BOWLING GREEN — An ignominious record arrived on the most forgettable of nights.
Ohio scored touchdown after touchdown against Bowling Green on Nov. 19, and by the end of the Bobcats’ 66-24 drubbing of BG at Doyt Perry Stadium, most of the few fans in attendance were long gone. The game meant nothing in terms of the Mid-American Conference title race, but it assured something different: It officially became the worst four-year stretch in the 100-year history of Bowling Green football.
After the game, coach Scot Loeffler was at his wit’s end during a particularly frustrating stretch, saying he had reached a point of complete clarity with the program that he had agreed to lead 356 days earlier. The Falcons would win again, he said, but it will take time.
“We'll win whenever we're ready to win, and right now, we're not ready to win — not even close," Loeffler said then.
A week later, after a 49-7 loss at Buffalo, the Falcons concluded a fourth straight season in which their defense allowed more than 450 points in 12 games. Before 2016, the Bowling Green record for points allowed in a 12-game regular season was 417.
The Falcons won the MAC twice in a three-year span from 2013 to 2015, and since have won 12 of 48 games.
Loeffler is the man tasked with undoing the damage, but ask anyone with ties to Bowling Green, and the answers are the same.
This mess was years in the making.
The title era
Former Bowling Green coach Dave Clawson built the program slowly but surely during his five-season tenure at the school. Clawson inherited an imbalanced roster and weathered two rough seasons in his second and third years, a combined 7-17, but prioritized recruiting high school players in the immediate region and developing them over time.
By the fifth year, the Falcons had the best defense in the MAC and fifth-best nationally in points allowed. They led the country in time of possession, had fewer turnovers than all but two FBS teams, and averaged nearly 35 points per game in their 2013 MAC title season.
The current Bowling Green administration views Clawson’s system as the correct way to do business at their school.
“That is the model,” current BG director of athletics Bob Moosbrugger said. “Building from within the high school ranks, [recruiting] within that four-hour radius, and keeping the numbers right over the time is the model you have to have.”
When Clawson accepted the Wake Forest job after the MAC championship game that season, former BG director of athletics Chris Kingston had an open position and a roster that would be immediately ready to win.
Kingston, who did not respond to a message seeking comment, landed on Dino Babers, whose Jimmy Garoppolo-led offense at Eastern Illinois recently had advanced to the FCS quarterfinals. The agreement worked wonders in the short term — BG won the MAC in 2015, after which Babers immediately left for Syracuse — but the program wasn’t being built to last.
"That was an athletic director who had never hired a head football coach before, and he went for the sizzle and not the steak,” said Mike Wilcox, a former BGSU trustee who is in the school’s athletic hall of fame. “And that carried over.”
A transient program
For any college football team, some level of attrition is expected. Players become dissatisfied with playing time and transfer, injuries change plans, and better, higher-paying jobs usually lure the MAC’s top coaches.
At Bowling Green, however, the sheer levels of turnover have been staggering.
In Loeffler’s first game this season, he became the seventh man — interim coaches included — to lead the Falcons during a span of fewer than seven years, the most of any FBS school. The university itself has had four presidents in 11 years.
Change has been especially visible at the player level, as every recruiting class between 2014 and 2018 was hit hard by attrition.
Babers’ two recruiting classes produced two NFL receivers in Roger Lewis and Scott Miller, multiple eventual starters in the defensive backfield, and two one-year transfers who became starters during the Falcons’ 2015 MAC championship season.
But the full classes didn’t stand the test of time.
A total of 23 players — just more than half of Babers’ recruits — did not finish their eligibility at Bowling Green. The two classes produced only two offensive linemen who started a game at Bowling Green. Of the three defensive linemen who became full-time starters, one transferred and another started as a walk-on.
And when the program most needed a coach who could build and develop a roster the way Clawson had years earlier, Kingston made a hire that made sense only to himself. In the span of days and without using a search firm, Kingston became enamored with Texas Tech running backs/associate head coach Mike Jinks, who had spent three years as a college assistant and never had been to Ohio.
Most prospective head coaches have a plan ready to go — assistants to hire, players to recruit right away, and a detailed plan of the weeks and months to come — but Jinks was not actively seeking a Division I head coaching job when Bowling Green offered the chance.
