Tyrone Willingham once said of his players, “You hate to see them have to deal with anything of this nature.” David Beaty once said, “It’s not something you ever really think about.” John Mumford once said, “There’s a good team in [the locker room] with those kids. They need confidence. They need to win.”
All of those former coaches — Willingham at Washington in 2008, Beaty at Kansas in 2015, Mumford as interim at Army in 2003 — spoke to reporters about something rare in college football, and even rarer in the 2020s. They had just finished the hard, hard months of a season gone winless.
Another team joined that mix this week, and it joined it with elements downright poetic: the brooding rain and chill of a late-November Tuesday evening in western Massachusetts, in a stadium with yawning swaths of empty seats. That’s where the last-place team in the Mid-American Conference, new member Massachusetts, lost, 45-14, to the next-to-last-place team, Bowling Green, to fall to 0-12.
“[Going] 0-12 is just horrible,” a linebacker once said, and that was Mason Foster of Washington speaking to reporters in Berkeley, California, on Dec. 6, 2008, after a 48-7 loss to California, well before he made third-team all-American in 2010 and toured the NFL with Tampa Bay, Chicago and Washington.
“I think there was some anxiety and nervousness about it, which always goes into a last game,” Joe Harasymiak, the first-year U-Mass. coach, told reporters in Amherst on Tuesday evening, soon adding, “They tried their best, and it wasn’t good enough.”
His team became the 23rd this century (discounting the truncated 2020 season) to know the hard feeling of winless, and to know in its bones the drudgery that deserves admiration but seldom seems to coax it in American culture: practice after practice with no reward from the scoreboards; the will to go out in front of others while often outmanned; the soreness, the injury, the fatigue, the commitment, the phones — especially the phones.
As Harasymiak noted Oct. 18 after maybe the harshest of the 12 outings, a 28-21 loss to Buffalo in which U-Mass. had a 21-20 lead and the ball with 59 seconds left: “You know, it’s hard for [the players]. It’s really, really hard for them. Because they’re a generation, you know, that, I don’t want to pick up the phone here” — and he pointed toward his own phone — “but they’re a generation that lives — they’re addicted to this thing. Right? They grew up in a generation that is addicted to their phone. And right now you go on that thing, there is nothing good said about these kids. … It’s really hard to listen inside the walls when the majority of your life, you live on your phone, and everything you see on your phone hasn’t been very positive. But hopefully people can see that these kids are trying their [behind] off.”
Ten seasons this century featured zero winless teams, meaning everybody had at least one happy scoreboard. The Mid-American has known the winless vibe the most of late: Akron in 2019, Kent State in 2024, U-Mass. in 2025. Central Florida endured winless seasons twice along its peerless 21st-century roller coaster that has seen it relish such heights as 13-0 and 12-1 (twice!). Duke, now set to play in its 10th bowl game in the past 14 seasons, suffered winless thrice: 2000, 2001, 2006. The Blue Devils got to a closing game in 2006 against a 2-9 North Carolina, with a win over that particular program figuring to ameliorate at least a good chunk of the woe. Duke trailed 45-38 late yet suddenly got a 21-yard interception return for a touchdown with 2:49 left, from lineman Patrick Bailey.
The extra point … got blocked.
It was one of two extra points the Tar Heels’ Kentwan Balmer blocked that sighing day.
Gosh.
Harasymiak came from well-regarded showings as defensive coordinator at Minnesota and Rutgers, after head-coaching Maine, and in 2018 he led the Black Bears through the Football Championship Subdivision bracket to a place they’d never been: the national semifinals. He was just 32 then. He’s just 39 now. He’s already got this as a marker from which to sprout.
After an especially dreary 45-3 loss to Northern Illinois on Nov. 12, he opened his postgame remarks with this: “I know there’s going to be a lot of questions, so I just want to make sure I cover this to start: There is no one else to blame in this whole organization — no one else to blame but me. I will take a hundred percent ownership for this. It’s all on the head coach. It’s not the players. It’s not the other coaches. It’s all on me.”
The next week, against Ohio, after a 42-14 loss, he noted that three young players who had entered the game and thrived “don’t have the disease of losing, so they go out there and play. I just love watching them play. It’s like watching kids play, just going out and enjoying the moment.”
You take merriment where you can find it during 0-12, and long before that, on Sept. 8 after a 27-26 loss derived from a 20-3 lead against Bryant from the FCS, he said, “I think we underestimate how hard it is to teach people to win.”
As it closed down both at last and so soon against Bowling Green, and the rain pattered onto Harasymiak’s windbreaker, and as he looked like a classically grizzled New England football coach, and opposing coach and Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George spoke multiple sentences to Harasymiak in apparent encouragement afterward, and as Harasymiak said he would seek players “obsessed with football,” he concluded: “You work so hard during the week. They do. We do. And we come out and, again, in a lot of games this year, we just didn’t start the game the right way. That’s too much for us right now, the way we’re not built to come from behind.”
Also: “Tackling was really bad,” he said.
Yet on a night when you could hear only the play-by-play announcer’s voice through the TV during a touchdown, with no crowd sounds — attendance: 6,043, maybe — and when Bowling Green scored on a one-yard run with 1:56 left, maybe the tackle on the previous play supplied a kernel of what’s admirable about the winless. Bowling Green running back PaSean Wimberly got through the line and rumbled from the 19-yard line toward the goal line, an official barely getting out of the way along the way. U-Mass. safety Zeraun Daniel pursued through the hopelessness and managed to drag down Wimberly at the 1, with the ground causing the ball to pop out. Tackling is bloody hard anyway, so why even make that tackle in the dying fumes of a dead season? It could have been instinct, effort, both or something else, but there’s some valor tucked in there somewhere.
Here’s hoping at least some of the U-Mass. Minutemen can feel at least a morsel of what Ryan Kent felt in 2003, just after Navy plowed Army, 34-6, to send Army to 0-13. “I’m upset, and I’m sad, and I’m disappointed,” Kent, the Army linebacker and captain, told reporters in Philadelphia that day. “But I’m still proud to be part of this program even though we didn’t win a game.”
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