It took until mid-November of the football season for defending Celebration Bowl champion North Carolina Central to face adversity.
But head coach Trei Oliver is preparing his guys to play one more football game — the 2023 regular-season finale against Delaware State — and is hopeful there will be at least one more after that.
The Eagles suffered a shocking 50-20 loss to Howard on Saturday, forcing NC Central to hope for a Morgan State win over Howard this week while they do battle with the Hornets, a team Oliver once served as an assistant coach.
“If you look at the scores when they’ve played folks, they’ve been one-possession games,” he said of the 1-9 Hornets, who are looking for their first MEAC win of the 2023 season. “Our guys have to play well and at a high level because they’re a dangerous football team.”
Oliver said there was no big speech in particular following the Howard loss, just a resolve to focus on the task at hand.
“I’m not a big yeller and screamer. Obviously, our guys are disappointed, but we’ve got a 24-hour rule,” he says. “We’ve got to get over it. We’ll look at some film, correct the mistakes that were made, and we’ll move on.”
The 8-2 Eagles, ranked No. 14 in the latest FCS Coaches Poll, could still earn an invite to the NCAA playoffs with a win, and if that’s the case, Oliver is confident his team will play with as much intensity, aggression, and enthusiasm as they would the Celebration Bowl.
“We don’t want to be a one-and-done team wherever we play,” he said. “We want to represent our program and our conference well.”
As far as the conference goes, there was one piece of business Oliver wanted to clear up before Monday morning’s coaches’ conference went any further.
“People have asked me a thousand times, ‘Do we need a conference championship game,’” he said before answering, “No, we do not.”
In July, Howard head coach Larry Scott suggested that the league adopt a championship game like other conferences.
“Just like many other sports. Let’s take another week off. Another two weeks,” Scott said. “Let’s tee it off. Let’s have a championship game.”
Oliver, on the other hand, has always been against the idea, saying during MEAC Media Day that a conference title game was not needed after North Carolina Central scored 50 points against Howard last season en route to its league championship.
