First, the Thunder hosted a game against a hungry Hope College team in their first Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association contest. Hope had lost its first four games, but when it met Trine on the gridiron that season, it played as if it were fighting for the conference championship.
The Thunder prevailed, 38-35, and Trine strong safety Aaron Shoemaker, who had led the Thunder with six tackles and two assists against Franklin College the previous week, made a career-high 17 tackles against Hope. That tied for fifth highest for the season in all of D3 football. Shoemaker assisted on three other tackles in the game.
Then came two more road games that were business as usual – a 51-14 conquest of Alma and a 42-17 triumph at Olivet. The latter game was as uncharacteristic as you’d see in what had become an otherwise balanced Trine offense. All of Trine’s six touchdowns came on the ground, and the total team rushing yardage for the game was 281, compared to 240 in the air.
Kent Biller rushed for 177 yards on 19 carries and scored three of the touchdowns. Watt completed 11 of 22 passes but was sacked three times.
Next to fall were Albion (33-14), Adrian (21-16) and Kentucky Christian (36-21). In the Adrian game, Curtis tied a school record for pass receptions for touchdowns in a season with his eighth, and he broke it the following week against Kentucky Christian.
The Thunder won the MIAA title again and qualified for the postseason D3 playoffs. They were assigned a road game in Cleveland at undefeated Case Western Reserve in the opening round. Trine prevailed in a huge offensive battle – 51-38. Both teams had 25 first downs, and time of possession was almost equal – Trine 28:34, CWR 29:45.
Kent Biller led Thunder rushers with 113 yards on 17 carries as the Trine running game netted 333 yards on 61 total carries. Watt completed 12 of 19 passes for 206 yards and five touchdowns, including two long ones (42 and 48 yards) to running back Devin Leas.
Another of the TD passes – for 15 yards in the second quarter – landed in Paul Curtis’ hands, allowing him to extend his record season total to 10 for the year. He also would be surprised by his girlfriend (and future wife), Aja, who would greet him with a hug after the game. “I wasn’t expecting to see her there,” he explained.
“They (Case Western) had a real good quarterback (Dan Whalen), and their fullback (Corey Checkan) was a little tank. Short and 250 pounds,” said Thunder defensive back Andrew Pickford. “Their quarterback chucked the ball all over the place. I always thought Eric was the best quarterback I’d ever seen in college, but their quarterback was right up there. Just a little smaller and not as athletic.”
Whalen completed 29 of 48 passes for 330 yards and three touchdowns and had just one interception. Checkan ran 17 times for 70 yards and a touchdown and caught one pass for nine yards.
In the following week’s second-round tournament game at Wittenberg University, the host school dominated time of possession and total offense yardage (468 to Trine’s 250), and the Tigers rushed for 260 yards and averaged 44 yards per kickoff return to win, 34-17.
The schools started the game by trading touchdowns, but the Tigers took charge after that, scoring three unanswered TDs to take a 27-7 lead at half. A Jeremy Howard field goal broke the streak in the third quarter, making the score 27-10, but Wittenberg scored another TD with 3:47 left in the quarter, rendering insignificant Trine’s fourth quarter touchdown. The Tigers advanced to the next round, where they lost to eventual national champion Wisconsin-Whitewater, 31-13.
“We
played them close in the first quarter,” said Andrew Pickford. The Tigers’ 21
points in the second quarter served as a knockout blow of sorts, he said. “That
was the whole game right there. They were big up front. They had a receiver
(Michael Cooper) who was big – 6-3, 190 pounds – and fast as wind. They got 21
on us (in the second quarter), and we couldn’t come back.”
Cooper caught a 53-yard touchdown pass from Aaron Huffman for one of those second-quarter touchdowns, and he caught a 4-yarder for a TD in the third quarter. Huffman threw for five touchdown passes in the game, completing 15 of 22 passes for 208 yards and had one intercepted. Watt, his counterpart, completed 14 of 28 passes for 141 yards and also had a pass intercepted. Both of Trine’s touchdowns came on runs.
