Labor Day Classic will have a fall feel
There’s nothing unusual about Texas Southern or Prairie View A&M putting on helmets and shoulder pads this time of the year. After all, spring football is a rite of passage.
What’s out of the norm is that the Tigers and Panthers aren’t practicing for the fall. They’re running drills, tackling and working on formations in preparation of a spring football season, albeit a shortened sixgame schedule.
Members of the SWAC, which opted out of playing last fall because of the pandemic, TSU and Prairie View are playing this spring for keeps. The games count in the standings, and a conference championship will
be played.
“This gives our guys an opportunity to be showcased,” TSU coach Clarence McKinney said. “When you play in the fall, you’re always overlooked by the Power Five schools. The FCS is the only show in town (this spring), so it gives us a chance to put on a good, quality product in front of some people that may not have had an opportunity to watch some HBCU games.”
Said Prairie View coach Eric Dooley: “Playing this spring, is it normal? Absolutely not, but we understand that we get another opportunity to go out and get better.
“It’s been different, and the players alluded to that. It’s been different, but what makes you overlook it is that the players and coaches are excited because football has been taken away from us for so long.”
It has been more than 400 days since either team played a game that matters.
And as fate would have it, both teams had their respective season openers last week postponed because of adverse weather conditions. The two rivals now open their seasons against each other in what is still being billed as the Labor Day Classic.
TSU and Prairie View kick off at 7 p.m. Saturday at Panther Stadium.
Neither coach had any issues getting players to buy in to a nontraditional spring football season.
“The players just want to play; they don’t care when they play,” said McKinney, whose Tigers went 0-11 in his first year on the job in 2019. “They want a chance to show the coaches, the fans and the alumni what they can do. It also gives us a chance to compete for a championship that we were robbed of in the fall of last year.
“The biggest change is knowledge of our schemes. Our guys understand what they’ve been asked to do a lot better now than in our first year. Our guys are flying around and just having fun.”
Commissioner Charles McClelland and the SWAC announced last July that the league would push back its 2020 fall football season to the spring of 2021. Since then, McClelland has arranged for several SWAC games to be on ESPN platforms.
“Charles has done a magnificent job in leadership and putting us in a great position to be successful,” Dooley said. “Everything he does he does at a high level, and I’m excited where he has already taken the conference and where we’re going to go to. With him at the helm, I can clearly say we’re one of the top conferences in college football.”
Prairie View has been one of the top SWAC teams in the Western Division for several years. And this season, with eight players on the All-SWAC preseason team, the Panthers are picked to finish third in the division.
“We understand that we have to grasp this season right here,” Dooley said. “Right now we’re not looking forward to the fall.”
McKinney’s attention is on the current football season as well.
“I’m focused on the spring,” McKinney said. “We’re trying to rebuild a program, and our focus is taking it one day at a time, and we’ll worry about the fall once the fall gets here. Right now our focus is getting better each day in the spring and winning some games.”