On Melvin Spears and Grambling: Two sides

He could best be described as a perfect Grambling conundrum, a guy with two sides.

Melvin Spears was an outsider with a deep passion for Tiger football, a winner who suffered devastating losses, someone who will forever be of and yet not of.

When it was over, Spears’ nine-year run as key coordinator and then head coach at Grambling transformed him into a figure both forever loved and hated, it seems, with equal ferocity.

Once a largely unknown assistant under Doug Williams, Spears helped him craft some of this decade’s most interesting vertically attacking schemes — then went on to post a spotless league record on the way to a Southwestern Athletic Conference championship as Williams’ successor in 2005. Still, Spears encountered controversy as easily as his pass-first offenses found the end zone. That campaign of dominance was bookended by two seasons of struggle, and his eventual ouster in 2006.

As Spears prepares for a televised Thursday night return to Grambling, now as an assistant coach at SWAC West rival Texas Southern, his insoluble nature remains as much as mystery to some as the day Williams, his first cousin, hired Spears in 1998 as offensive coordinator.

He’s a guy who had his players pay tribute to a legendary influence like former GSU coach Eddie Robinson, but also publicly demanded a forfeit when a competing school’s officials said they couldn’t play in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

He is a coach who once took the team on a tour of historical landmarks from the Civil Rights era before a critical game against the defending SWAC champion in Montgomery. But also the one who stuck with his starters after halftime in tongue-wagging blowouts over Prairie View and a first-year NAIA program.

He is a man who wears sunglasses at night.

SOME WANTED TO SEE HIM FAIL
Spears’ eyes began to falter during a stint as a computer programmer after graduating from Alcorn State.

“One day I woke up, and I couldn’t see at all,” Spears told me. “I was blind, basically.”

After a series of tests for light sensitivity, Spears said he underwent a cornea transplant in his left eye. He said he has worn shades ever since to keep his vision from degenerating any further.

“People talk about intimidation with these glasses,” said Spears, chuckling at the thought. “They are just something I need to operate day to day.”

Those shades became his persona, and probably his defense mechanism, in the dark days after Williams suddenly resigned in February 2004 for a job in the NFL. This should have been the time of his life. After all, Spears would quickly be named interim — something he called a dream job back then. But some were slow to accept Spears. He almost immediately became ensnared in a series of alumni-generated tempests — including a resume inquiry sparked by an anonymous fax to the state board that oversees GSU.

“There were always people,” Williams said in 2005, “who wanted to see him fail.”

That was simply the first tumbling pebble in an eventual avalanche of misfortune during Spears’ initial campaign. Spears and his staff worked through the inevitable learning curve. Worse than that, though, were mounting injuries — none more damaging than the blown knee of senior quarterback Bruce Eugene. Spears struggled to a 6-5 record, losing every home game — something that had never happened at Grambling in records going back to 1950.

“I did a whole lot of praying, a whole lot of soul searching,” Spears said.

Perhaps never more than in those moments after a tough 2004 loss on homecoming. Spears’ office, like Williams’ before him, was usually a bustling corner of activity after games — with fans, alumni and parents milling about. Not this time. Spears sat alone behind his desk for hours, thinking about what might have been.

“There was nobody around,” Spears said. “If not for my faith, in God and in this program …” After a long pause, Spears continued: “That’s got us over the hump.”

A QUESTION OF KARMA?
Success against Southern, always critical, had never held more portent. A victory in 2004 meant job security, with a multi-year contract. Next came a medical waiver for Eugene by the NCAA.

A year later, Spears secured his lone title as a head coach at Grambling. But even that has not been without controversy, as GSU galloped past conference opponents in 2005 by an average of almost four touchdowns per game.

Along the way, Spears went for two with 34 seconds left in the Western Division title-clinching 58-21 win over Texas Southern — ironic now, perhaps, since that’s where he ended up coaching next.

Then there was the lopsided 82-7 victory in 2005 over the embryonic Concordia College.

SWAC beat writer Josh Moon, in a piece before that season’s Bayou Classic, wrote: “I can’t wait on karma to catch up with this guy.”

But Spears doesn’t see the point in telling young student-athletes not to give their all, and doesn’t believe that the other team wouldn’t have won by that same margin if it could.

“We stress that our players shouldn’t play down to the level of the competition,” Spears said in 2005, smoothly deflecting. “Our job is to go out and play Tiger football.”

Winning allowed Spears to relax a little. He even took to letting Eugene call some plays. But the record-smashing quarterback’s 2006 depature would send the Grambling program, and Spears’ tenure, into a spiralling disaster.

ON MELVIN, AND DOUG
The son of Melvin Sr. and Edith Matthews Spears, GSU’s coach grew up in Clinton, and said he always followed his maternal cousin Doug around.

“When you talk about role models, I will always start with my mom and dad,” said Spears, who shares Edith’s temperament and style. “The next guy in line, though, is Doug Williams. Always has been, always will be.”

It just took Spears 20 years to follow him all the way to Grambling.

While Williams signed to play collegiate football for Eddie Robinson, Spears says he chose conference foe Alcorn only because he didn’t want to sit behind his talented older relative on the depth chart. Spears would play for another football legend — Marino Casem, known as “The Godfather of the SWAC.”

“We ran the Wing-T, much the same as Eddie did,” Casem told me.

“Melvin ran the counter trap as well as anyone has run that thing for me,” said Casem, who coached at Alcorn from 1966-86 and later was an administrator at Southern. “He might not have been as fast as the Trumaine Johnsons and the Sammy Whites that Grambling had playing that position, but he ran it as well because he knew the system.”

