Justin Broussard helps lead the Southwestern defense from his defensive end spot. Southwestern athletics photo

Southwestern was 0-10 in 2013, the first year of its restarted football program. The Pirates are 1-5 this season, having just suffered a tough and close loss to Trinity (Texas) last Saturday.

What shows up, in terms of progress, is that the Pirates have won more games (or one more game) this year than they did last year. What doesn’t show up is the spread of community interest, the physical and psychological changes in the players and the plan, being implemented by head coach Joe Austin, who speaks of his football team as if it’s a startup tech company or a restaurant at times. And from a point of perspective, that’s a good thing.

Austin came to Southwestern from Hanover, where he was the head coach of the Panthers for three years and made them into Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference contenders after five consecutive losing seasons.

One of the bright spots at Southwestern has been sophomore defensive end Justin Broussard. Broussard was All-SCAC last season and was second in total sacks (7) in the SCAC last season. This year, the Beaumont, Texas, native is eighth in tackles, second in sacks and first in tackles for loss in the conference. So maybe he’s a little more than a bright spot. One might say he’s a foundational player.

Then again, one great player or a couple of good players do not make a good team. Therefore, in an effort to gauge the true state of the Southwestern football program, I thought I’d talk to the two men who might have hands on the heartbeat of the program.

I reached Austin and Broussard by phone in Georgetown, Texas.

D3: You’re in Year 2 of the program — what changes have you seen with regards to the progress of the team and the system you’re trying to implement?
Joe Austin: One of the big differences is that [the players] are physically changing. This year to last year physically, our second-year guys are much improved, and that’s given us an opportunity to be competitive. But they’re also changing mentally. We’ve played a really competitive schedule. Until we played Trinity, five of the six teams we played have been .500 or better, two of them were scholarship teams, and we didn’t mind that because we wanted the challenge and we wanted to learn how to compete against good people. So I would say we’ve changed so much — physically and mentally. And that’s why I think we’re heading into this new stage where we’re not just trying to keep our head above water anymore. Now, we’ve got to learn how to complete ball games.

D3: What do you like about the defense you play in at Southwestern?
Justin Broussard: I like all the guys around me. Everybody in our defense is capable and they’re so talented. We have a great DB core. We have, I think, the best cornerback [Nik Kelly] in our conference right now, and our linebackers are playing very explosive, right now, they’re coming down hill, they’re flying. And our D-line is playing at extremely high levels … and the other defensive end who plays on the opposite side of me, Alex Lee, is playing some good football, and I’m loving seeing him emerge as a playmaker on our team. I think that Coach, our defensive coordinator, he puts all of us in a position to make plays. We strive, every week, to make tackles for loss in the backfield. That’s one thing that I think we do a ton of, and I just think it’s great that we can make plays and we have guys that are capable of making plays.

D3: Coach, you came in from Hanover, a somewhat similar situation to Southwestern. What did you expect and what surprised you about starting the program at Southwestern?
JA: Well, you’re right in that I’ve done similar things to this before. At Hanover, it kind of a total revamp. They had five straight losing years. So, bringing a good chunk of my staff with me, we felt pretty prepared for it. From a football standpoint, we knew it was going to be a three-year process. We needed to get to where we had some upperclassmen before you start to have any expectations on wins and losses. My biggest surprise was actually something that I suspected would be this way and that’s the support of our community. Obviously, central Texas is football crazy. In Williamson County, here on the north side of Austin, we don’t have a hometown college football team. … You’ve got UMHB up in [Bell] County, north of us; you’ve got UT in Travis County, but Williamson is kind of striving for a hometown team. So we’ve had really good support from our community. That’s been really fun.

D3: Are you still playing off campus?
JA: Unfortunately, because our first game didn’t count that’s not going to go into our attendance; but, we had another 5,000-people game. We’re in a little bit of a dip just based on it being our second year and we’re not winning yet, but at that first game this year, we had another huge draw by Division-III standards. … As we finish up our season here, with Trinity coming back for our homecoming, it’s going to be another, you know, 4, 5, 6,000-people game. Our fans are really getting behind us. There’s Southwestern gear now in the Wal-Mart and in the H-E-B, … They’ve painted our logo on the water tower. They’ve added “Home of Southwestern University” on all the signs coming into Georgetown. Just the response that football has created, in this area, has just been huge. Football, I think, is kind of the glue that is sticking the university to the town in a way that it never has before.

D3: Is there a timetable for building a stadium?
JB: There’s not a timetable. It’s a topic of conversation and a topic for planning, but there’s not a timetable in place right now.