The Thunder finished 2009 with a 10-2 win-loss record. It was a season in which Watt’s passing efficiency jumped dramatically to 153.69 and his completion percentage crossed the 60 percent threshold (63.9) on 179 of 280 passes for 2,161 yards and 26 touchdowns. He had eight interceptions. He also rushed 112 times for a net 494 yards, or 5.8 per carry, and scored three rushing touchdowns.
Watt’s
daring boyhood punting feats in his yard at home in Kentland, Ind., might partially explain why Watt appears in Trine’s
team punting statistics for 2009 and ’10. He had a total of three kicks in ’09
and five in ’10. His longest punt senior year, 54 yards, also was the longest
among the four players who punted that year for Trine. Eric said he
kicked in rare quick-kick situations and that because those kicks were designed
to catch opponents by surprise, they were downed without a return.
Total home attendance for the season was 17,642, or an average of 3,528 per game. The single-game high mark crowd was the 4,200 who saw Trine defeat Hope, 38-35, on Oct. 3.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The following season, 2010, the Trine Thunder proudly dedicated their significantly improved playing facility under the name Fred Zollner Stadium, boasting a seating capacity of 5,000. Work on the stadium’s new framework had begun in 2009.
The Trine football team kept its offense rolling in 2010, Eric Watt’s senior year, and even took it up a level. The margins of victory in the majority of the team’s 2010 regular-season games were so overwhelming that there aren’t many contests to single out for drama
Trine won by scores of 76-6 over Bluffton, 38-0 over Alma, 31-10 over Hope, 51-14 over Olivet, 59-17 over Kalamazoo and 58-16 over Albion.
Albion entered the game at Angola with a 4-1 conference ledger, so there was some drama in advance of that contest because a victory over 5-0 Trine would have given the Britons a share of the MIAA championship. But there was absolutely no suspense once the game started.
The Thunder took immediate command, scoring 22 unanswered points in the first quarter. It was 30-7 at halftime and 37-10 at the end of the third quarter. Albion trimmed the deficit to 37-16 with a score at the 13:44 mark of the final frame, but the Thunder responded with three more unanswered touchdowns – including an 18-yard pick-six by linebacker Brandon Killingbeck – to seal the win and MIAA championship.
Kent Biller ran for a season-high 170 yards on 12 carries and scored two touchdowns to lead another balanced rushing and passing attack. As a team, the Thunder rushed for 357 net yards on 48 carries. Watt completed 18 of 26 passes for 273 yards and four touchdowns and gained 55 yards on 11 carries.
The Thunder defense forced a season-high six turnovers and tied a season high with four interceptions – Aaron Selking had three of them; Killingbeck and his pick-six was the other. Selking’s eight total picks in 2010 led the team by far and set a team single-season record, matched twice since then. The rest of the team had 13 for the year.
In his final college season, Eric Watt led Trine to a 10-0 regular season record and third consecutive league championship and appearance in the NCAA D3 postseason tournament.
Watt threw for 2,873 yards and had three games of 300 or more passing yards and six games of 200 yards or more. He threw for 33 touchdowns and had only six passes intercepted, half of them coming in the win at Hope on Oct. 23. The narrowest victories were 24-16 at Adrian on Oct. 2 and 45-35 at DePauw in the first round of the postseason tournament.
DePauw had gone undefeated until its last regular-season game, and the slip at that point was stunning. The Tigers lost 47-0 to archrival Wabash in the schools’ annual meeting in the Monon Bell Classic.
Despite such an embarrassing whitewash, the NCAA gave DePauw a third seed in the postseason tournament bracket. Meanwhile, undefeated and eighth-ranked Trine was seeded sixth, and if you wonder how that was received in Angola … it didn’t play well at all.
