David Hughes: Rose-Hulman keeping strong football tradition alive

Nov. 9—This Saturday, Rose-Hulman's football program will face almost the exact same situation it's faced the previous two years at this time.

The Engineers (7-2 overall, 6-0 Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference) will welcome Mount St. Joseph (8-1, 6-0) to Cook Stadium for a 1:30 p.m. Senior Day matchup. At stake, for the third year in a row, will be the HCAC title and the right to represent the conference in the NCAA Division III playoffs.

In 2021, the Lions from Cincinnati traveled by bus to Rose for the regular-season finale. Coach Jeff Sokol's Engineers were undefeated in the conference at the time, while MSJ had one loss. But a victory for the visitors would have created a tie, with the tiebreaker being head-to-head results, thus the automatic NCAA bid would have gone to the Lions.

No tiebreakers were necessary, however, as Rose-Hulman dominated its second-place foes 58-21.

In 2022, both squads soared into their regular-season finale at Cincinnati with 6-0 conference marks. So it was clear the winner would take all ... and that was Mount St. Joseph to the tune of a 40-31 score.

So with another clash between these Midwest small-college powers on the horizon, Sokol insists he and his players are ready for intense gridiron warfare (or something dramatic like that from the narrator of those old-time NFL Films documentaries).

"We expect a tremendous challenge from the Lions," he told me this week. "They are great on both sides of the ball and on special teams. Their quarterback [senior Josh Taylor] is a special player who can hurt you in a multitude of ways.

"They have excellent players all over their two-deep [lineups]. They will present some unique matchup issues for our defense, but we have confidence in our players and our schemes."

Sokol agreed that it's no coincidence the same teams have been squaring off for the HCAC championship in recent years.

"I think it has been very fun and fortunate for both teams to have the game determining the conference championship on the last week of the season," he said. "There are so many things that build up throughout the year."

You know, Rose has never captured a national championship in football or anything like that. But it's presented an entertaining brand of football to its students and fans for most of the last several decades.

Perhaps its best-known player ever was 5-7 1/2, 152-pound Carl "Rocky" Herakovich. He starred on the undefeated 1958 team when the engineering institute was known as Rose Poly. Those Engineers went 8-0, outscoring opponents 270-31, while Herakovich ended up with a nation-high 168 points and earned Associated Press Little College honorable-mention status for his efforts.

I met Rocky during that team's 50-year anniversary celebration in 2008 at Cook Stadium and I was pleased to learn recently that he's still doing well at 86 when we traded emails.

"Possibly my favorite memory is what teammate Hal Booher told me several weeks after the [1958] season was over," recalled Herakovich, who lives in Raleigh, N.C., after retiring as a college professor in 1998.

"He told me, for the last two games of my career, the players refused when coach [Phil] Brown told one of them to substitute for me. They wanted me to have every possible opportunity to score a touchdown. I played every second of those last two games because they wanted me and the team to break [Eddie] McGovern's [1942 single-season points] record. I hadn't realized that I had played the entire game for the last two games. To realize that my teammates wanted that for me is something that I will always cherish."

Rocky also remembers he was forced to re-score the final, record-breaking TD of that season twice because it kept getting called back by penalties.

"It was fourth down on the 6-yard line," he said about the one that counted. "There were 20 seconds left in the game and we knew we had to score now if we were to break McGovern's record. I say 'we' because it really was a team effort.

"[David] Lindzy was the QB and he said to me 'What play do you want to run, Rocky?' We were on the right hash mark and I was at left halfback, I said something like, 'I'll switch with Michael who was at right halfback, you roll out and pitch the ball back to me, both guards pull left, and you, [fullback] Anderson and Michael lead me around left end.' The play worked like a charm and when I dove into the end zone, several of my uncles who were at the game picked me up. We had never run such a play previously."

To this day, Herakovich still carries fond memories of Rose from on and off the football field.

"I've told my children that when you accomplish something like breaking the record and leading the nation in scoring," he explained, "it gives you the confidence to believe that you can do anything you set out to do."

Herakovich also still follows current Rose-Hulman football when he can.

"I am amazed at how many points they score," he said of the 2023 Engineers, who defeated HCAC foe Defiance 78-54 with the help of Grant Ripperda's five touchdowns last Saturday. "I fully expect my record for points in a season to be broken. However, the points-per-game record [21.0] will be harder to break. I only recently learned that I held that national record for 30 years until Barry Sanders broke it at 21.3 ppg [in 1988]. I'm still second to Barry in that record. It's a shame that the current teams haven't had the great defense that our teams did."

Although Sokol is probably more focused on X's and O's than anything else football-related this week, he is glad to hear that Herakovich will be rooting for the Engineers from a distance Saturday.

"We take tremendous pride in our 131-year football history," Sokol emphasized. "The 8-0 undefeated 1958 team stands alone amongst our 13 conference championship teams as the only one to do it without a loss [for the entire season]. As someone who has spent 13 years chasing that goal, I know first-hand how significant an accomplishment that is.

"It means a lot to our team that [Rose-Hulman football success] still means a lot to the guys who did it in 1958."

Tribune-Star sports reporter David Hughes can be reached after 4 p.m. by phone at (812) 231-4224 (psst, just text him on his cell instead); by email at david.hughes@tribstar.com; or by a prehistoric fax machine at (812) 231-4321.