Tommies beat Johnnies. How God? Why God? Is there a God?

So here are 10,000 - or so - words on St. John's football. My apologies in advance. Read it in shifts, if need be. Print it out, take it on a cross-country plane trip. Laminate it, give it as a Christmas gift.

****
A pair of college football games in Minnesota on Saturday were decided by a point. In one, Northwestern beat Minnesota 29-28 in Big Ten action.

Then there was the game people cared about. In Collegeville, St. Thomas defeated St. John's 27-26 in overtime in front of 16,421 people, which set a Division III attendance record. The previous record came in 2003, when 13,107 freezing souls watched the Johnnies edge Bethel for the MIAC title, a victory that gave John Gagliardi a record-setting 409 victories.

It's the first time since 1997 the Tommies beat the Johnnies - and only the second time since 1992 - and when you read that result, nothing makes sense in the world, even if many people expected a St. Thomas victory. St. Thomas defeated St. John's in football. Typing it twice still doesn't make it seem real. I wrote last year about the rivalry between the schools. It's a bitter rivalry, or at least as bitter as a rivalry can get when it's between a pair of schools that have more similarities than differences, schools that are separated by an hour, are both Catholic institutions, attract students from the same small towns and big cities, and send graduates into the same work force to labor for the same companies.

For much of the game the Johnnies appeared to again be the better team, even though St. Thomas came in ranked higher for the first time in a few decades. Unfortunately for the thousands of people dressed in red, SJU failed to take advantage of several St. Thomas turnovers in the first half. With a little more than 3 minutes left in the game, St. Thomas tied it at 20-20, only to miss the extra point. The Johnnies marched down in the closing minutes before a late interception ruined a chance at victory in regulation. After the Tommies started OT with a touchdown and PAT to take a 27-20 lead, the Johnnies scored on a fourth down play. But just as people prepared for a second overtime, the game ended as St. John's missed the extra point and a few thousand people dressed in purple rudely stormed the field to celebrate.



Those are the basic facts. All that's missing are the hundred plays and dozens of what-ifs that swirl around any game that comes down to one play. Johnnie fans feel the Tommies got a bit lucky, and Tommie fans say, even if that's so, it only makes up for the fact the Johnnies needed a bit of luck and a controversial call to win the past two seasons.

Tommie fans rightfully celebrated their victory because it gives them the edge in the race for the conference title and it came against the hated Johnnies and, perhaps best of all, it came on St John's home field, the mecca of Division III football. Beyond that, though, there's been a feeling hanging over the game that perhaps there's a power shift in the MIAC taking place. Maybe the Tommies, who dominate in several sports, have finally - under their outstanding third-year head coach Glenn Caruso - found the formula that will end the Johnnies' control of the league. Many people thought the Tommies would handily defeat the Johnnies today. That didn't happen. Doesn't make it any easier for the St. John's players, coaches or fans - the last time St. John's had a moral victory, Johnny "Blood" McNally stood on the sidelines as coach - but it does show the teams are all-but even this season.

And no matter what Tommie graduates tell themselves during the late-night shift at McDonald's or St. Thomas students tell themselves during drunken parties where they read Vince Flynn passages to each other (cheap jokes are all the losing side's fans have after games like this. Sad, I know.), one game - one season - does not indicate a seismic shift. In 10 years, if the Tommies have won seven conference titles in that span and routinely defeat the Johnnies and also make it to the national semifinals a few times, perhaps people can look back at October 2, 2010 and say, there, that was the day everything changed in the MIAC.

But one day doesn't trump 58 years.

That's how long Gagliardi's coached at St. Johns, after spending four seasons at Carroll. Fifty-eight seasons. During that time with the Johnnies, he's gone 450-122-10. He's basically lost about two games a season. In other words, if history's any indicator, the Johnnies are done losing this year. Yet even if that is the case, some SJU fans will consider the season to be something of a disappointment. That's what happens when you build something up over seven decades of action.

