Junior running back Madison Ross leads Austin College with just under 100 yards per game. Photo by Joe Fusco, d3photography.com

Progress needs to be witnessed; it can’t in many cases be described. And it takes a trained eye to see the progress being made in, say, a company or a highway project, in a human being or a football team.

In sports, especially in football, strides are measured by many and often with simple tools. Coaches tend to disregard the evaluations of outside parties, at least they say they do, and tend to express valuation as based on more nuanced and genuine measurements.

The progress of the Austin College football team is pretty easy to see, whether on the field or on the page. They just had to take a couple of steps back first.

The Kangaroos were winless in 2011, going 0-10; 2-8 in 2012, 5-5 last season and 5-3 so far this season. The steady advancement, starting at rock bottom in 2011, came after a 4-5 season in 2010, head coach Loren Dawson’s first season.

Dawson has had a varied experience at Austin. He had to coach up a group in 2010 that wasn’t entirely of his making, and he got to start over in 2011 with a new class of recruits and begin shaping the program as he saw fit.

“We knew when [the 2011 recruits) were freshmen and sophomores, especially when they were sophomores, we knew we were making progress,” Dawson said. “We just had a long ways to go to make it happen. Our juniors, give them credit. When we were recruiting them, we were coming off an 0-10 season, and they still had the courage to come here because they knew it was the right place for them.”

The progress Dawson has seen is in every area of the program.

“Every facet. From roster size — when I got here the roster was in the 80s , now we’re in the 120s. Our retention — we’ve got a senior class of 25 … Stat continuity — if you look at the stats, not just the wins and losses, but the stats offensively and defensively, there’s been progress made every year during the last four years,” he explained.

Ultimately, what the fans see, what the media sees, and, in large part, what the administration sees is wins and losses. This season’s record marks a recent milestone in that the Kangaroos will have recorded two consecutive non-losing seasons since the early 1990s. It’s also the first time since 2008 that the ’Roos have had a 5-3 record at the week-9 marker. Last season’s 5-5 record came after the ’Roos won five out of their last six games, before which they had been winless.

The four-game win streak to end last season carried over to this season, with another win streak of four games in weeks 3-6. The streak was halted and the 4-2 start, Austin’s best since 2002, was ruined in a 10-point loss to Hendrix on Oct. 25. It was so much of a disappointment for Dawson and his team that the head coach didn’t want to be interviewed for this column that week.

Yet, as has been the running theme with this Kangaroos team, they had to incur a stoppage of progress in order to make the next step forward. It can also be said that Austin’s play against Hendrix, an improved and up-and-coming team in the SAA, proved to be a step unto itself.

“It was an important game for us to respond to playing poorly in Arkansas,” Dawson said. “It was important that we responded to that. I think it’s important — how did we play the second time we’re playing somebody. Did we improve since the first time we played them.”

The ’Roos responded by putting up 49 points against Southwestern and its talented defense, after having beaten the Pirates 20-13 in a very evenly matched game in Week 5. The ’Roos now have two games left, against Texas Lutheran and Trinity (Texas), to exceed the five-win mark, for the first time in 14 years.

What has changed over the last five seasons is that Dawson, his staff and his players have accepted some of the truths of football and life.

“What I’ve learned, in four or five years of doing this now — you as a head coach, and then you get your staff and your players to just focus on the things that you have control over,” Dawson said.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t have control over that impact your ability to win, but if you’re worried about the things you don’t have control over, you’re not worried about the things that you do.”

Football, like our lives, is an imperfect game or, rather, we’re never going to play it perfectly. Recognizing where substantive and genuine value lies, putting effort into improving and mastering those areas are the ways to progress. It also helps to let go of the illusion of being able to control and affect everything, something of which head coaches and teachers can have a good understanding.

Dawson received his master’s degree in school guidance counseling from Arizona State and has taught in the Austin College Department of Exercise and Sport Science as an assistant professor. His advanced degree and experience teaching have lent him the ability to help and advise his players in parental and educational ways.

“When you’ve got 120 young men, there’s a lot of different things 120 young men are dealing with,” Dawson said. “I’ve learned to become a pretty good listener and [to] help guys find answers for questions they have or maybe get them to ask the questions that they’re not quite thinking they need to be asking and help them figure out where they need to go and how they can get there.”

The Kangaroos are getting there all right. It doesn’t mean they won’t take steps back or sideways. It doesn’t mean that they’ll get beyond five wins this season and if they don’t, that certainly doesn’t mean that this team has failed to improve, that this season isn’t a success and that they are going in the wrong direction. Because as we all know — failures, no matter how small or large, are often our greatest successes; it is the place where true learning exists. It creates a need. It’s where progress sprouts and undeterred growth blooms.

For his team, Dawson said it best: “I’ve been in this business long enough to know that when you’re making progress, usually the last place it shows up is the on the scoreboard.”

No bid for the SAA

Last Friday, on All Hallows’ Eve, the NCAA Division III football championships committee made a scary change to the championship handbook. The committee took the automatic qualification (or bid) for the 2014 Division III football playoffs away from the Southern Athletic Association — the AQ the committee had granted to the conference in its pre-championship handbook just a couple weeks earlier.

The scary parts are not that the committee would act with such autocratic authority — there is precedent for these kinds of changes — or that the allowance was reversed, because ultimately it was the correct decision. The scary part is the seeming incompetence by the committee and its general disregard for a program’s (dare I say) feelings about such a tease.

In the end, the SAA will have to wait one more year for an automatic qualification, and a school like Centre, which is 8-0 and ranked No. 22 in the D3football.com Top 25, may not get into the playoffs — which would be much more of a shame than a pull-the-rug kind of error. 

Looking ahead

Centre is going for 9-0 this Saturday against Millsaps along with trying to keep its playoff hopes alive and keep a tight grip on the conference lead. Those are mostly the reasons to “tune” in, although, Millsaps, given its tendency to keep games close this season, may give the Colonels a run for their money and make a tight one out of the penultimate game of the regular season.

It’s not likely, due to the facts that Millsaps is already giving up 170 rushing yards per game and Centre is averaging 267 rushing yards per game and 39 points per game against conference opponents.

Keeping it in the SAA, Rhodes (6-2, 3-1) plays Hendrix (5-3, 2-2) at home this week, in a game of somewhat evenly matched squads. Rhodes is trying to keep its conference title hopes alive, although, Centre needs to lose for those hopes to be considered (and even then, the Colonels hold the tiebreaker). Hendrix, on the other hand, is trying to beat a good, in-conference team and finish up a solid year that has gone a little south (pun intended) over the last month.