wouldn’t start that way again the entire time he led the Trojans in Division I-AA. The Div I-A/FBS portion of his tenure more than made up for that with varying degrees of success.
His second 1-2 start came with the Trojans’ move to I-A. We’ve talked a lot about that season here before, but suffice it to say that was one of his better coaching jobs against THAT schedule.
Blakeney started the season 1-2 in 10 of his first 12 seasons at the I-A level.
While the tail end of the Blakeney era ended a little like the beginning, he is still regarded as the greatest coach in Troy’s history.
Neal Brown looked to elevate Troy to its previous heights when he took the reins in 2014, following Blakeney’s retirement. Like his predecessor, Brown’s first year with the Trojans began with a win and two losses.
The 2015 team was rebuilding from Coach Blakeney’s final 3-9 season, as well as dealing with a new-look Sun Belt after the 2010s realignment.
While there were plenty of dark spots in 2015, the bright parts that peeked through showed the promise of Neal Brown’s tenure. Troy would only win four games in the 4-8 2015 season, but they wouldn’t even lose four in any of his final three seasons.
After Brown, Troy shuttered their program until Jon Sumrall revived it in 2022.
Editor’s Note: The coach who shall not be named did in fact exist. Each of his seasons began 2-1, which is still tunning in retrospect.
Though Blakeney did have two teams that started 1-2 and ended the season with a Sun Belt title and bowl win, I’d like to present the argument that no coach in Troy’s history was better at coaching their way out of a 1-2 hole than Jon Sumrall.
If you ever heard him speak you know that he can be very motivating and if the fans were pumped up, imagine how it impacted and motivated the players.
2022 is the greatest season in Troy’s FBS tenure and 2023 built on its success to put Troy in great standing moving into the Gerad Parker era.
Except maybe with fewer 1-2 starts.
