Fourth and Long

In about a week, Macalester College will open another football season with a match against Beloit College. Macalester’s club has averaged about one win per year since 1989. The team won just one game last year, had three winless seasons in the 90s, and ended last season with only 29 players. (Most of Mac’s competitors field teams of 80 to 100 players.) While Macalester had four winning seasons in the 1980s, it also held the NCAA record for the longest losing streak: 50 losses in a row from 1974 to 1980.

Because of that record, the school nearly eliminated the football program last year. But a reprieve has been granted. This year, the team will drop out of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and play against smaller teams for the next few seasons. The plan is a model of simplicity: to win more than it loses, find more exceptional students who also happen to be football players, and then return to the MIAC when the program is stronger.

Coach Dennis Czech played on the celebrated Mac squad that finally snapped the 50-game losing streak. Proving the proposition that if you work hard and become the best at anything—even losing—you can be on TV, that team was briefly the darling of the national media. “We got interviewed by Jim Lampley. We were on Wide World of Sports, the whole thing,” he said the other day. “The losing streak was really a draw. It’s the same pitch we use today.” In other words, prospective students can be part of a Cinderella story—play college football and help establish a winning tradition at Mac. It’s an odd pitch, to be sure. Since Macalester has no athletic scholarships to offer, and since they look primarily at a student’s academic record, all they can credibly promise students is a real opportunity to play.

Clark Wohlferd is one of four co-captains. He is a political science and history major with a 3.78 GPA who is planning to go to law school. While he wasn’t running drills and lifting weights, he interned for two summers in the office of the Wisconsin governor. Before settling on Mac, Wohlferd had walk-on invitations and scholarship offers from several larger schools. He comes from Sun Prairie, a powerful football school near Madison, Wisconsin, where he lost only four games in four years. The Sun Prairie Cardinals were the number one team in Wisconsin his senior year, but they were upset in the state tournament quarterfinals. “I don’t like talking about that. It was a depressing time,” he said.

So how do Mac gridders react to losing so much? Like athletes everywhere, they practice a rigorous form of denial. “Our team goals are to go undefeated,” Wohlferd said decisively. The student in him, however, was more circumspect. “We will not accept planning ahead to lose. We’ll see what happens.”


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