Opinion| 2021 SWAC Title Game: Champs then, champs again?

The Prairie View A&M University Panthers are headed to the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game this weekend, 12 years after their last SWAC title, 23 years after ending “The Streak,” and light-years from the Billy Nicks winning dynasty of the 1950s and 1960s. The mere thought of a win over the nascent Jackson State Tigers and their HBCU marketing maven head coach Deion Sanders evokes memories of a time when PV dominated the SWAC and winning championships was the purple and gold norm.

Of course, the program is not that anymore, far from it. But a win Saturday would be a giant step forward for a program scratching and clawing its way out of mediocrity since a 2009 title and the embarrassing struggles in the post-Nicks years as Black college football – HBCUs in general – enjoys an ever-growing surge of national interest and exposure. The whole ESPN2 world, and likely a few blue-chip football recruits (!), will be watching Saturday as the biggest game in recent PV history unfolds.

It’s an opportunity to show the sports world that PV football is on the rise, at least, but also to foster a winning attitude for the future.

The Panthers have been in a perpetual rebuild mode for more than half a century, though Henry Frazier’s seven-year stay showed great promise from 2004-2010. Frazier left for North Carolina Central with the third-most wins (43) in PV football history. Frazier struggled in his first three seasons at PV, winning only 11 games. His remaining four seasons produced 32 wins and back-to-back 9-1 seasons (2008, 2009), the 2009 SWAC title and the Black College Football National Championship. Frazier also reaped national coaching honors, including the Eddie Robinson Award as the top coach in the Football Championship Subdivision level, the first time the 23-year-old award was presented to a Black college coach.

After the Panthers knocked off Alabama A&M, 30-24, for the 2009 title, senior wide receiver Anthony Weeden told a Houston Chronicle sportswriter: “We didn’t know that becoming a champion would mean this much to so many people. We didn’t know it was this big. When I got here, I didn’t even know we had this many alumni.”

A championship would mean a lot to PV Nation…you know. Frazier, now the Director of Leadership & Character Development for the University of Maryland football program, looks back at “a special time” at PV and the support he got from alums who openly expressed their love and loyalty for the school. Frazier was credited with reviving the program from its nadir of “The Streak” – for the uninitiated, that was 80 consecutive losses from 1989 to 1998.

Yet it seems there is less talk about winning in the program’s history, especially at its peak with Nicks at the helm winning five Black College national championships. That’s like talking about UCLA basketball and not mentioning John Wooden, or Texas football but no Darrell Royal.

In the Nicks era, Black college programs fed off segregation to automatically get the best Black high school talent in the state. Nicks won, got his former players coaching gigs at Black high schools in Texas, and then recruited their best players for the price of a long-distance phone call.

“You got a good boy there, and I want him!” the coach would say. “You have that boy here Saturday.”

And they came by the dozens from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Sealy, Lufkin, Beaumont, Livingston, Abilene, anywhere there was a Black high school, city boys, country boys, talented and athletically gifted Black Texas boys coming together to establish a winning tradition on “The Hill.”

The late great PV Sports Information Director Joe Booker reveled in noting the depth of talent on hand and how, during the Nicks era, the team would split and play two games in the same day and win both. There was crazy depth at each position where players played through injuries knowing to sit meant they might never get back on the field when they were healthy.

And there was swagger from the head coach. Nicks drove from Georgia to PV for the 1945 season and promptly lost five of his first season’s nine games after winning a national championship at Morris Brown College in Atlanta with bruising All-American running back John “Big Train” Moody. Nicks never had another losing campaign in his 17 years leading the Panthers.

“He was a classic coach,” relates Ken Houston, the former PV great and Pro Football Hall of Fame safety. “He looked the part, and he got his players to play. He didn’t play favorites. If we were going on a trip, and there were star players missing when we got ready to leave, he’d say, ‘We got eleven? Roll this bus!’”

With Nicks, from 1952-1965, the Panthers were easily the dominant program in the SWAC, winning seven of the 14 conference titles – Southern University was the next most successful in that era with three titles, Grambling only two.

Nicks won nine of 15 games against Eddie Robinson and held his own against another coaching legend, Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither. Nicks won two of four meetings against Gaither’s FAMU teams, both with the Black college national championship on the line (1953, 1958) in the Orange Blossom Classic.

Earlier in the program, Sam Taylor was more noted as the “Father of Track” because he founded that program for the university, but from 1930-1943 his football teams won 74 games (32 losses, 15 ties), second to Nicks for most wins in school history, and two SWAC titles.

Jimmy Stevens had a brief tenure, 1949-1951, but he won 24 of his 31 games and a SWAC title in 1951.

In a Zoom media conference earlier this week, PV Coach Eric Dooley pondered what a win Saturday would mean for the program and said, “It would be huge. Words could never describe it.”

So, on to Jackson?

Yeah, roll this bus!

Michael Hurd is Director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture at Prairie View A&M University. His upcoming book is “Champions On the Hill, Coach Billy Nicks and Prairie View Football’s Golden Era.”