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Football: McNeese coach, players have chip on their shoulder

Kevin Foote, The Advertiser, Sept. 10, 2016

McNeese State head football coach Lance Guidry remembers well the last time his Cowboys played the UL Ragin’ Cajuns in football.

It was 1987 and he was in his third and final season as Carencro High’s head coach. In other words, he was working in Cajun Country at the time.

And he loved the experience.

“We had a divided staff (at Carencro),” Guidry said. “Mac and I had graduated at McNeese, Donovan (LaGrange) had started at UL but finished at McNeese, Rip (Eveland) played at UL, (Tony) Courville went to UL and Judd (Broussard) was McNeese. We definitely had a lot of fun with it.”

Even better, Guidry was able to enjoy a rare opportunity for that game — watching it in the stands as a fan.

“It was a lot of fun being a fan,” Guidry said. “I don’t ever really get to do that. You get to hear what the fans are saying, everybody’s opinions. Everybody’s an expert for sure.”

Of course, it really made the experience even more fun when McNeese State did what it typically has done in Guidry’s lifetime — beat the Cajuns. In that meeting, the Cowboys rolled to a 38-17 victory at Cajun Field.

“McNeese fans have been able to brag for eight years on that game,” laughed Guidry, who said the only other game he’s attended as a fan was Cecil Collins’ debut at McNeese after transferring from LSU because he was an assistant at Leesville High in the Collins era.

At 6 p.m. on Saturday at Cajun Field, UL will get another chance to claim its first win in the series since handling the Cowboys 33-13 in Lake Charles in coach Nelson Stokley’s first season of 1986.

McNeese State leads the all-time series 20-15-2, but that’s a bit deceiving. Since Guidry was born on March 25, 1971, in the shadows of McNeese State in Welsh, the Cowboys own a 12-3-2 mark against the Cajuns.

As much as Guidry’s grown up with the rivalry, though, this will actually be his initial first-hand experience with it. His playing career at McNeese State was from 1990-93, culminating with his first-team All-Southland and team captain senior season. Prior to that 2007 game, the previous meeting was UL’s win 30 years ago.

“I think it’s a great rivalry,” Guidry said. “It just has something special to it, but really, the two programs have only played once since the mid-1980s. I know our fans really miss the opportunity to make that trip to Lafayette.

“It’s very important to our fans. Really, it’s all they’ve wanted to talk about since it came out that we were playing this game.”

So like Guidry himself, none of the current Cowboy players have actually participated in the series either.

“We’ve tried to talk to our players about the rivalry,” Guidry said. “I think they understand. I think they get how important it is to the McNeese community.”

In fact, Guidry said many Cowboy fans are concerned about not playing again for another decade or so. Or even longer than that, especially if the Cowboys pull off another road win.

UL coach Mark Hudspeth said his staff and players have gotten updated a bit on the rivalry’s history as well.

“McNeese week: a game that all of our fans have been looking forward to for quite a while,” Hudspeth said. “We have not had the most success against those guys toward the end of that series, so we’re hoping as a team and as a program that we can compete much better and hopefully play well.

“I heard it was a pretty heated rivalry, obviously, to say the least. From my vantage point, and learning about the rivalry, it’s always seemed to go in swings, where one university had the series for a while, then it flips to the other university. It wasn’t a whole lot of back-and-forth every year … and I think it ended up, if I’m not mistaken, with McNeese owning the majority of the last times.”

While many of the UL and McNeese fans have kept the rivalry alive with friendly (and perhaps sometimes not-so-friendly) banter over the years, the two programs’ paths have also crossed in recruiting wars over the years.

“We know their players; their players know us,” Hudspeth said. “That always adds to a rivalry game. We recruited a lot of their players; they recruited a lot of our players, and they’re all from the same area.

“Anytime you have all those factors involved it will make for a great game.”

That motivation from recruiting still hasn’t changed for some since Guidry was a kid pulling against the Cajuns.

Guidry admits that he played and still coaches “with a chip on my shoulder.” He thrives when “people tell me I’m not capable of doing something.”

That familiar story for many McNeese State players over the years is gaining motivation when passed over by the Cajuns in recruiting.

“We’ll definitely have some players playing with a chip on their shoulders in this game,” Guidry said. “Maybe they wanted to play for the Cajuns but were passed over.”

And you can bet, Guidry and his staff won’t refrain from reminding them.

“I think I’m at my best as a coach when I’m trying to get players to play at a higher level than most people think they can play,” Guidry said.

While this is Hudspeth’s first game against McNeese, it’s not the first time he’s competed against Guidry, who was the defensive coordinator at Western Kentucky in 2011-12.

“Obviously we know of Lance,” Hudspeth said. “He’s been in some good programs and had good defenses when he was at Western Kentucky. And his scheme is awfully hard to prepare for. He’s sort of known for his own scheme. I think he’s sort of put his stamp on what he does, because you don’t see it every day. It makes it tough to prepare for. He gets a lot of guys flying to the football and playing awfully hard.

“It’s a lot of pressure, a lot of people on the line of scrimmage. They lock you down, they come get you and they run to the football extremely well. They’re a well-coached football team.”

As hard as Guidry wants his Cowboys to play Saturday, though, he also doesn’t want them to define their season by the outcome.

“That one game doesn’t make or break the season for either team,” Guidry said. “That’s not fair. It’s not the end of the season. It’s not a bowl game. No matter what happens, we’ve got a big conference game to prepare for the next week against Stephen F. Austin.

“But because of how things went for UL against a very good Boise State team, I think it does put some extra pressure on them to perform well. If we’re able to pull out a win, it would be a special one for us.”