Football: Cajuns reaping the benefits of STM’s Huval staying home

Tim Buckley, Daily Advertiser, August 25, 2013

 Huval: Cajuns must be hungry

UL senior center Andre Huval looks forward to the Ragin Cajuns’ 2013 season-opener Saturday at Arkansas, and senses a team ready for the test.

“We’re gonna have to come play,” he said.

“We have to come into the Arkansas game hungry, which we are,” Huval added. “Everybody’s got their eyes set on it.”

What the Cajuns accomplished during offseason conditioning is what gives Huval the confidence he has.

“In the summer it’s kind of like some team building. … It’s working as a team,” he said. “It’s trying to accomplish a mission, rather than just going in there and seeing who can push the most weight around.

“Because when you’re on the football field, (it’s) not always (that) the strongest man wins. The team that works together as a team the best is usually the team that’s gonna come out on top.”

Bowl wins were great, but Cajuns now want Sun Belt crown
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Today, he’s a UL senior beginning his second straight season as one of 44 candidates on the Rimington Trophy watch list for best center in NCAA Division I-A football.

He’s a preseason All-Sun Belt Conference pick who plays like a coach, quarterback and center rolled into one.

He’s even deemed by one of his coaches – offensive coordinator Jay Johnson – to be one of the two “most pivotal” players on the UL offense, along with starting quarterback Terrance Broadway.

Yet Andre Huval almost never made it with Ragin’ Cajuns.

“It’s like night and day,” he said.

It was his senior year at St. Thomas More, and Huval – now listed as a 6-foot-2, 285-pounder – wasn’t feeling enough love from the program near and dear his heart.

He held offers from FCS Southland Conference-members McNeese State and Southeastern Louisiana, but none from UL or any of the other bigger teams talking to him.

“I think the big thing was my height,” said Huval, who stood around 6-foot at the time. “It kind of scared a bunch of them away.

“It even scared UL away, to the point where UL didn’t offer me until (late November, just more than two months prior to the opening of the NCAA’s national signing period).

“They (the Cajuns) kept holding off,” Huval added, “and at that point I was kind of fed up with the whole recruiting process.”

Was he ever, so much so he even wondered what it would be like attend UL – whose team he pulled for as long as he can remember – but not play football.

He also contemplated playing sans scholarship.

“I was just kind of flustered,” Huval said. “But I probably would have considered (walking on), and maybe earn my way.”

The staff of ex-coach Rickey Bustle let it be known to Huval they liked him, but the coaches just weren’t ready – yet – to take that next step.

Huval was right about the height.

“You watch the film, and you say, ‘He’s really good,’ ” said Gerald Broussard, a Cajun assistant coach at the time and the father of current UL deep-snapper John Broussard. “Then you see him in person, and you say, ‘I thought he was bigger. … You wonder if his lack of size is gonna get him in trouble.

“He’s an easy guy to turn down, because he just doesn’t pass the eyeball test right away. But the more film you watch, the more you realize he (can play).”

As that process played out, the recruit grew restless.

“It aggravated me to the point where I didn’t care if they (the Cajuns) called,” Huval said. “I thought about it, and I almost was even considering maybe I wouldn’t even play.

“It was kind of frustrating, the way people kept doubting because of my height. I knew I could play. Then they called, and I thought about it for a little while, and I was like, ‘I do want to play.’ ”

He most definitely did.

And the scholarship finally was on the table.

Yet Huval’s emotions were mixed.

Here he was, a two-time All-State pick, his home not far from that of UL, yearning to play for a team that didn’t have a winning season the whole time he was in high school. And there the Cajuns were, keeping lines of communication open, but not prepared for the longest time to make an offer.

“It was kind of like, ‘It’s about time,’ ” he said of the day the words he’d been hoping to hear finally arrived. “I had been waiting and waiting, and it just never happened.”

After all the mental anguish of not knowing, however, Huval did not answer in the affirmative right away.

Now it was his turn to take some time.

“UL would call every week, and I’d be waiting to hear, ‘We want to offer you a scholarship,’ and it was like they were holding out on me for some reason,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why.”

So Huval did not immediately commit to the Cajuns. McNeese State was on him especially hard, ready and willing to wrap their arms around him, and he took note of that.

After talking with his parents, however, Huval committed a few weeks later.

“I could see he was struggling with it,” said Huval’s father, Terry. “I remember telling him, ‘If football wasn’t in the equation, where would you go to school?’ ”

It was UL, by a landslide.

“Well, that’s half the answer right there,” Terry Huval said. “In the end he was sold on UL because UL is the school he would have gone to anyway, had he not played ball.”

Broussard, an ex-Cajun player himself and now a Cajuns football radio analyst, was not Huval’s primary recruiter. But he did help seal the deal, leaning on the lineman’s Acadiana roots.

