Published October 14, 2024
“The Punt” was when I decided Kerry Joseph could do anything. Calling it merely a punt, though, doesn’t do it justice. Clips of it would go viral if it happened today. It would be hard to beat for Play of the Day honors. In full context, maybe Play of the Year.
Joseph flipped the field and saved the game in the greatest comeback in McNeese State football history, and he wasn’t even the team’s punter. An injury thrust Joseph into the role, and what I called The Legend of Kerry Joseph was born. That was before he threw a football 88 yards on the fly during a workout for an NFL coach. More on that a little later.
I’ve been wrong about a lot, and one thing that’s hard to accept being wrong about was what I knew to be true: that Joseph would one day excel as an NFL quarterback. He came close, playing 12 seasons in the Canadian Football League and leading the Saskatchewan Roughriders to a championship in 2007. He previously played in the NFL at other positions.
NFL quarterback … coach
Now he’s coaching an NFL quarterback, Chicago Bears rookie Caleb Williams. Despite many obstacles, I expect Joseph to make a difference. He already seems to be.
Williams, shown in the image above next to Joseph in preseason camp, had a good day Sunday in London in only the sixth game of his pro football career.
Joseph is not the only member of the 1993 McNeese football team in a high-profile role as an assistant coach. Adam Henry, who caught Joseph’s passes in college, coaches Buffalo Bills wide receivers, including rookie Keon Coleman, a native of Opelousas, Louisiana. Lance Guidry, who bruised and picked off QBs of McNeese opponents, is defensive coordinator for the No. 6-ranked University of Miami Hurricanes.
Zack Bronson, who played in the same secondary as Guidry and went on to play seven seasons for the San Francisco 49ers, coaches McNeese defensive backs.
Some history
McNeese players and coaches have gone on to coach at the highest levels before. Don Breaux (1961) had a lot to do with the Washington pro football team’s offensive production in winning three Super Bowls. George Haffner (1964) was an offensive coordinator for Bobby Bowden, Johnny Majors and Vince Dooley. Haffner was OC when the latter coached Georgia’s 1980 national championship team, led by Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker.
R.C. Slocum (1967) was Texas A&M’s head coach for 14 seasons.
Mike Collins, who coached McNeese linebackers during the years when Joseph, Henry, Guidry and Bronson played, including that 1993 team, was on LSU’s strength and conditioning staff a decade later for its 2003 national championship. Nick Saban promoted him to linebackers coach the next season.
I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.
After a 53-21 win at South Florida in 2013 and taking Nebraska to the wire a year later, McNeese’s claim to fame in sports, lately, has been as the school where NBA Hall of Famer Joe Dumars played, a note put back in the news by the Cowboys’ recent resurgence in men’s basketball under Will Wade.
McNeese football has lost a few steps. The Cowboys lost all 10 games they played last season, and the program hasn’t won a playoff game since 2002. The hurricanes of 2005 and 2020 are a big part of the decline. There are plenty of other reasons.
The glory years
Before all that, McNeese had one of the country’s better small-college programs. The Cowboys played in three of the first five Independence Bowls, beating Tulsa in the 1976 inaugural. The 1980s were mostly a lost decade, but coach Bobby Keasler led a dramatic turnaround in the ’90s.
Aided by the likes of Joseph, Henry, Guidry and Bronson, McNeese found its way again. Southland Conference championships in 1993 and ’95 and No. 1 rankings for weeks at a time established a standard under Keasler.
Joseph started at quarterback for most of four seasons. He earned every bit of his induction into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame this year.
The Cowboys went on to play in Division I-AA national championship games in 1997 and 2002. In the first one, they lost 10-9 to a Youngstown State team coached by Jim Tressel. Longtime LSU fans might get it when I say that was one of the two best 10-9 games I’ve ever covered. That ’97 game was the last event I covered for my hometown paper before moving to Shreveport to find out if I was good enough to work somewhere else.
McNeese lost to Western Kentucky, a team it had soundly defeated earlier in the season, in the 2002 championship game.
I stayed at the Holiday Inn Chattanooga Choo-Choo for both national title games. I thought you’d want to know.
That 1993 team beat Kurt Warner
There’s a special place in my memory banks for that ’93 season. It was my first one as the beat writer for a college football team. I flew to Normal, Illinois, and to Orlando to cover games. (I’d return to Orlando 11 years later for Saban’s last game with LSU.)
McNeese opened the 1993 season with a 27-10 home win over Northern Iowa. It was Kurt Warner’s first start as a college quarterback. You may recall he ended the decade on a high note, winning a Super Bowl. (I covered the next Super Bowl, where he and the Rams lost, in New Orleans a few months after 9/11. Memorable experience.)
Against Northern Iowa, Guidry forced a Warner fumble that led to McNeese points. Bronson picked off two Warner passes, returning one for a touchdown. Joseph threw for one touchdown and ran for another. Fun fact: It was 91 degrees at kickoff time. At night.
Henry, Bronson and Guidry were first-team All-Southland Conference selections that year.
They also beat a team with Mike Tomlin
McNeese won a playoff game for the second time in its history in that 1993 season. The first time was the year before against Idaho and its quarterback, Doug Nussmeier. You might know his son as LSU’s current starting quarterback.
Fun facts: Garrett Nussmeier and I were both born in Lake Charles. Louisiana, home of McNeese State. Doug Nussmeier was born up here in Portland. He and Joseph both played quarterback in the Canadian Football League.
Mike Tomlin, who coaches the Pittsburgh Steelers, played wide receiver on the William & Mary team McNeese beat in the ’93 playoffs. Tomlin got hurt in that game and didn’t finish it. Troy finished McNeese’s season in the quarterfinals a week later.
