Connecticut savors first bowl
DETROIT — As their plane descended to Detroit Metro Airport, they could see it lit up and blinking at them from underneath the clouds:
U-C-O-N-N.
The Connecticut football players were already excited, but this sent them to another level. The name was emblazoned on the team’s hotel, the Dearborn Hyatt Regency.
“It was sweet,” senior quarterback Dan Orlovsky said. “I wonder what they do if you’re at the Sugar Bowl? “
Other Motor City Bowl teams might embrace playing in Detroit in December like they would the E bola virus.
Even if the bowl were in Iceland or a foot of snow fell today, nothing could spoil the first bowl trip in Connecticut’s history. The Huskies play Toledo on Monday at Ford Field.
Four years ago, the Huskies were 2-9 and in the midst of a difficult transition to Division I-A football from I-AA. Thoughts of a bowl game were far away.
“A lot of teams have played in bowl games and they take it for granted,” Orlovsky said. “That’s something Coach is trying to stress. Don’t take anything for granted. It’s a privilege to be here. We’re ecstatic to be here. It’s our first bowl game and our first time playing in a postseason game. We didn’t care where we went. We just wanted to go somewhere and we were lucky enough to come to Detroit.”
When Orlovsky committed to UConn over Virginia and Purdue, everybody thought he was crazy — even his own father.
But Orlovsky saw big-time football on the rise at UConn, a university known almost exclusively for its college basketball teams. Now committing to the Huskies isn’t so strange anymore.
The Huskies opened the 40,000-seat, $91-million Rentschler Field this season. It’s about a half-hour from UConn’s Storrs campus, but it’s a serious upgrade from Memorial Stadium, which sat only 16,200.
“It was high school,” Orlovsky said. “That’s no knock on the stadium. It was a great stadium, but it wasn’t a I-A stadium.”
In 2006, UConn will unveil the Burton Family Football Complex and the Mark R. Shenkman Training Center — a connected, $42-million state-of-the-art facilities that include a 120-yard playing surface and an 18,000-square-foot strength and conditioning area. It also was made possible because of a pair of $2.5-million donations from prominent alumni Mark R. Shenkman and Robert Burton, whose son Michael captained the 1999 UConn football team.
Things have moved just as fast for the Huskies on the field, too. The Huskies lost 12 of their first 17 games after moving up to I-A. They have gone 22-16 since, including a 7-4 record this season. They finished 3-3 in the Big East.
There were several program-building victories along the way, including a defeat of Big East champion Pittsburgh, 29-17. The Panthers are playing in the Fiesta Bowl, a Bowl Championship Series game, leading the Huskies to believe even bigger things loom in their future.
“It’s one of those things where if I say it’s a surprise, they’ll say you don’t set your expectations high enough,” coach Randy Edsall said. “I think it’s a surprise to everybody. We’re in a bowl game in three years. There are some teams that haven’t gone to a bowl game in decades. It could probably be a surprise, but when you look at the makeup of this team, the coaching staff and what we’ve tried to do, then I don’t think it’s surprising.”
Until now, the football team has felt like the odd- man out within UConn’s big-time sports community. The women’s basketball team has won four national titles since the Huskies began the transition to Division I-A. Last April, both the men’s and women’s basketball teams won national titles, the first time a school has won both the same year.
Though this berth in the Motor City Bowl doesn’t match that success, the football team no longer feels like the nobody on campus. And Edsall believes it’s only a matter of time before the team begins contributing to UConn’s championship tradition.
“It’s been a monumental ride and a monumental experience to get here this quickly,” Edsall said. “A lot of us in our wildest dreams never thought this could happen.”