In fact, Spears played in modified versions of the GSU offense both under Casem and at Clinton High School — where his coach was a former member of the legendary 1940s Grambling squad that went unbeaten and unscored upon for Robinson.

“Grambling,” Spears said, “always seemed to be around.”

Spears left computer work for coaching in the ’90s. He was defensive coordinator at Morgan State, his first collegiate work, when a call from Williams reunited the two.

“I have known Melvin all my life,” Williams told me in 2005. “I had no idea then that he would end up being the coach and what he would go through. I just felt comfortable with him.”

Spears would switch sides, serving as offensive coordinator at Grambling for the next six seasons. That versatility was something his former coach at Alcorn recognized in Spears even as a youngster.

“He was smart and he knew the system as well as some of the coaches,” Casem said. “He also knew all the other positions. I knew in my innermost being that he would be a success as a coach.”

Spears’ offenses, which topped the Football Championship Subdivision for production in 2002, were an important cog in Williams’ run of three straight SWAC titles beginning in 2000. Quarterback Randy Hymes, one of the most celebrated contributors from that period, later played for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Everybody knew in the league that I was coached by Doug Williams, but I am always speaking Coach Spears’ name to people,” Hymes told me. “I remind them that there was somebody right there beside Doug Williams.”

Still, when Spears stepped out of the former Super Bowl MVP’s considerable shadow, Spears found the spotlight to be searing and unforgiving — even behind those ever-present shades.

He came away thinking that a coach had to win to make his way at Grambling, and win big. And when the winning stopped in 2006, Spears’ hunch proved eerily prophetic.

WINNING THEM OVER
Victims of Grambling blowouts shouldn’t feel bad, the on-campus joke used to go. This guy is so hard that he cut his own son.

Spears, divorced years ago, actually became closer with his kids once he came back to Louisiana — since they were living in Baton Rouge and he was coaching in Baltimore at Morgan State. Spears’ three older children — Seana, Kulmoris and Jerome, the former tight end — all went to Grambling State. His youngest son Sean was a fixture as a youngster around the program back then, and now plays for Texas Southern.

But when Jerome didn’t live up to expectations, he was taken off the Grambling roster. As a father, he said that hurt. But Spears knew, as a coach, there was no other way.

“It was,” he said, “business.”

Spears took the same approach with the 2005 hurricane game against Alcorn, saying it could have been played as scheduled by two schools that were outside Katrina’s destructive path.

It’s that simple with Spears — an Alcorn alum, remember — and that complicated.

Eventually, Spears’ relationship with Williams came to take on this now-familiar dichotomy. By 2005, the two spoke infrequently. Both seemed to be concerned with their legacy at Grambling, and they were at different points in that journey.

“Eddie Robinson set this stage, then Doug Williams followed,” Spears would say, in a familiar refrain. “This is just something I am building upon.”

Spears was fond of recalling Robinson’s big wins, and his most well-known quotes. That doesn’t always sit well with Williams, who wondered aloud back then about how politics inspired those statements.

There were those in the old guard, however, who revelled in them.

“Melvin has recognized the great contributions that Eddie Robinson made to Grambling and to football in general,” said Casem, himself a long-time friend of the late Robinson’s. “I think some haven’t appreciated it as much as Melvin does.”

Former Grambling baseball coach and athletics administrator Wilbert Ellis, in a memorable moment, could be found taking Spears aside at a 2005 benefit banquet for the proposed Eddie Robinson Museum, and putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m proud of you, son,” said Ellis. “You have done well by my alma mater.”

A SUDDEN DEPARTURE
Spears got much different results without Bruce Eugene under center.

Together, they swept through the Southwestern Athletic Conference in ’05, rewriting record books along the way. Apart, Spears managed just nine wins over two seasons. First, there was the 6-5 interim campaign in ’04, when Eugene was lost to a knee injury. Next came a dismal 3-8 slump in ’06, after Eugene’s eligibility ran out.

“It was a situation where as a team, we didn’t prove we could win without Bruce,” GSU receiver Henry Tolbert told me back then. “It started to seem like he was the thing that kept us above water.”

Through Spears’ final campaign, Grambling had boasted a historical average of just three losses per year over the previous 60 seasons. GSU had also won four league crowns between 2000-05, and was also just one win away from the title match in both 1999 and 2003. That very consistency made Spears’ skids without Eugene all the more dramatic.

He knew it. But as coldly calculating as Spears could always be, however, he never wanted to leave Grambling. There, again, were two sides.

Something Spears told me in 2006, as he cleaned out his office, has always stuck with me. I think it speaks to his underlying passion for the place — and underscores why Thursday’s game at Robinson Stadium will likely be so tough for him.

“We won four championships, three as offensive coordinator and one as a head coach — and we graduated a lot of players,” Spears said. “I’ve been blessed to carry on the legacy of Eddie Robinson, Doug Williams and all those players who came before me.

“I’ll have to thank Doug for giving me this opportunity,” Spears said, finally. “I’ve cherished these moments.”

Spears’ teams won consecutive Bayou Classics in 2004-05, something that hadn’t happened at Grambling since 1989-90, and hasn’t happened again. The Tigers hadn’t been undefeated in league play in more than a decade, either. Yet, Spears also became embroiled in an NCAA investigation over that final campaign — and, though Grambling was later cleared, that likely also contributed to his early departure.

A career marked by dramatic highs and just as incredible lows never had a chance to plateau after 2006.

That season marked just the third time in 60 years that GSU had lost as many as eight times. But GSU also dropped six of those hard-fought 2006 contests by a touchdown or less, two in overtime.

A lawsuit followed Spears’ firing, and that litigation is ongoing. He finished at Grambling with a 20-14 record.