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There is a sign prominently placed in the office of head coach Ray Woodard that speaks to the prevailing football philosophy at Lamar University.
It says: "Patience is overrated."
Call it the Cardinal rule, and Lamar’s trip to Aloha Stadium to play the University of Hawaii in a nonconference game Saturday is an example of that ambitious creed.
Maybe, when you have been without football for 21 years, the way Lamar was prior to 2010, there is a tendency to try to make up for lost time in one swoop.
Perhaps when you are building a program from scratch, you’re more willing to jump into challenges. Even ones 4,000 miles distant.
Which helps explain what brings Lamar, a debuting Football Championship Subdivision member from Beaumont, Texas, here this week. And to Oklahoma State in 2013 and Texas A&M in ’14.
"I knew this would be our first year that we’d be eligible to play (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools and I just thought playing Hawaii was very intriguing," Woodard said.
He approached UH about the game almost a year before he had even put his first team on the field, envisioning it as a "win-win" proposition for his players and program. It gave him another recruiting tool for three years and, under the all-expenses-paid terms of the contract, the trip will not cost the Cardinals a cent.
Lamar is contracted to leave here with a $125,000 check in its pocket since UH covers the airfare, hotels and meals, making it roughly a $250,000 package.
LAMAR’S IS a story of a basketball school smack dab in the middle of prime football country that is determined to make a go of it on the football field, no matter how many tries it takes.
Bob Knight’s son, Pat, coaches hoops there now, and Billy Tubbs, for whom the basketball court is named, once did.
In fact, it was Tubbs as athletic director who brought back football after the school had dropped the sport for the second time following the 1989 season. He helped convince students, who voted 79 percent in favor of a $100-a-year student-athletic fee, to get behind the funding and got boosters to chip in on millions in stadium refurbishments and football facility construction.
Legend has it that Tubbs initially targeted Barry Switzer to be the architect of the revival, but by the time he’d won all the necessary approvals, Switzer was in his 70s and wouldn’t give up his TV duties.
Enter Woodard, a Texas graduate, defensive lineman on the Denver Broncos’ 1987 Super Bowl team and a Texas junior college coach. He has set about trying to convince prospects in the talent-rich southeast portion of the Lone Star State to stay home and play for the Cardinals, a team whose coaching staff includes former UH line coach Dennis McKnight.
With 5-6 (2010) and 4-7 (2011) records the first two seasons, and a 40-0 loss at Louisiana-Lafayette in the 2012 opener, the Cardinals are paying their dues on this full-speed-ahead charge.
"With an open week, we know (the Warriors) have had time to focus on us," Woodard said. "We know when we go out there, we’ll have our hands full."
The patient approach this isn’t.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
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