Next month’s International Bowl will represent more than just a game for the University at Buffalo Bulls.
Buffalo has reason to be bullish about football after all.
The University at Buffalo Bulls -- the other football team in the Western New York city famous for chicken wings -- will play their first-ever Bowl game when they tackle the University of Connecticut Jan. 3 at the International Bowl at Rogers Centre in Toronto.
It's the same venue where the Buffalo Bills lost 16-3 to the Miami Dolphins last Sunday in the first-ever National Football League regular-season game played in Canada. The Bills' latest loss put a dagger into the hearts of all the fans who follow the team religiously.
But the Bulls have given football fans in Buffalo reason to shout. What the Bulls have done this year is remarkable, producing a feel-good story that is as much about changing shifts in attitudes towards blacks in America as it is about a football team celebrating a dream season.
Last Friday the Bulls scored an upset for the ages beating Ball State, which hadn't lost in 12 games this season and was rated 12th in the nation, in the Mid-American Conference Championship game. It represented UB's first championship in the school's history dating back to its inception in 1894.
Coincidentally, this Bowl appearance happens on the 50-year anniversary of the 1958 team that had received an invitation to play in the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida. Because of the discriminatory policies at the stadium that prevented the participation of black athletes, combined with the fact UB had two black players -- one of them a starter -- the team voted unanimously to decline the invitation. It was a sign of unity that has not been lost on this squad. Some members of the '58 squad will be in attendance for the International Bowl, which will be their Bowl game 50 years later.
"It is part of probably one of the largest things I've ever been a part of," UB's athletic director, Warde Manual, told Sportsnet.ca on Thursday at a media conference to promote this year's International Bowl. "It is this sense of we couldn't do it. We couldn't get here. We couldn't get this team -- a team at Buffalo -- to win a championship. At first it was we couldn't win the (MAC) East. Then it was, 'Well, you'll never win a championship.' We tied for the East last year and then we win the MAC (championship).
"For me it's all come together to really be a perfect result in the perfect Bowl for us, and then that 50th-year anniversary, those guys are ecstatic and excited."
"I'm worried how the '58 team is going to behave,” Manual added jokingly. "To win a championship at this level, to be the first team to actually go to a Bowl -- and I keep referencing to the '58 team -- this is by far the biggest thing that's ever happened in collegiate athletics in the University at Buffalo," Manual added.
Manual, heading now into his fourth year at UB, is black, so too is the team's head coach Turner Gill, whom he hired three years ago. Gill, the onetime star player at the University of Nebraska, played professional football in the early '80s with the Montreal Concordes of the Canadian Football League, which did not discriminate against a player because of his skin colour.
The CFL was way ahead of the curve in terms of allowing black quarterbacks to play when the National Football League clearly overlooked players, regardless of their talent, if they didn't happen to be white.
Gill turned around the Bulls' moribund program, highlighted by the dramatic win over Ball State. With that victory, there is talk a school with a higher-profile program may sign Gill later this month, thus preventing him from coaching in the Jan. 3 game. If another team wants Gill to begin the recruiting process as soon as possible, there will be little Manual can do to stand in his way. Those are the unspoken rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, in which a team can poach a head coach developed by another school.
Gill is simply saying right now his focus is playing the University of Connecticut.
"We'll see what the future holds, only God knows," he said. "We'll pray to Him and see what happens."
Fifty years ago, it was unlikely to have a black man as athletic director at an NCAA Division 1-A school, much less a head coach. Times have indeed changed in the history of the University at Buffalo football program and, to an even greater extent, sports as a whole.