One-hundred-twenty-two losses. Today felt unique because it came against the Tommies, but under Gagliardi, most defeats are heartbreaking, gut-wrenching affairs that leave fans lamenting one missed kick or one fumble. So to ease the pain of Saturday's loss, here's a look at those 122 defeats. Perhaps looking at the past will provide a guide to the future, while presenting comfort for the present.

* Gagliardi's had five unbeaten seasons at St. John's. Thirteen times he's only lost once.

* The last time Gagliardi had a losing record? 1967.

* This was the first time St. Thomas won in Collegeville since 1986, when the Tommies won 56-21. They followed that up with victories over the Johnnies in 1987, 1990 and 1992. That, too, signaled a changing of the guard in the MIAC. The Tommies were taking over the league. The Johnnies - and Gagliardi's - reign over the league had come to an end. And then the Johnnies went on to win 16 of 17 in the series. So a one-point defeat somehow doesn't sound like a mythical, magical impossible-to-define-but-we'll-know-it-when-we-see-it-and-there's-no-stopping-the-Tommies-and-their-millions-and-large-enrollment-and-charismatic-coach changing of the guard. Or put it this way: Imagine St. Thomas now winning every game against St. John's until 2023. Finally, that year the Johnnies break through and win by a point. In overtime, on a missed extra point. Would that mean there was a changing of the guard?

* To save space (too late), let's take a look at the losses since 1989, which sort of signaled the start of the modern Johnnie dynasty. Counting Saturday's game, since 1989 St. John's is 216-39-3. Of those 39 defeats, 15 were by more than 10 points. Two of those double-digit defeats were against Mount Union, two more against Whitewater, the overwhelming Division III forces of the past two decades.

So here are the toughest defeats the Johnnies and Gagliardi have suffered since '89, when the Johnnies went 11-1 and lost to Dayton 28-0 in the national semifinals. Many have been in what-the-hell-happened fashion, the kind of games that probably leave Gagliardi wondering what he did to make God angry, while Johnnie opponents wait impatiently for the football gods to finally even the score. The Johnnies rarely get blown out. They've won countless times in seemingly miracle fashion, but the memorable losses stand out because they are so rare.

- 19-7 loss to Dayton in 1991 semifinals. The Johnnies dominated that entire year, putting together one of their more overwhelming seasons. Their closest game was a 35-25 victory over Hamline. No one else came within 10 points. They beat Carleton 56-7, Macalester 56-0, St. Olaf 67-19 and in the playoffs decimated Coe so badly that everyone in Iowa, including Hayden Fry, felt it, winning 75-2. But then came the semifinals. The Johnnies committed an astounding 1o turnovers - 10! - but still only lost by 12 points. If they commit five turnovers, they probably win by two scores. In addition, star running back Jay Conzemius played injured.

- A superior Johnnies team lost to St. Thomas 15-12 in 1992, a game that ultimately kept the Johnnies out of the playoffs. Carleton improbably earned the playoff berth that year as they shared the conference title with SJU, despite the fact the Johnnies beat them 70-7.

- St. John's went 11-2 in 1994. One loss came on Homecoming against Hamline, as the Pipers won 27-26 (there's that score again), as a failed two-point conversion attempt in the closing seconds cost the Johnnies. That game started the sterling career of quarterback Kurt Ramler, who was just a sophomore that season. In the semifinals, St. John's lost 19-16 at home against Albion, a game famous for a horrific noncall. Albion's winning TD came when a receiver caught a pass that clearly bounced off the ground before the receiver scooped it up. Albion went on to defeat Washington & Jefferson 38-15 to win the national title. It's impossible and dangerous to compare scores. But what the hell. If the Johnnies had won that game and faced Washington & Jefferson in the Stagg Bowl....they'd have won the national championship. Johnnie fans are still very bitter over that defeat.

- The Johnnies won their first 11 games in 1996. In the second round of the playoffs, they led Wisconsin-Lacrosse 23-8 at halftime, but squandered the lead, losing 37-30.

