Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Bonds put aside as rivalry renews
JONESBORO — Blake Anderson was watching film this week of Central Arkansas and couldn’t keep his mind from wandering back to more than a decade ago, when he was a first-year assistant at Middle Tennessee.
“There’s still a lot of things that look similar to what we did back then,” he said.
There’s a good reason for that.
Arkansas State and UCA will rekindle an instate rivalry for the first time in five years at 6 p.m. tonight, when the ASU coach and UCA Coach Steve Campbell meet as head coaches for the first time. The matchup will reconnect two former colleagues and longtime buddies.
Their careers were on different trajectories back in 2002 when they were together in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Campbell, then 36, had recently won a Division II national title at Delta State
when he was hired to be the Blue Raiders’ offensive coordinator, his first such job in Division I. Anderson, then 33, had been coaching wide receivers at New Mexico when he was picked to be the co-coordinator, where one of his many duties included organizing the passing game.
The twist came when head coach Andy McCollum told them to run the offense that former offensive coordinator Larry Fedora had run previously, snippets of which both Anderson and Campbell were familiar. Campbell, for instance, had run a no-huddle offense at Delta State, but never at the tempo Fedora had in place at Middle Ten- nessee.
Campbell called the plays while Anderson coordinated the passing game. Both tried to achieve the desired speed.
“We were told to come in, learn the system and run it as is,” Anderson said. “We tried our best to learn it inside and out and find a way to be productive. It was a challenge.”
Campbell, who already had been a head coach for three seasons, said the two worked well together.
“We did it like every other place I’ve been,” Campbell said. “You get together what you want to do in the run game, you get together what you want to do in the pass game, then you take input and
go from there. It was an inclusive deal.”
The two coaches have had more successful seasons. The Blue Raiders went 4-8 while ranking second in the Sun Belt Conference in scoring (24.8) and third in total offense (362.7).
After the season, Campbell accepted the offensive coordinator
position at Mississippi State, where he spent one season before starting a 10-year run as head coach at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
Anderson stayed two more seasons before he left coaching to work in private business in Texas. He got back in the profession in 2007 at Louisiana-Lafayette, before moving on to Southern Miss and North Carolina in assistant roles.
Then, in December 2013, Anderson and Campbell crossed paths again.
Campbell was hired at UCA on Dec. 18, 2013. The next day, Anderson was introduced as ASU’s new coach. Both coaches said the week was a whirlwind, but they found time to sneak in a phone call to reflect on becoming Division I head coaches just a couple of hours away.
“Wow, can you believe that,” Campbell remembers saying.
That’s not the only connection on the field today.
ASU wide receivers coach Luke Paschall was a redshirt freshman at Middle Tennessee the year Campbell and Anderson ran the offense together. Five years later, Paschall’s first job out of college was coaching receivers for Campbell at Gulf Coast. He was paid $2,000 and lived in the dorms, but he helped the team win a junior college national championship.
Campbell called Paschall a “fired up, go-get-it guy.”
“I learned how much I didn’t know,” Paschall said. “I knew how to watch film, but I didn’t know how to watch film.”
On the UCA sideline tonight will be first-year defensive line coach Larry Hart. He’s a former UCA All-American who spent one season with the Jacksonville Jaguars. He spent the past two seasons as a graduate assistant at ASU before moving back to Conway.
ASU offensive line coach Allen Rudolph played at Nicholls State while Campbell coached running backs there in the early 1990s. ASU offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner has no connection to Campbell, but he coached UCA’s quarterbacks in 2009 for Clint Conque. ASU defensive line coach Brian Early coached that position at UCA from 2004-2008, also under Conque.
The history between the two staffs provides material for pregame conversations, but pleasantries will be put aside during their final nonconference game of the season.
“The No. 1 thing is let’s go try and win the game,” Campbell said. “Your friendships are your friendships, and you’ll have them. You’ll set them aside for a week and then get them back. That’s a part of football.”