“He wasn’t looking, so he didn’t have that file,” said John Harbal, a former trustee who remains close to the football program. “He had to throw a staff together, and it was a staff of inexperienced and young assistant coaches who didn’t recruit the state of Ohio. They were all from the Texas area. It took another year for them just to get to know the high school coaches.”
Kingston was gone before Jinks ever coached a game, resigning to accept a job at Learfield.
But something was amiss right away.
The first week of the 2016 season proved prophetic. BG played at Ohio State, whose coaches openly admitted they had no idea what to expect from the Falcons, and for good reason: The BGSU staff had no one who previously had been an FBS offensive or defensive coordinator, or even called plays at the FBS level.
The hire’s effect on recruiting was devastating, as Bowling Green’s attrition rates became even more pronounced.
With few contacts in its geographical footprint, BG’s coaches attempted to bring in eight transfers that first year. Of the 30 players the program added or at least signed, 21 of them were not on the final 2019 roster four years later.
The next year’s class had 17 of 30 missing by the end of this season, and a third of the 2018 class is already gone. BG went 7-24 in Jinks’ tenure and fired him midway through 2018, his third season at the school.
Though Jinks took the brunt of the blame from the public, the hire was Kingston’s decision alone. A recommendation from Red Raiders coach Kliff Kingsbury and Kingston’s initial infatuation with Jinks’ Texas Tech title — associate head coach — led him to zero in on an inexperienced candidate without conducting a full search.
“For some reason, he was blinded by that,” Harbal said. “He certainly didn’t do enough homework, and he certainly didn’t do enough a broad enough recruiting effort to have a good comparison.”
The next step
What remained was a Frankenstein roster that Loeffler inherited for the 2019 season. Of the seniors who remained when BG left the field two weeks ago at Buffalo, four of them had signed with the program as high schoolers and stayed until the bitter end. The Falcons’ junior class has five scholarship specialists: two long snappers, two punters, and a kicker. The sophomore class is down to 11 scholarship players, and BG finished the year with fewer than 70 scholarship players.
The Bowling Green roster at the end of 2018 had three players from Lucas County or its bordering counties, an area from which Toledo had drawn 17 players at the same point.
The current coaching staff was aghast at the condition of the roster upon arrival, as Loeffler has said repeatedly players could barely line up and fitness was nowhere close to where he wanted it to be.
However, the agreement between Bowling Green and Loeffler has a rare commodity in coaching these days: Time.
Moosbrugger said Loeffler sold his vision better than any other candidate, and as long as the Falcons are sticking to the original plan, they will preach patience.
“Scot and I have had long conversations where I’ve said, ‘Scot, we know it’s not going to happen overnight,’” Moosbrugger said.
Loeffler pointed to the buyout in his contract, about which he told BG he was unconcerned. The buyout is $1 million to leave during the first two years on the job, $750,000 for the next two, and he must receive written permission to discuss other jobs.
However, he said he has no intention of “quick-fixing” the roster to lure another job, which he said is an unfortunate direction the profession has gone.
“[It’s become] go find someone that has done it completely right way and ran out of time, swoop in, get a few extra grad transfers — one or two — and you look like you just became the smartest thing ever. And then you win and go find another job,” Loeffler said. “That wasn’t my objective here.”
The Falcons plan to fill their entire class of 2020 with high school players only, most of them from familiar Midwest states, as part of continued effort to compete for championships once again.
Knowing the program had reached a critical junction last offseason, Moosbrugger said the school’s senior administration was on the same page about the type of years-long commitment the program had to make.
“We all felt the need to get this right,” Moosbrugger said.
The Falcons finished 3-9 in the first year, but scored a landmark upset victory against Toledo, their first in 10 years and critical first step for the direction of the future.
Winning regularly again likely will take additional time, but Loeffler promised BG will return to its old standard.
These bleak times, Loeffler said, will not last.
“I just feel extremely obligated to get it back to the way it used to be — like, passionate, out-of-my-mind, can’t sleep thinking about it,” Loeffler said. “It’s all about bringing Bowling Green back to where Bowling Green has been.”
First Published December 14, 2019, 4:00 p.m.