- In 1998, the Johnnies again went unbeaten in the regular season, only to lose in heartbreaking fashion 10-7 to Eau Claire, in another game marked by controversial calls and a goal-line fumble by SJU late in the game, when they were on the verge of winning.

- Pacific-Lutheran beat the Johnnies in the quarterfinals in 1999, 19-9. One of those games the Johnnies have lost by 10 points since 1989. But that one deserves an asterisk. In the fourth quarter, St. John's led 9-6 and was driving for a potential clinching score. Instead, Pacific Lutheran forced a fumble, and scored a pair of touchdowns to end the Johnnies' season, a year immortalized in Austin Murphy's The Sweet Season. Pacific Lutheran won the national title that year.

- Mount Union edged the Johnnies 10-7 in the 2000 title game, as the Johnnies' defense stopped the powerful Raiders offense until the final minutes. Unfortunately, the offense only got one drive going and a field goal in the final five seconds won it.

- 2002. National Semifinals. Texas. St. John's falls behind Trinity 34-13 at halftime. The Johnnies stage a remarkable rally and tie it at 34-34, only to lose it late in the fourth quarter, 41-34. Many members of that team were on the roster the next season, when St. John's went unbeaten and won the national title.

That's a sampling. There are others: In 2004, for instance, in somewhat of a rebuilding season, St. John's lost three games by a total of five points. And now throw Saturday's game onto that list of most heartbreaking defeats. It's a game people will talk about for years, even if St. John's fans, players and coaches would like nothing more than to forget it within the week.

Saturday belonged to the Tommies. But the Johnnies have suffered devastating defeats before. They've lost to key rivals, even if it's rarely been to their biggest one. But one loss does not a changing of the guard make. Not when there are 57 years of history that say, in the end, the Johnnies and Gagliardi will always recover and quickly find themselves back atop the MIAC standings.

Now pass the Johnnie Bread and some wine, please.

The annual St. John's/John Gagliardi propaganda post

In about three weeks the St. John's University - Minnesota version - football team starts its season. Each Saturday during the football season, I sit in front of our computer, listening to the online radio broadcast. With the obvious exception of Lakers games and the occasional Twins debacle, it's the only time I spend really getting worked up over a sports team.

St. John's is one of the most successful Division III programs in history, but certainly not the most successful. Mount Union, for instance, has won an astounding 10 national titles since 1993. Yet there's no doubt the Johnnies receive the most publicity of any Division III program. In fact, the team probably gets more publicity and recognition than any other small-college program, regardless of sport. Stories about the team appear in the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, ESPN.com, and on the Today show and NFL Films. The St. Cloud Times provides the type of coverage some Division I schools don't get, while the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Minneapolis Star-Tribune have all done countless features on the program. Sports Illustrated writer Austin Murphy wrote a book about the team - The Sweet Season - and has written several other stories about the program for the magazine.

The reason for all that publicity? John Gagliardi.

When the Johnnies open the season at home against Northwestern on September 4, the 83-year-old Gagliardi will stand on the sidelines, probably in a baseball cap and white shirt. The 2010 season will be Gagliardi's 62nd season as a college head coach, his 58th at St. John's. His coaching career started in Montana in 1949. One of my favorite Gagliardi tidbits is that he was never an assistant coach, at any level. He took over as coach of his high school team when the previous coach went off to war. Gagliardi was 16. After that, he took over at Carroll. But in all those years, he's never had to answer to a superior. He could make up his rules as he went along.

He has a career record of 471-126-11 and he has the most victories in college football history. When a guy started coaching only four years after World War II ended, the career numbers eventually stop making any sense. But if Gagliardi lost 344 consecutive games, he'd still have a winning record.

Gagliardi's famous for his record number of victories and his coaching methods.



