Rutgers vs. NCCU: Doctor Frazier Readies to Right Another Failure

Henry Frazier’s latest coaching task – reviving NCCU – begins in Piscataway

You could take the SATs when you’re still in elementary school. You could drive a tractor through four feet-deep puddles in the middle of LBI’s sand dunes. You could fall into a daylong sleep on top of a log in the middle of a bear-ridden forest. But, compared to Henry Frazier III consistent coaching tasks, this is considered a peace of cake.

Where would you go if you were coming off back-to-back magnificent seasons – national championship-worthy campaigns? I can tell you where Frazier would go.

Out. Because his wife, LaNier Turner of Empowherment Entrepreneurs, told him that there really wasn’t anything left to accomplish.

So where did he go? North Carolina Central University, a university in the process of being completely integrated into the FCS; a team who managed a mere three wins last season; a team with enough talent to provide a slight glimpse of potential, if only they had the right head coach.

Frazier, 44, was the right head coach. He had been the right head coach for two schools prior to NCCU. He was like a magician, or realistically a doctor, with a magic touch in healing flailing football teams.

It all began when Frazier, native of Washington DC, lettered in four sports in high school, but took his talents as a football player to Bowie State (BSU). At Bowie, he totaled a stellar 18-3-1 record as a starting quarterback. In 1999, he began his collegiate coaching career with a return to his college, Bowie State. There, he brought a BSU Bulldog team out of pessimistic hopes and into glimpses of the promise land. This team was half under water and their potential savior was 29 years old. It didn’t matter; from 2-8 in 2000 to three consecutive winning seasons, Frazier had established a winning D2 Bowie program. Now officially donned as Bowie’s savior, the prestigious Frazier decided to move on and reestablish himself among the FCS ranks.

So where did he go? Where could he have gone?

A coach of his age and caliber really could have gone anywhere. Instead, he took over the Prairie View A&M Panthers. This was no ordinary football team. To say they were terrible before Frazier’s takeover could be taken as a compliment. They were really bad. Clueless actually. There was no doubt that a topnotch high school football team – perhaps NJ’s Don Bosco Prep or Las Vegas’s Bishop Gorman – could easily compete with them. The Panthers took bad to a new level. Their two wins in the last two seasons was, remarkably, the good news because, during one agonizing stretch not long before Frazier’s takeover, the Panthers had doubled the FCS all-time consecutive losing streak of forty, by flailing in eighty consecutive matches.

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A promising new coach readying to revive a tremendously awful team; ironically, just a few years earlier, Greg Schiano of Rutgers was given a similar job. It took Rutgers five consecutive sub-.500 seasons to officially field Schiano, and, once AD Robert Mulcahy hired him, it took Schiano three years to put Rutgers on the map with 2004 non-conference victories over Michigan State and Vanderbilt. One year later, in 2005, Schiano had New Jersey building with excitement as Rutgers went 7-5, including an appearance in the Insight Bowl against Arizona State, the Knights’ first bowl appearance since 1978. One year after Rutgers was on the winning track, Schiano won numerous head coaching awards as Rutgers shocked the world with ten wins, including a 9-0 start and a National Game of the Year victory over Louisville.

What Schiano had done at Rutgers in a mere five seasons was truly remarkable. Asking Frazier to do the same at Prairie View – remember, 80 consecutive losses – was borderline impossible to most, but not to Frazier.

The challenge would and will never intimidate Frazier. He took the Prairie View A&M job by the horns and, after battling out of three rough seasons out of the gate, the Panthers won seven games in 2007, nine games in 2008, and won the SWAC championship in 2009. The Panthers won seven more games in 2010, before Frazier resigned as head coach, only to take the job at North Carolina Central three days later.

Like Bowie and Prairie View, NCCU is under heat. One year removed from their first football season in the MEAC, in which the Eagles were almost entirely outmatched in a mere three wins over the course of last season, Frazier took the job absolutely excited to heal another flailing college football team.

The journey begins Thursday night at Rutgers. It is not an easy opener – the NCCU Sports Network play-by-play man Chris Hooks explained that this will be the Eagles’ second match in recent history against an FBS opponent (the first was a 2009 loss against crosstown foe Duke) – but it is definitely a checkpoint. To play a team of FBS caliber can undoubtedly provide an answer to Frazier’s questions on NCCU’s summer performance.

Doctor Frazier has been here before.

So don’t be surprised when NCCU wins the MEAC in a few years time. But, after that title, Frazier will be somewhere else, healing another flailing football team.

By: Justin Sontupe
BigEast-fans.com Rutgers Correspondent