When Trine drew DePauw for its opening game and learned it had to travel to Greencastle, Thunder head coach Matt Land and his players were outraged. Land described the seeding as “a slap in the face” to his team and university.
Adding more insult, Andrew Pickford said, was the fact that d3football.com had predicted that DePauw would win the game, the most recent in a series of player-perceived slights the website had administered to Trine over the years. Pickford said Trine players visited d3football.com on a regular basis to catch up on things going on in small-college football.
DePauw and Trine weren’t the only curious seedings in the tournament that season. Undefeated, top-ranked and defending D3 champion Wisconsin-Whitewater was seeded second in its bracket. Furthermore, Whitewater had appeared in five consecutive previous D3 championship games (2005-09), winning two of them (2007 and ’09). Getting the top seed in 2010 was undefeated – but third-ranked – Wesley College of Dover, Del.
When the Trine team arrived in Greencastle, Ind., for the game, Pickford said he found that the condition of the visitors’ locker room at DePauw’s Blackstock Stadium was substandard, comparing it to “a dungeon.” He said the locker-room toilet – the only one – was in a dark, closet-size room. Andrew recalls going to the nearby tennis center – a nice and newer facility – to use restroom facilities while there.
The Thunder resolved to settle the perceived seeding slight on the gridiron. They scored four first-quarter touchdowns, opening a 27-7 lead. DePauw closed the gap to 27-14 at halftime and forged ahead 28-27 with two scores in the third quarter. But a touchdown and two-point conversion enabled Trine to pull ahead 35-28 entering the fourth period.
two unanswered scores – a two-yard George Outlaw run and a 24-yard Jeremy Howard field goal, the final points of the contest.
Watt completed 20 of 30 passes for 338 yards and three touchdowns. He also ran the ball eight times for 38 yards and a touchdown. JaVontae Hence caught eight of Watt’s passes for 169 yards and two scores, including a 59-yarder.
The win earned the Thunder a date the following weekend at Wisconsin-Whitewater, which had beaten Franklin College in the first round.
Andrew Pickford remembers the Whitewater game as another cold day and pointed to Whitewater’s offensive line and tight end as keys. “They were giants,” he said. “I didn’t feel like we shouldn’t have been there, but their offensive line was the difference-maker.”
After the Warhawks grabbed a 10-3 first-quarter lead, the teams traded scores several times in the second quarter until Whitewater tallied on a 17-yard pass from backup quarterback Lee Brekke to Aaron Rusch with 52 seconds left in the half to take a 31-24 lead at the midway point. Brekke, a sophomore, was starting his second collegiate game in place of junior starter Matt Blanchard, who had suffered an injury in the team’s regular-season finale.
Trine tied the score at 31 when Devin Leas scored on a 1-yard run in the third quarter, but that was the Thunder’s last score. Whitewater junior Levell Coppage scored twice on 9-yard runs in the final quarter to seal the Warhawks’ 45-31 win.
The Warhawks’ running game (324 yards on 48 carries) stood out; Trine mustered just 98 yards rushing on 33 carries by comparison.
In his last collegiate game, Watt completed 26 of 38 passes for 276 yards and two touchdowns and had one pass intercepted. He ran seven times for 14 yards. Appropriately, his longtime favorite receiver, fellow senior Paul Curtis, caught the Trine quarterback’s two touchdown passes in the game, both in the second quarter, the first a 26-yarder at the 14:53 mark and the second a 10-yarder at 2:41.
Before the game, the Thunder defense had heard a lot about bruising 5-foot-9, 215-pound running back Booker Stanley, the transfer from the University of Wisconsin. But Stanley carried the ball only three times for 10 total yards.
Doing the serious damage was 5-9, 190-pound halfback Coppage, who gained 300 yards, his second-highest college career total (also the second-highest Wisconsin-Whitewater single-game total). And he scored three touchdowns, including the two in the fourth quarter that served as the coup de gras.
