Stinging from a loss to the one football team he dreams of beating, Colorado State coach Sonny Lubick felt his broken heart leap in his throat as a gurney racing toward the ambulance nearly ran him over in the stadium hallway.
“Excuse me,” said Lubick, abruptly halting the sports conversation in mid-sentence, to turn on his heels and run as fast as any 70-year-old coach can to catch up with the medical personnel quickly wheeling away CSU assistant coach Dave Arnold.
Suddenly, it did not seem to matter the Rams had blown a double-digit lead to hated Colorado and lost 31-28 in overtime.
“He was feeling bad all day on the sideline,” explained Lubick, the shock and dread of uncertainty filling his eyes. “Coach (Arnold) came up to me at one point during the game and said, ‘My gosh, if I go down, if I collapse, will you make sure my players are OK and take care of them?”‘
The Rams are spiraling downward on an eight-game losing streak that dates to last season. Hear those disgruntled alums grumbling? The golden era of CSU football seems to be crumbling around the feet of its architect. But, as he agonized about a friend’s health, Lubick could only pretend to care.
“I have to get out of here and go to the hospital. Right now, I’m numb,” said Lubick, after returning to the locker room, where the Rams glumly analyzed how it all went so wrong Saturday against their bitter intrastate rivals.
Putting on a brave face to hide his anxiety regarding Arnold, Lubick walked from the dressing stall of CSU quarterback Caleb Hanie to nose guard Erik Sandie, repeatedly ordering the Rams to “keep it together, we’re going to be fine,” with the old coach sounding as if he were trying to convince himself there really was truth in his sermon.
“I can’t come in here and start swearing at the players and get mad at them. Heck, they played as hard as we can,” Lubick said. “But the way we lost this one? It hurts. I’ll be standing out there at practice on Monday, when the players are running, and I’ll be thinking, ‘Why did we make this call in the game? Why didn’t we call that instead? What the heck were we thinking?”‘
There’s no denying that from top to bottom, this proud program has been shaken and its confidence deeply bruised, for reasons extending beyond the fact Colorado State has not beaten anybody since early October 2006.
The Rams have had too many brushes with death in the past 18 months, what with the wife of co-offensive coordinator Dan Hammerschmidt falling victim to breast cancer and assistant Marc Lubick, son of the head coach, enduring extensive treatment for cancer.
On Saturday, less than a half hour after Buffaloes senior Kevin Eberhart had kicked the Rams in the teeth with 35-yard field goal on CU’s first possession of overtime, there were whispers and worries Arnold might have suffered a heart attack. Word from the hospital, however, brought the good news the 62-year-old assistant had collapsed from nothing worse than fatigue, according to CSU spokesman Zak Gilbert.
The reassuring information no doubt eased Lubick’s panic, but the queasiness in the pit of his stomach will return when Colorado State’s leader of 14 years awakens this morning.
“At 6 a.m., that’s when it really hits me hard,” Lubick said. “I just felt like we controlled this game. To me, there were so many coaching moves and miscues. We had the momentum and let it get away.”
While Lubick owns a 105-66 record with the Rams and has produced nine bowl berths for what had been a long-suffering program, the way CSU lost to the Buffs is indicative of why the venerable coach’s grip on success seems to be slowly slipping through his fingers.
Boldness is what got the Rams in front 28-17 early in the third quarter, with nervy fourth-down gambles and quick aerial strikes by Hanie against Colorado’s shaky pass defense.
Once in the lead, however, CSU got stuck on the same page of the playbook, handing the football again and again and again to bell cow Kyle Bell, who rushed 40 times. Diminishing returns brought down the Rams, who finally fell from weariness, after trying to hang on for too long.
With a brutal September schedule that might easily run Colorado State’s losing streak to 11, antsy fans could soon be asking if Lubick has hung around the coaching profession too long.
“I can take the heat,” Lubick said. “I don’t like it. But I can take it.”
Lubick is a football legend at Colorado State.
Sometimes, we forget how vulnerable, how weary and how human a legend can be.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