It's all about the word no. No tackling in practice. No whistles at practice. No wind sprints or laps. No one calls Gagliardi Coach, they simply call him John. No blocking sleds or tackling dummies. No calisthenics. No goals, just expectations. No hazing. No long practices - they usually last 90 minutes, but are often even shorter. He's the most famous advocate of the word no since Nancy Reagan.

The most famous of Gagliardi's no's is probably the no tackling one. Anyone who ever played football has been crushed during a practice, whether at the highest levels or as a 98-pound seventh-grader who somehow gets locked into a tackling drill with the 185-pound linebacker who was held back a grade and sports a full beard. It's a big part of what makes football practices miserable. But if you've listened to coaches for the past century, it's also what makes football players tough. Makes them men. Beat the hell out of each other in practice and it will carry over into the game. Or something. Except the Johnnies don't tackle in practice.

The rationale is simple, which is perhaps the problem for other people. We've been inundated with the idea that football is the closest thing we have to war outside of Afghanistan. It's supposed to be so incredibly complex that only coaches who spend 18 hours a day in the office and can't name the President of the United States can understand the intricacies.

The Johnnies don't tackle because, in Gagliardi's words, they "work on getting to the ball carrier so that we can make the tackle." Another reason? It cuts down on injuries. It all seems simple, right?

The St. John's coaches assume that by the time a guy gets to them, he knows how to tackle. It's a matter of putting them in the right position to make the play. And every year, St. John's has one of the best - if not the best - defenses in Division III. They don't always lead the country in fewest points or yards allowed, but their dominance has come against the best teams, on the biggest stage. Since 1995, Mount Union - those 10-time NCAA champs - has been held to 10 or fewer points in two games. Both came against St. John's. Mount Union defeated St. John's 10-7 in the 2000 title game. And in 2003, St. John's snapped Mount Union's record 55-game winning streak with a 24-6 victory, the first and only time since 1989 the Purple Raiders scored fewer than 10 points in a game.

Just think how good the Johnnies' defense would be if they tackled in practice.

Former all-pro linebacker Chris Spielman served as the ESPN analyst for that 2003 title game. As a player, Spielman was the ultimate tough guy, both at Ohio State and in the pros. Throughout the game, he kept talking about how he couldn't have played in a system that didn't allow tackling in practice. He said he needed that to be a great player. But he didn't. He had been taught that he needed it, but it wasn't a requirement. He expressed skepticism early in the game about St. John's and Gagliardi's methods. As the game wore on and the Johnnies' defense continued to torment Mount Union while almost never missing a tackle, he finally started to see that their ways do work.



I graduated from St. John's in 1997 but didn't play football. However, I did take Gagliardi's Theory of Football class, one of the most entertaining courses I had in college. Gagliardi spent much of the time doing magic tricks and setting up some of his players with the females in the class, but there was also some occasional football talk. Gagliardi's easygoing and friendly. He's famous for his jokes, though at functions he often breaks out the old reliable ones: He never thinks about retiring but he does think about suicide after every loss. He's only going to coach for one or two more...decades. Hearing him speak at a conference is like going to see The Rolling Stones. Yeah, it's nice to occasionally hear the new stuff, but you're there to hear "Satisfaction" and "Sympathy for the Devil."

On a couple of occasions I bumped into him at the campus post office. One time, when he found out I was from Janesville, we spent about 20 minutes talking about one of his old players who was from my hometown, along with several others who hailed from nearby towns. We talked more about the towns themselves than football.

Gagliardi has proven that his style works perfectly at the Division III level. There's always been discussion about whether Gagliardi's methods would work at a higher level. Could a big college use his ideas and succeed? Could an NFL coach win without running tackling drills in practice? Many people say no. Gagliardi himself doesn't care. One of his most-used quotes is they're not trying to get converts.

But I actually think his style might work even better at a higher level. It seems like the more talented the players, the better the system would work. St. John's gets high-level Division III players, so they don't have to spend time on ridiculous drills. Things like the bear crawl. They run plays in practice. Over and over. They teach the defenders how to get into position. At a higher level, where the athletes are superior, they'd obviously already know how to tackle. So what good does it do to beat each other up in practice all week?

