Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

6B ♦ WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2006 Wake Forest’s Grobe has performed miracles before You say no one saw Wake Forest coming. You hail the Demon Deacons’ run to Saturday’s Atlantic Coast Conference Championship game as a miracle. You claim a weakened ACC put the Deacons in Jacksonville, Fla., to face Georgia Tech and it will never hap pen again. Wrong. Wrong. And so, so wrong. A small, quiet group of football fans know M Adam Van Brimmer Morris News Service better. And no, we are not biased homers reveling in Wake’s success. We are the folks who wit nessed Deacons head coach Jim Grobe’s first - and far greater - miracle in his pre vious head coaching job at Ohio University. Ohio went 0-11 in 1994, my first season as the foot ball beat writer for The Post, the school’s daily student newspaper. The coach, Tom Lichtenberg, was in poor health and was plagued by dissension on his staff. The situation so flustered Lichtenberg that midway through that season he uttered one of the funniest yet saddest lines ever in a press conference: “I often times feel like we’re Cliffy and the clowns out there on Saturdays - and I’m Cliffy.” The team’s play and the general apathy of the uni versity community so dis gusted the school’s new president, Robert Glidden, that he fired Lichtenberg with a week remaining in the season. Into this quagmire a month later stepped Grobe, hired away from the Air Force Academy - where he was a position coach, not a coordinator. Unheralded or PLANNING A PARTY? Consider VIP Treatment at your Favorite Entertainment Hot Spot!!! p \k M ' ffiw Lj A Xjt O* 1 1 Idm tender! Call for Availability 788"5000 (Dates filling fast!) not, Grobe made an impres sion. His calm and confident demeanor made believers out of cynics. He hired several former Air Force players for his staff and brought in Mike Sewak, the right-hand man of triple-option guru Paul Johnson, to build his offense. The Air Force grads brought a disciplined, military-like approach and ran off several of the few talented players Ohio returned, guys happy with their status as the best players on a bad team. Grobe demanded sacrifices and hard work. No excep tions. Ohio snapped the nation’s longest Division I-A losing streak in Grobe’s second game as head coach. The Bobcats defeated a Division I-AA team by a 5-3 score in a driving rainstorm. The few dozen students who stuck it out rushed the field to rip down the goal U7uW' (/)ric/rf/ ffileyMry JIM ■■ Leigh Cabasares & Dave Wolk Jessica Wood & Dan Perdue Molly Tripp & Craig Craybeal Rachel Moore & Mason Florence Lauren Mason & Thomas Moore As.hlee McCord & Bradford Wood PJ3 Tina Hawk & David Conner 909 Carroll Street Downtown... Perry ki ■aSI www.twofriends2.com jf CT jUb^^ f Bi ■*/ w AW Lcr Us Bos? Voyi ri’ 20® WWS "«(fe posts afterwards. It took close to 20 minutes - yes, I timed it - to topple the posts on one end of the field. Aboilt a dozen of the students ran the length of the field after the second set. After five frivolous minutes of slipping and sliding, they gave up. The football program didn’t, though. The Bobcats went 2-8-1 in 1995 and 6-6 a year later. By the 1997 season, the players and the university community had bought in. The stadium began to sell out. Fans turned out to tailgate before kickoff and stayed beyond the marching band’s renowned half-time show. And Ohio won eight of its first nine games, the lone loss to then Big 12 power Kansas State by three points on the road. The Bobcats lost their last two games, including a Mid- * «tf«a l m SPORTS American Conference divi sion title game to Marshall and Randy Moss., but the turnaround was complete. In his last season at Ohio, 2000, the Bobcats defeated Big 10 power Minnesota and MAC bully Marshall. Grobe won 33 games in his six seasons at a school that had won 17 games in the 10 sea -Rl 89 IMj 1 X H 9k M H 9 I K ionite Church Rd. jH intezuma, GA H 78-472-8833 ttnisfcislte Xa wm. • mMkMmksWJM ■ ■pome check out our gift N©iW/©SINf BbH: Qhnn Wp hsvp / —-* ■* o custom built gift baskets for that hard lo Holiday, special: No.W. S i please friend or relative 2§%fhmS Dee. 8> jfl including jams, teas, 7-9, am," WS salsas and more. ... WffljM “Mite§ii£& j^H Order”* ro JH Strawberry Cake rn.ufnns HI For Your m ujSjwMm WWi bjjy/aj M ■Hi Holiday Dessert. cu^oHqffee.. flfl Call for Daily Lunch Specials. ML Open Mnn. • Sat. sons before he got there. And that success spawned what he’s done at Wake Forest. “Ohio was really a tougher situation, etien though Wake Forest was in the ACC,” Grobe said Sunday. “Coming to Wake Forest, one of the things that gave us confi dence was what we did at L r t l,or «</5 lim ffe iLJ J*M feomv® THE HOUSTON DAILY JOURNAL Ohio. ” And that’s why we former Bobcats say, “Where there’s a Grobe, there’s a way.” Adam Van Brimmer is an Atlanta-based writer for Morris News Service. E-mail him at adam. vanbrimmertomorris.com or telephone him at 404-589- 8424. |oo<flni>> 00041346