Coppage “was a tough guy with quite a bit of speed,” said Paul Curtis. He added that Trine defenders could momentarily lose track of Coppage when the short back maneuvered behind the Warhawks’ huge wall of offensive linemen. On some plays, he said, defenders wouldn’t spot Coppage until he had blown past them.
It was not easy for Curtis to discuss the Whitewater contest, also his last collegiate game. He had even more trouble talking about his last play on the field, one he hadn’t discussed much with anyone over the years.
Whitewater was leading 45-31 in the fourth quarter, and the Trine offense was deep in Whitewater territory hoping to climax a successful drive with a score, after which it planned to try an onside kick to get the ball back and squeeze in another quick score.
Curtis ran a post corner route, and Watt’s pass met the receiver near the sideline with Curtis inside the 5-yard line. After making the catch, with so little time left, Curtis instinctively dived toward the pylon at the goal line, arms stretched out in front of him, thinking an immediate score would preserve some valuable seconds on the clock.
Whitewater defensive back Jared Kiesow put a solid hit on Curtis during the receiver’s dive, hoping to down Curtis before the ball crossed the goal line. Upon impact, the ball jarred free from Curtis’ hands, and it simply stuck into the turf. No bounce, no spin. And it stayed in bounds.
Game officials made no indication the play was over, so Whitewater safety Steve McCollum, Kiesow’s teammate, picked up the ball and ran with it for nine yards on what would be ruled a fumble and recovery return. Once McCollum’s return ended at the 11-yard line, the play was blown dead with 1 minute and 43 seconds left on the clock.
It was Curtis’ hope that game officials would rule that some part of his body had landed out of bounds before the ball fell out of his hands, but no such luck. Curtis said he and quarterbacks coach Dan Simrell later reviewed footage of the play, and they felt Curtis had a case.
But even if video replay review were allowed back then, and game officials had found that Curtis was correct, and even if Trine had been able to maintain possession and score on the drive, there would have been the question of whether Trine would have had enough time to pull off a successful onside kick and score again in 1:35 or thereabouts.
“It was not an error per se” on Curtis’ part when he fumbled the ball, said Trine coach Matt Land. “It just happened. He’s one of the best players in the history of our school.”
But had the Thunder scored on that drive, coach Land said, his team was prepared – with under 2 minutes left on the clock – to deal with the challenge of getting the ball back so it could get the second score it needed to make it a game again.
“We work on that all the time” in practice, Land said of end-of-game strategies. “We would do two-minute drills – score, and run a(n) (onside) kickoff and score again. We work that all the time. We worked that, if I remember correctly, the week before Defiance (2007) for the first time, that specific situation,” he said, alluding to the late-fourth-quarter, come-from-behind win in Watt’s first game action as a freshman.
“We would do all kinds of situations twice a week that we would make up like that one” so players would be ready if the opportunity presented itself.
The Warhawks ran out the clock after taking over possession, and they continued winning in the tournament (beating top-seeded Wesley 27-7 in the fourth round) and successfully defended its championship by defeating fellow D3 power Mount Union, 31-21, in the title game.1
Trine fans had turned out in droves in 2010 to see their team play at home in Watt’s final season. Attendance for the five home games that year totaled 23,918, for an average of 4,784 per game. The 5,187 who attended the home opener, a 55-7 win over Manchester, set a record for attendance. The mark lasted until Oct. 9, when 5,524 saw Trine defeat LaGrange, 51-7.
The Trine offense set school records for scoring offense (46.17 points per game), total scoring for a season (554 points), most points in a game (76 vs. Bluffton), total offense in a game (642 yards vs. Manchester), total offense in a season (495.6 yards per game), rushing offense in a game (358 yards vs. Bluffton) and rushing offense in a season (238.2 yards per game).