As the NFL season progresses, you often read about coaches cutting back the tackling in practice as they try to preserve the players. It apparently doesn't occur to any of them to do that for the entire season. If NFL coaches are so concerned about being physical - and announcers share this concern, to the point that the word "outphysical" has actually become an accepted term - why don't they insist on tackling throughout the season? Why let up at all? Or do they just feel the need to be physical a few times a week early in the year, because that's the way Halas did it and, god damn it, that's the way we're going to do it? That's part of Gagliardi's methods. Why do you have to do what's always been done?

Offensively, St. John's runs a small number of plays. They practice the ones they are good at over and over. Over the last 20 years, St. John's has possessed an explosive offense, though the offense has struggled a bit the last couple of seasons. But in 1993, for example, St. John's averaged 61 points per game.

"When it comes down to it, we're trying to be good at a certain number of plays, and we're not afraid to run the same play over and over and over again. You've got to be careful trying to run 60 different plays in a game and being pretty good at most of them, as opposed to being great at this core group of plays."

That quote didn't come from Gagliardi. Peyton Manning said it in an interview with Dan Patrick last year, but he might have stolen it from one of Gagliardi's interviews. I don't understand why other "systems" work, but Gagliardi's wouldn't, when his makes more sense than just about any of them. Why can screamers and coaches who have their players drill each other in practice succeed but someone who operates in an opposite manner wouldn't have a chance?

Former Alabama coach Mike DuBose had a successful four-year stint at Millsaps in Division III. He was a former SEC coach of the year. But Millsaps wasn't St. John's when it comes to D3 success. His style worked at a lower level and he had previously shown it works at the highest level in all of college ball. Again, why wouldn't Gagliardi's methods - which have helped the Johnnies dominate at the D3 level since the time when John F. Kennedy was a senator - work? Countless coaches have moved up from the lower-levels and been successful in numerous sports - Bo Ryan at Wisconsin being one. I don't know if a 45-year-old Gagliardi would have found success at Nebraska, but it's impossible to say he wouldn't have had a chance. It's a brutal game, but it doesn't have to be taught in a brutal manner.


Ultimately that speculation doesn't matter. Gagliardi's career is about what he's done, not about what might have been. I still want a movie made about his career someday. Maybe combining The Sweet Season with the 2003 championship year - it's Hollywood, they can mix and match seasons.

There is always talk about who might someday replace Gagliardi. Mike Grant's name is always thrown out as a possibility. Mike - son of Bud - played for Gagliardi and was on the 1976 team. Grant is the most successful big-school high school coach in Minnesota. He's used many of Gagliardi's methods to turn Eden Prairie into a dynasty. He'd seem like a natural fit. Except he's getting, well, a bit old. He's in his fifties and by the time Gagliardi's done, might be close to 60. Who knows if he'd have any desire to take over. John's son Jim, the longtime offensive coordinator, is another possible candidate, as are veteran defensive coaches Jerry Haugen and Gary Fasching.

Whoever they hire will probably be successful. St. John's has many built-in advantages - built up over 58 years - that should help the new coach continue the winning ways. But it won't be the same as it's been with Gagliardi. It's not just about the winning, it's about how he's won. There's no replacing the coach who preaches the value of no. Thankfully - and remarkably - the school, players and fans won't have to worry about that for another one or two...decades.

Gagliardi links:
St. Cloud Times story on start of 2010 season
ESPN Page 2 story from 2003
2009 New York Times story
1998 LA Times story on Gagliardi
Austin Murphy article on "The Natural Bowl"
Sports Illustrated story after Gagliardi's 400th victory
Sports Illustrated story after Gagliardi broke Eddie Robinson's record
1992 Sports Illustrated feature - Gagliardi appeared on the cover of the issue
Athletic Business article