(I drop a lot of names, don’t I? Yeah, fair, but I’ve seen some things.)
Scattered memories
When the 49ers signed Bronson to a free-agent contract, I wasn’t surprised. I’d sat next to Boyd Dowler, one of their scouts, a couple of times in the press box and learned how impressed he was with Bronson.
Carly, is that the same Boyd Dowler who played for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers and caught a touchdown pass in the second Super Bowl? Yes. The same. I may have asked him a question or two about all that. Sue me.
I’ve known Guidry since his senior year of high school. I made a mistake in a story I wrote about his Welsh High School Greyhounds, and his father let me know. I wrote back, explaining and apologizing for the error. His dad wrote back to tell me I had made a friend for life in Lance. Covering his years as a McNeese player and as a coach was enjoyable.
A favorite memory of Guidry is seeing him on the sideline celebrating a dramatic Welsh victory. He had broken his ankle and would miss the end of his senior season. Seeing him raise his crutches in jubilation as his teammates scored a winning touchdown was touching.
Guidry talks about “The Punt” in that video above. Maybe he read my story about it, because I know he wasn’t there. Joseph’s punt happened Sept. 16, 1995, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Guidry was probably watching game film in Leesville, Louisiana, where he helped coach the Wampus Cats to the best season in their history.
Now he’s coaching Miami’s defense in what is turning out to be an interesting season.
But let’s talk about The Punt.
Now we’re in 1995
McNeese had a special season when Joseph was a senior. The Cowboys won their first 13 games, played 13 games as the No. 1-ranked team in I-AA and lost only to Marshall in the semifinals. Future New York Jets QB Chad Pennington was Marshall’s quarterback.
Week 3 at James Madison University is when I saw The Punt. McNeese dug itself a big hole, trailing 17-0 after one quarter and 24-6 at halftime. The Dukes of JMU didn’t score again.
McNeese began chipping away at the deficit. With JMU leading 24-19 early in the fourth quarter, McNeese had to punt. The snap flew over the head of Joseph, the substitute for injured punter Brian Stewart, and Joseph ran toward his own end zone to try to mitigate disaster. The Dukes were on the verge of putting away the Cowboys.
Joseph got possession of the ball at the McNeese 10-yard line, made a sweeping turn to elude JMU players chasing him, and on the run he punted the ball. It took off. It soared. It bounced. It rolled. It came to rest at the JMU 11-yard line.
Wait, did I just see that, or did I imagine it?
It was a mind-blowing thing to witness. A couple of plays later, Kavika Pittman, who went on to have a solid NFL career, forced a JMU fumble, accelerating McNeese’s comeback.
Joseph scored the winning touchdown on his second TD run of the game and added a two-point conversion. McNeese’s 30-24 comeback win was one for its record books.
McNeese hammered Youngstown State 31-3 the next week, then routed Central Florida 49-7 the week after that. Joseph dazzled. But he was cold to me during postgame interviews.
“I wanted to make sure people knew there were two quarterbacks in this game,” he told me.
Ah, yes. I’d done a feature story on Daunte Culpepper, the Central Florida freshman who was already generating some buzz. Before 6-foot-5 Cam Newton sprung forth from some superhero screenplay, there was 6-foot-4 Daunte Culpepper. Our readers knew about Joseph. We wanted to tell them who was coming to town.
It was fair for McNeese coaches to use that as a motivational tool.
“Kerry likes you,” McNeese offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Mike Santiago told me later, smiling devilishly.
Yeah, I’d have done the same thing to light a fire under my guy.
It’s fun remembering these men
That 1993 team had qualities that are still rippling out in football. Henry has a job on his hands with a Buffalo team that wasn’t properly constructed for sustained success in 2024. Joseph has a bit of a challenge as well, considering the Bears’ situation and their history at quarterback.
But I’ve seen Joseph do some amazing things.
In a 30-28 playoff loss in 1994 in Missoula, Montana, I saw Joseph and his teammates turn a 27-7 fourth-quarter deficit into a 28-27 lead against the Montana Grizzlies. Years later, I covered two LSU national championship teams and a decade of SEC football, and that may have been the best game I ever saw.
Joseph threw the ball 88 yards in the air in Cowboy Stadium for Ray Rhodes, then the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. I once threw a baseball 111 yards on the fly, and I struggle to comprehend how Joseph did that.
He could roll out to his right, turn, and throw the ball 40 yards upfield to a receiver running down the left sideline, a pass easily covering more than 60 yards by air, a flat rope singing a note that’s rare in the wild.
I still say he can do anything. Caleb Williams is lucky to have him as his position coach.
I’m keeping an eye on the Bears
It’s been fun to pay attention to the Chicago Bears with Joseph on the coaching staff. The HBO series “Hard Knocks” made that easier to do. Beating the Jacksonville Jaguars and sitting down for tea in the end zone in London is one thing; there will be harder days.
But this is a fun team and story for me. It was particularly interesting yesterday with so much focus on rookie QBs.
Rookie Sunday pic.twitter.com/dwLZkwSuDC
— NFL (@NFL) October 13, 2024
Santiago, with whom I shared a birthday, died of cancer in August 2023. Joseph paid tribute to him at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
Not that any of us do this to be liked, but maybe someday Joseph will tell a reporter “Caleb likes you” after a statement win and a series of terse answers to postgame questions. I would like that. I think Mike Santiago would approve.
A note about Bronson: To try to limit confusion, I spelled his name as Zack Bronson, as written in his playing days at McNeese and in the NFL, as well as in historical reference sources. His current bio at McNeese has it as Zach Bronson and his full name as Robert Zach Bronson.
Screenshots from Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame video and HBO’s “Hard Knocks.”