Eric Watt established a then-school record single-season passing efficiency mark of 182.05 in 2010, completing 197 of 294 passes for 2,873 yards and 33 touchdowns and had just eight interceptions. His pass efficiency mark has since been eclipsed twice, first by Evan Wyse in 2017, a Gagliardi finalist that year, with 193.3. Brandon Winters also surpassed Eric’s mark, in 2018, with 187.3. Watt’s 2010 season completion percentage, 67, ranks third all-time at Trine.
Watt’s 9,999 career total yardage is tops in Trine history, and his 227.2 yards per game (44 total games) of total offense ranks second to Taylor Masiewicz’s single-season mark of 245.6 (in 16 games). His 100 career “touchdowns responsible for” also ranks first. Astoundingly, his 1,535 career rushing yardage (on 347 carries) ranks eighth on the school’s all-time rushing list.
Receiver Paul Curtis, who started at Trine the same year as Watt, was the quarterback’s favorite target by far in 2010. Curtis hauled in 49 passes for 1,144 yards – almost twice as many yards as the next highest receiver.
Thirteen of those receptions were for touchdowns, eclipsing his own single-season record of 10 that he had set the previous year. The 1,144 yards is tops for a season in Trine history. His 28 career touchdown receptions and 18.82 yards per catch average are also tops all-time at Trine. His 2,446 career receptions yards rank fourth, right behind JaVontae Hence’s 2,528.
Sophomore Hence caught 36 passes for 592 yards and nine touchdowns in 2010. Hence, a versatile athlete, also gained 367 net yards on 61 rushes and 8 touchdowns, led the team in scoring with 102 points and threw one successful two-point conversion pass. He holds the school career reception record with 194. Curtis ranks sixth with 130.
Place-kicker Jeremy Howard set the school record for most point-after kicks in a season with his 67 in 2010. He missed only four that year. Lucas Garza came close in 2017 with 65 and in 2018 with 60. The next closest is 50. For a career, Howard’s 147 rank second behind Garza’s 192. Howard played from 2007-10; Garza from 2016-19.
Watt, Howard and Aaron Selking swept the MIAA’s top awards in 2010: Watt was named Offensive MVP for the second year in a row, Selking was named MIAA Defensive MVP and Howard won the annual Pete Schmidt Memorial Award, given to an outstanding athlete-scholar in the league. Schmidt coached football at Albion College from 1983-96, leading them to nine MIAA championships and the NCAA D3 championship in 1994. He also was offensive coordinator at Indiana University from 1997-99. He died of cancer, at age 52, in 2000.
Watt’s accomplishments at Trine were voluminous – and staggering. He is, by far, the most decorated player in Trine football history, and his name appears all over the passing category of the school football record book.
He is tops in touchdown passes with 82; the next highest player has 57. He has the second-most career pass attempts and completions (650 out of 1106), the second most career passing yardage (8,464), third-best career yardage per game (192.4), fourth best career passing efficiency (141.0), fifth-best career completion percentage (58.8%) and sixth-best career yardage per pass (7.7).
As for season records, he ranks in Trine's top 10 in attempts, completions and touchdowns in each of his last three seasons. Two of those seasons rank in the top 10 for completion percentage, passing efficiency, average yardage per pass and average yards per game.
By the time he graduated early with a degree in finance in December 2010, he had led the Thunder to 20 straight MIAA wins; a three-year regular season record of 29-1 (the 2009 loss to Franklin being the only blemish); three consecutive MIAA football titles; and two consecutive postseason D3 Sweet 16 appearances. The Thunder’s three straight league titles and three-year 29-1 regular-season record from 2008-10 is unmatched in Trine football history.
At the end of his career, Watt was named:
* MIAA player of the week seven times;
* MIAA offensive most valuable player in 2009 and 2010;
* All-conference quarterback in 2008, 2009 and 2010;
* To the MIAA all-academic honor roll in 2009 and 2010;
* Winner of the 2011 Trine University Robert L. Greim Award, given to the senior male student-athlete who best embodies the values of leadership, character, citizenship, scholarship and athletic accomplishment.