“As simple as it sounds,” Broussard said, “I said, ‘Dude, your last name is Huval. You live in Lafayette. Go to UL. My last name is Broussard. I went to UL. Some things are just meant to be.’

“Sometimes the fit is just there, and you just have to made aware of that,” Broussard added. “When you are a Huval from Lafayette, and you have an opportunity to go play for the Cajuns, that’s what you do.”

Huval arrived where he was born to be in 2010, and didn’t need long at all to show Cajun coaches he was ready to play right away.

When then-starting guard Jaron Odom sprained an ankle in UL’s season-opening loss at No. 23 Georgia, Huval stepped in. Odom and Huval alternated series in a win over Arkansas State, and Huval made his first start six games later in a loss at Ohio.

But UL endured a six-game losing streak during October and November that year, finished 3-9 after a season-ending win over UL Monroe and soon found itself looking for a new coaching staff after Bustle was fired.

Huval had to make his case all over again, this time to the new staff of Mark Hudspeth.

At least he wasn’t alone.

“They didn’t know who we were,” Huval said with reference to Hudspeth and his new assistants, and to Bustle’s old recruits.

“They looked at film, but film was irrelevant. It’s not the same scheme. So we had to prove we could succeed in their scheme when they got here.”

In Hudspeth’s first spring at UL, he asked Huval to move to center.

“I had never snapped the ball before,” Huval said.

It didn’t matter.

Hudspeth saw something he didn’t in other Cajun linemen on campus, and he pegged Huval as his center for the future.

“You want your center to be a guy that can get everybody going in the same direction, that can handle the mental part of the game as well as the physical part,” Hudspeth said when asked why. “Because a lot of people can handle the physical part. But when it comes to the mental part, they’re just not quite there yet.

“That’s what he was able to give us,” the Cajun coach added. “Then he just kept maturing and getting better each season.”

Huval started all 13 games for a 9-4, New Orleans Bowl-winning team as a sophomore in 2011, missing only 11 of 936 snaps – six in a blowout loss at Oklahoma State, five in a 25-point win at Middle Tennessee.

He started all 13 games as well for another 9-4, New Orleans Bowl-winning team as a junior last season, that time playing all but 12 snaps.

“I like the responsibility and the job,” Huval said. “I think it was a good switch.”

Brilliant, actually.

Huval now knows the UL offense as if he’d drawn up the playbook himself.

“We might as well put him back there at quarterback sometimes,” said Terry Johnson, Huval’s backup at center last season and now UL’s starting left guard.

“He knows where the blitzes are, he knows where everything is. I trust him. I trust him like I trust a brother,” Johnson added. “He’s never gonna steer me wrong. He’s always gonna tell me the truth. If I do good, he’s gonna tell me I did good. If I do bad, he’s gonna tell me I did bad.”

It’s that inside-out understanding of UL’s offensive system that was integral in the Cajuns producing a school-record 5,914 yards in total offense and school-record 461 points last season.

“He knows our offense. It’s unbelievable for an offensive lineman. He knows exactly what we’re doing,” offensive coordinator Johnson said. “The communication (with offensive line coach) Mitch Rodrigue is unbelievable. He’s another coach on the field.

“Andre can tell everybody on our line what to do, and how to do it. He knows all the looks. He studies film, he studies the defenses.”

It’s nothing new, though.

Even playing youth basketball, Huval tried to read the defense. His father remembers the same when soccer was the sport of choice.

“He’d direct the other players where to go on the field,” Terry Huval said. “You watch him do that on the line (now), it’s kind of funny.”

His father considers worth ethic, strong self-discipline and a “calm demeanor” – not to mention quick feet – Huval’s top attributes.

A first-team Capital One Academic All-District pick last season, he also knows how to practically apply what he learns.

But Huval tips his hat to Rodrigue when hearing that Hudspeth essentially calls him a center who could play QB if it weren’t for all the throwing and running.

“It’s a testament to Coach Rod. … He teaches (so) we’re reading coverages just like quarterbacks are,” Huval said.

“You know, most centers aren’t out reading coverages. But we have to know that, because we have to relay information to the quarterback. And he’s got to relay information back to me.”

Hudspeth is just happy Huval got the info – and offer – he needed to land at UL, so his center-in-waiting was there when he arrived.

“That’s thing about recruiting. It’s no perfect science,” Hudspeth said. “Every year there are players that are five-star kids that get to your place, and they never play a snap. Then there are players, a lot of times, that only have one or two offers – and they get to your place, and end up being great players.

“He’s having such a great career,” the Cajun coach added. “I’m glad it worked out, because he got to play for his home team, the team he grew up watching. His family has been able to enjoy his career, and be a part of it.”

It means plenty to family, too.

“It’s certainly quite a treat to be able to … have this opportunity,” Terry Huval said. “It’s great to have him at home.”