Andrew Santos-Johnson/MUSTANG DAILY Cal Poly football players huddle before kickoff Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wis.
Lon Baldwin sat in the lobby of the Madison, Wis. Dane County Regional Airport on Sunday morning, wearing a purely red “Wisconsin” sweatshirt unscathed by snowfall Californians might’ve expected of a late-November, midwestern night with a 24-degree wind chill.
Still, though, Baldwin’s relieved demeanor suggested his beloved Badgers football team had avoided a different storm Saturday night – one that would’ve pelted the Big Ten Conference school’s sense of world structure.
The unforeseen weather’s name was Cal Poly, and its triple-option offense and flex 3-4 defense combined into a blizzard that nearly sent Madison’s Camp Randall Stadium announced crowd of 80,709 running home before they saw the frightful sight turn back to the West Coast.
Wisconsin, favored by offshore odds makers at nearly three touchdowns, prevailed just 36-35.
“I was really impressed with Cal Poly,” said Baldwin, 36, of Waunakee, Wis. “They should have won that game.”
Bold words. But it could’ve been a fluke, right? Not to Baldwin.
“The speed they played with was as good as anybody the Badgers have played,” he said. “That (2008) team, in particular, I think, would’ve given anyone in the Big Ten – minus Penn State – a heck of a game.”
Hundreds of fans (several of them who said they’d never heard of Cal Poly prior to the game’s announcement) in attire similar to Baldwin’s crowded nearby bars hours before kickoff. Three-hundred-pound linemen crashed into each other every play. House of Pain’s “Jump Around” blasted between the third and fourth quarters, cuing a frenzied, bobbing rendition of the song’s instructions so forceful it shook TVs hanging from the rafters of a press box seating hundreds keeping a watchful eye on scores from around the country pertaining to national-championship contenders.
And positively, absolutely, Cal Poly looked like a natural, and belonged right in the middle of it.
The Mustangs, the third-ranked team in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), led 13-0, 20-7, 23-14 and 29-21 in their fearless bid to wrest just the FCS’ third win in 85 tries this season against the Football Bowl Subdivision (I-A).
They already accounted for one of the previous knockouts, a 29-27, season-opening win at San Diego State on Aug. 30. But going toe-to-toe with Wisconsin, their first-ever foe from a Bowl Championship Series conference, was another feat entirely.
The in-person audience, which surpassed the previously-largest crowd in Cal Poly sports history by 48,173, took notice.
“I knew a little bit (about Cal Poly), but not too much,” Baldwin said.
For all those who may have been educated, though, Mustangs head coach Rich Ellerson reiterated his refrain of “we’re not surprised” – which he also harped after the San Diego State victory.
“We expected to win,” he said.
So did the players.
“As cliché as it sounds, they bleed like us,” Mustangs senior quarterback Jonathan Dally said. “Their football team’s just like us.”
For two weeks earlier this year, that team “just like us,” a three-time Rose Bowl champion that’s produced two Heisman Trophy winners, was voted the eighth-best in the country – anywhere, at any level.
The “SportsCenter”-highlighted performance indicated that Cal Poly may be ready to soon move up to the FBS, perhaps through the Western Athletic Conference – a development Fresno State head coach Pat Hill recently told reporters he envisions happening in coming years.
“In terms of the Western Athletic Conference, our program right now is competitive in football with its lower half,” Cal Poly president Warren Baker said at a pregame, indoor tailgate party for about 200 Cal Poly supporters.
But in order to accept Cal Poly, the WAC would likely have to do so on an associate-member basis, which most conferences don’t prefer, Baker said.
Cal Poly plays 17 of its 20 sports in the Big West Conference, which dropped football in 2001.
In 1993, the California State University system mandated that when assigning athletic funds, schools would have to be within 10 percent of demographically reflecting gender.
Since 1992, 10 California schools the Mustangs used to regularly play dropped football.
Consequently, Cal Poly, one of just two of 23 CSUs to be primarily male, is one of just three scholarship FCS programs in the most populous state in the nation, and because of six winning seasons in a row, annually experiences a scheduling nightmare.
Its membership in the Great West Conference seemed a potential cure-all, but when North Dakota State and South Dakota State each defected a year ago, the chance for a “viable” group to alleviate the year-in, year-out woes by forming a “critical mass” of routine opponents was lost, Baker said.
In the wake, Cal Poly’s precarious status as a sustainable FCS Californian stayed endangered.
This week’s Madison Capital Times entitled an article detailing the history of Cal Poly football, “The story of a survivor.”
One of the strongest examples is Al Moriarty, a Long Island native who played for Cal Poly’s 9-0 team in 1953 and is now a devout booster.
He was a guest Saturday morning at Baker’s table, which also included athletic director Alison Cone.
“You’ve got to show people that you’ve grown,” said Moriarty, an advocate of the arrangement with Wisconsin. “You’ve got to think big.”
He said he could soon see Cal Poly playing at the FBS level in a 40,000-seat stadium.
“We’ve got such a future ahead of us, it’ll knock your head off,” he added.
Moriarty certainly knows the past. He almost traveled with the team on Oct. 29, 1960 when its plane crashed in Toledo, Ohio, killing 16 players and six others.
“You build on that as a positive,” he said. “Those kids, if they were alive, would never want Cal Poly to drop football.”
Indeed, the 1960 team would be proud of the 2008 version.
Regardless of the future, it showed the Lon Baldwins of the world what its Al Moriartys already knew. Cal Poly football isn’t merely surviving. It’s more alive than it’s ever been.
Donovan Aird is a Mustang Daily sports editor and a journalism senior.