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Polarizing coach hopes new beginning will strengthen a checkered past

 

                                                                                                         

 

New Stillman football coach L.C. Cole has become one of the more polarizing figures in Black College football over the last decade.

Depending on whom you ask – and when and where you ask it – the mere mention of Cole’s name generally elicits one of two responses.

Winner. Cheater.

But as Cole begins to resurrect a football program for the fourth time – this time a Stillman team that hasn’t come close to competing for the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference title since joining the league in 2005 – he will have to lean on everything he has become in between those two descriptions to revive the Tigers, and his own coaching career as well.

“This is almost like a rebirth for me, starting back over as a college head coach,” Cole said. “I know I’m in a tough situation and it’s not going to be an easy turnaround. It’s probably going to take more than anywhere else I’ve been.”

Stillman, which has won three straight SIAC baseball crowns and a men’s basketball title in 2006, is hungry for a football winner. Given Cole’s penchant for coaching winners (his last seven teams have finished with at least a .500 record), fans are expecting quick results.

“I think you have to temper it a little bit. When you start a program, everybody has high expectations because of what you did I the past. But it takes a little bit of time to develop a football program,” Cole said.

Purely from a standpoint of taking a moribund program and turning it into championship material in short order, very few have done it like “Cole Blooded Football”. In 1996, he took a Tennessee State team that won two games the previous year and doubled the win total.

Before he left, he had won his final 19 contests in the Ohio Valley Conference, winning league titles in 1998 and 1999. Tennessee State led the OVC in every offensive category in 1999 while ending the regular season as the No. 1 ranked team in NCAA Div. I-AA football, a first for a black college program. The 1999 season, in which the Tigers were 11-1 and finished the regular season ranked No. 1, included a second-straight playoff berth for the school, which had previously been in the midst of a 12-year playoff draught, and the 11 wins tied a school record. Cole's career mark at Tennessee State was 28-18, and he was twice named Ohio Valley Conference Coach of the Year and earned Division I-AA coach of the year honors in 1999.

 

Cole was seduced by one of the biggest contracts given to a Black College head coach in 2000, approximately $125,000 per year for five year, to leave TSU en route to Alabama State. While the salary and location had changed, the winning had not. ASU jumped from two to six wins in his first season and in 2001, the Hornets were within minutes of winning their first Southwestern Athletic Conference title in 10 years. A 6-6 campaign was the last Cole enjoyed before being dismissed in 2003.

 

Even on the high school level, Cole was strong. He took a forgotten about Sidney Lanier team in 2006 and guided it to within a win of the Alabama Class 6A championship game, then added another Montgomery city championship and playoff berth the next season before returning to the college game as a defensive coordinator at Texas Southern.

 

That winning pedigree played a big part in Stillman choosing Cole to replace Greg Thompson after the Tigers suffered through a 3-8 season in 2008 – only Stillman’s second losing season since it restarted football in 1999.

 

“We hired the best coach available,” Stillman athletic director Curtis Campbell said at the time. “His experience separated him from the pack.”

 

But all the winning has not gotten Cole away from allegations of cheating, bending and breaking the rules to help his teams demolish opponents.

 

Cole was suspended from one Ohio Valley Conference game and placed on two years probation for violating NCAA rules for providing an investigative committee with "misleading and false information" about a prospective student's participation in a practice. He was also accused of giving money to a student-athlete.

 

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