Grambling, Hampton lead 'Baad Team' selectees
LUT WILLIAMS
BCSP Editor
BCSP "BAAD TEAM" of Black College Football All-Stars
SWAC champion Grambling State and MEAC champion Hampton were the top teams of the 2005 black college football season so it's no surprise that those two programs have the most players on the 2005 BCSP "Baad Team" of black college all stars.
Melvin Spears' 11-1 Tigers of GSU and Joe Taylor's 11-1 Pirates of HU each placed four special players on the first team of the BCSP's annual list of all-Americans, giving them eight of the 26 spots on the first team.
And each program walks away with one of the top individual awards. Gambling senior quarterback Bruce Eugene wins our annual offensive player of the year award while Hampton junior linebacker Justin Duran gets the top award on defense.
Eugene's year will go down as one of the greatest in black college football history. The 6-1, 260-pound New Orleans native bounced back from a knee injury that knocked him out for nearly all of the 2004 season to throw for 4,408 yards, 56 touchdowns and only six interceptions in 456 attempts to establish himself in the SWAC and NCAA Div. I-AA record books and lead the Tigers to the top of the BCSP Final Top Ten. He tied the single-season I-AA touchdown mark of 56 held by former Mississippi Valley State QB Willie Totten, broke Totten's L-AA career mark of 139 career TD passes with 140 and finished second to former Alcorn State QB Steve McNair in I-AA career passing yards with 13,530.
Durant, a junior from Florence, S.C., backed up his sophomore year MEAC Defensive Player of the Year season with an even better junior campaign. Durant had 124 total tackles in 12 games, the second best total in black college football, with five sacks on the dominant Pirate defense and repeated as MEAC defensive MVP.
Hampton junior running back Alonzo Coleman is part of a contingent of ten black college rushers that topped 1,000 yards this season. He put up his third straight 1,000-yard season, rushing for 1,326 yards and scoring a black college best 19 TDs to earn the MEAC offensive player of the year award and first "Baad Team" status. Coleman is only 242 yards shy of breaking Montrell Coley's (1997-00) Hampton career rushing record of 3,838 yards. He is joined in the backfield by hard-running Bowie State sophomore Isaac Redman, who did the tough work on the ground that propelled the Bulldogs to the CIAA Championship Game and Pioneer Bowl. Redman finished with 1,305 rushing yards and 11 TDs.
Henry Tolbert was Eugene's favorite target pulling in black college bests of 74 receptions (6.17 pg.) for 1,391 yards and a whopping 19 TDs to get the nod at wide receiver. Tuskegee wide out Kenneth Henderson was just behind him with 67 receptions (6.09 pg.) for 1,023 yards and 6 TDs. Six black college receivers topped 1,000 yards in 2005.
Grambling also placed huge (6-8, 360) senior offensive tackle Jonathan Banks and big, talented senior defensive end Jason Hatcher (6-6, 285) on the first team. Six-three, 300-pound offensive lineman Gerrell Golightly, the MEAC's lineman of the year, and senior placekicker Andrew Paterini were the other Hampton players to make the first team.
© 2005 Azeez Communications, Inc.