D3: I always love asking this question of a player when he’s sitting in front of his coach, but, Justin, what are some things that Coach Austin does to help you perform at the level that you perform? And if you have any stories about him, funny stories or interesting stories, give me some of those too.
JB: The thing that Coach Austin does and the rest of our staff do, they hold everyone accountable. They don’t really care, like, how good you think you are or how much you contribute to the team — you’re held accountable. I remember one day in practice, I was walking to the line and Coach Austin said, “You walk to the line again, and I’m going to throw you out of practice.” I thought about it, and I was like “Man, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.” I thought about it long and hard, and I was like, well, that just shows me that Coach wants to see me reach my potential. He doesn’t want me to slack off, and he wants me to go hard all the time. That’s great. I want to be held accountable, and I want to reach my potential. I think what the coaches are doing … here, allows you to reach your full potential, in time.

D3: Coach, is there one group or unit that has impressed you more this year than any other group or unit?
JA: I think we’ve got … two little groups — the bookends of our defense. I think our two defensive ends are really good, with Justin [Broussard] and Alex Lee. They were both All-Conference last year, and they should be again. Alex hasn’t really gotten the sacks, but he’s had a ton of hurries. He’s been making guys get rid of the ball. … I also want to talk about our two freshman corners, Nik Kelly and DeeJay Johnson. Nik’s to the point now where some games people don’t even throw to his side more than once or twice, and that’s crazy to think about for a freshman.

D3: Do you think this team has a chance of being able to rise quickly?
JA: I think we do. I think we’re a few pieces away, either from recruiting a few more dynamic young guys or some guys growing into it. I think our third year, next year, is going to be really interesting. If I’m honest with my assessment, I think — we’ve played Austin and Trinity in our league, and I think we’ve caught them. … So I think we’re going to be very competitive going forward. And our schedule is going to even out, we’re not going to play two Division II teams next year, we’re only playing one. So, I do think our third year is going to be good. That’s been our target. Unfortunately these guys have had to wait, but we’ve always said, “Wait till we’re juniors. Wait till we’re grown up a little bit.”

Justin, what would you say your goals are for your career at Southwestern? When you look back, what do you want to have accomplished and what do you want people to say about you as a football player?
JB: I want people to look at us as a group and say, “That the first class that came into Southwestern, they created a legacy; and, they created something that we can go towards.” We want to be successful, and we want to get better every week. So I think by the time that I’m a senior, we’ll have a lot of talent and we’ll be successful as a group, if we follow Coach’s program. As a player, I don’t have specific stat goals or anything that I want to reach. I just want to go out every week, and I want to be the best. That’s what I strive to do every week. If I can be the best, that’s my goal.

D3: What’s your vision for the program, and when I say ‘vision,’ I mean what’s the ideal state that you’d like to get the program to, in terms of level of play, recognition, and how it fits into the school of Southwestern?
JA: We fit into the school because my mission as head coach is to see that our players leave and be good men. That fits into what our school wants to do. So that’s why I think it’s a good fit for me as the coach here, with what our school wants to do for preparing their students for lifelong learning and lifelong success. In terms of the vision for the program, I think in Texas football, with the schedule we play, we can get plenty of national notoriety by beating the teams on our schedule. We’re basically are a semi-affiliate member of the ASC. We play as many of those guys as we do in our own conference. If we can get to where we’re very efficient in our conference and effective and then we can be very good in our non-conference, there’s no reason why we can’t be a team in the South Region that people are aware of and people ought to talk about year-in and year-out.

Representing the Region: Barrolle, Smith and Crenshaw

For the games from Oct. 10–11, Marquis Barrolle, the junior running back from Texas Lutheran, was named to the D3football.com Team of the Week along with Spencer Smith, the defensive end from Rhodes, and Steve Crenshaw, the kicker from Hendrix.

Their games’ stats are listed on the page (awards) and they are impressive, but more impressive are some of the other accomplishments these players have achieved so far this season.

Barrolle has rushed for 1,152 yards in six games this season, which leads all of collegiate football. He’s ranked third in touchdowns (12) and second in rushing yards per game (192) in Division III.

Smith leads the SAA with nine total sacks this year, and was fourth last year with 6.5.

Crenshaw’s numbers of 8 for 13 in field goals and 37 for 40 in extra points don’t necessary pop out as exceedingly impressive, but he has scored 61 points, which is more points than the Warriors have passed for in touchdowns.

So these guys aren’t just from the small but prized region (of Division III football) south of the Mason-Dixon line. These guys are good!

Looking ahead

Yes, Mary Hardin-Baylor at Texas Lutheran. Of course.

Yet, the other game that should strike some fancy (and which was incorrectly mentioned as a Week 6 game in last week’s column by yours truly) is that of Centre vs. Rhodes. As I said last week, “With their undefeated conference records and the Colonels’ undefeated overall record, this game will obviously test the scale of power in the SAA.” All three of those things are still true — Rhodes and Centre are still undefeated in the SAA, Centre is still undefeated overall and the game will test the scale of power in the conference — but the stakes are no longer the same, given that Centre is coming off an easy and dominant win over Sewanee, in which the Colonels racked up 370 total rushing yards. Rhodes, which had last week off, is only giving up 89.8 rushing yards a game. We’ll see which side breaks first.