In 2016, Watt was inducted into his school’s athletics hall of fame, and in 2019 he was named to Trine/Tri-State University’s Quarter-Century Football Team. Shortly after his graduation, Trine decided to retire Watt’s jersey number 13. In early 2011, Watt said the school invited him back to campus where they surprised him with a framed copy of the jersey.
Trine quarterbacks coach Dan Simrell – he of coaching experience at Toledo, Findlay, West Virginia and professionally in Italy – said Eric Watt could have played for him at any of the places where he had coached.
“He was that good. I have every film, and every grading sheet from four years (of games at Tri-State/Trine).”
As if to underscore what he had just said, Simrell added: “He had the talent to play Division I football.”
Eric gave the question several days’ thought. When he responded by email several days later, he started by saying that he has felt people through the years doubted him and his competitive spirit. It contributed to him playing almost his entire career with a chip on his shoulder and eager to prove the doubters wrong.
“I hate losing,” he said succinctly.
He cited a handful of South Newton High School athletes who had stellar careers at his school – specifically Tracy Smith, now baseball coach at the University of Michigan; Sam Logan, who went on to excel as a wide receiver at Indiana State University; Justin Wentzel, Ryan Care’s cousin, a quarterback who held all of the school's football passing records before Watt eclipsed them; his own teammates Ben Welsh and Brice Willey, also two-sport athletes at South Newton; and Jay and Jarrett Hammel, two-sport athletes from the mid-2010s who rank first and second all-time on South Newton’s basketball career scoring list and today are pursuing interests in baseball.
But none of those, he contended, ever really made it “big time,” although Tracy Smith might beg to differ with his position as head coach at a prominent Big Ten university (Michigan).
“I remember bench pressing at our shop going into my senior year of college, telling myself I am going to be an All-American” despite all the doubt he felt that surrounded him and the Thunder, and despite the critics who felt Trine might be overrated, Watt said. Apparently winning two consecutive MIAA championships (at that point), winning those crowns going undefeated, and going through two regular-season schedules (at that point) with only one loss – a one-point defeat in a 2009 non-conference game – wasn’t persuasive enough evidence.
“I love proving people wrong, knowing that they have no control over it, while I do. I knew that the success I achieved didn’t all come from my athletic ability,” he said. A lot of his success can be attributed to his knowledge of the game, he added. “I love being challenged mentally.”
He compared what football players, and particularly a quarterback, must learn and retain to strategies that are key to winning a chess game.
“If I know what everyone is doing, then I can make the right decision,” he said, adding that Trine assistant coach Dan Simrell and other coaches taught him so much that, more often than not, he could accurately read a defense before the center snap and get the outcome he wanted on a play.
“Being a competitor has many definitions, but mine was being smarter than the other guy, and that got me a long way on the football field.”
That is what drove him all those years. “And still does.”
___________________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes:
1 - Several incredible NCAA Division III football streaks that were going on at that time deserve mention here. From 1996 to 2018, Mount Union appeared in 20 out of 23 D3 championship games, winning 12 of them (1996-98, 2000-02, 2005-06, 2008, 2012, 2015 and 2017). Eleven of those appearances were consecutive (2005-15). A major reason why the school didn’t win more was because Wisconsin-Whitewater appeared opposite Mount Union in 10 consecutive title games in that stretch, winning six of them. Whitewater won in 2007, 2009-11 and 2013-14, while Mount Union prevailed against Whitewater in 2005-06, 2008 and 2012.
Tomorrow in Chapter 16: The Highest Honor
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread
Chapter 3: The Kicker With the Ever-Present Smile
Chapter 4: Like Father, Like Son
Chapter 5: Where Legends Played
Chapter 6: A Moonlight Graham Moment
Chapter 7: 'Clearly the Best' Small-School Teams in Indiana
Chapter 9: Farewell, Levi ... and Welcome, Pup!
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