By William C. Rhoden
Jackson State head coach TC Taylor was a 10-year-old growing up in McComb, Mississippi when he saw his first Jackson State football game.
Thirty-six years after that first experience, Taylor’s family and close friends watched Saturday as the 46-year-old led Jackson State to its first Celebration Bowl victory. Jackson State defeated South Carolina State 28-7 on Saturday to win its first HBCU football national championship as the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champions.
Taylor is his hometown hero, Jackson State through and through. Recruited as a quarterback, Taylor attended Jackson State on a football scholarship and played four years for the Tigers, finishing his career as a wide receiver. As the confetti fell on her on Saturday, Taylor savored a surreal moment with friends and family members who were part of her journey.
“To hug those people, my family who supported me, my sister who took me to so many games… she was on the field with me. It means everything,” Taylor said.
It was Jackson State’s third Celebration Bowl appearance. Taylor was an assistant on coach Deion Sanders’ staff when Jackson State performed as the highly-touted “Coach Prime” show in the previous Celebration Bowl.
With his son Shedeur and two-way star Travis Hunter, who won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday, Sanders has turned Jackson State into a glamorous HBCU program. Each of the Tigers’ trips to the Celebration Bowl has turned into a media circus that excites opponents. In 2021, Jackson State lost to South Carolina State 31-10. In 2022, Jackson State lost to North Carolina Central 41-34.
After Taylor finished talking to reporters on Saturday, I asked him what makes this team stand out. There were some really good players like running back Irv Mulligan, but no superstars to speak of. Again, on Saturday, they succeeded where Sanders’ two teams had failed.
Why?
“It’s more of a brotherhood,” Taylor said. “We find a way every week, whether it’s offense, defense or special teams. They know how to be together and play for each other.”
This game — this HBCU football national championship, this season — may have ended Coach Prime’s suspension once and for all at Jackson State and the Southwestern Athletic Conference.
In his three seasons at Jackson State, Sanders has strengthened the foundation of the program. But the most important thing Sanders did was advocate for Taylor to be the next Jackson State coach after Sanders announced he was leaving for Colorado.
Sanders would be hard to follow, but he knew Taylor was born to coach Jackson State. Taylor drew blood from Jackson State. After Saturday’s win, Taylor said he was preparing for his moment after joining the coaching staff in 2019.
“I’ve always prepared like that, and when the opportunity presented itself, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work,” Taylor said. “I knew what I wanted my roster to look like, I knew what I wanted this coaching staff to look like, and I knew we were going to be successful. I wanted this moment. I knew this moment would happen.”
Football at historically Black colleges and universities has had many moments over the years. What was often lost during the Coach Prime years at Jackson State was that these HBCU football programs had been around for a long time, and they had endured.
South Carolina started playing football in 1907. Jackson State’s first season was 1911. They were places where mostly white schoolboys refused to recruit black players and where players could showcase their talents and make it to the pros.
When I was a senior at Morgan State in 1971, the first year of the MEAC, we traveled to Jackson State to play the Tigers in a non-conference game. Walter Payton, who played 13 seasons in the NFL, was a sophomore on that Jackson State team. Future Pro Football Hall of Famer Robert Brazile was a freshman and Tigers wide receiver Jerome Barkum had a 12-year NFL career.
A month before our trip to Jackson, we traveled to Orangeburg, South Carolina to play MEAC newcomer South Carolina State. Future NFL star Donnie Shell might have been a freshman on that team, and future Hall of Fame quarterback Harry Carson was on the way.
Every team in the SWAC and many in the MEAC had that kind of talent, although the tide started to go when white schools realized they had to recruit Walter Paytons and Robert Braziles to be successful. And they did.
The golden age of black college football is long gone and will never return. The NFL will never produce the same number of players from HBCUs that it once did. The Celebration Bowl pays homage to a long-lost era while celebrating the here and now.
For young HBCU coaches like Taylor, the mission has shifted from dominating professional football to providing opportunities for players to play competitive football, earn their degrees and perhaps find their way to professional football in the NFL or elsewhere. The HBCU universe gave Sanders the opportunity to be stamped and validated as a football coach.
A coach’s job is mostly to provide championship moments like the one Taylor and his Jackson State players enjoyed here Saturday. The moment Taylor never could have guessed — the moment that cemented his school-high stature — came in the fourth quarter on Jackson State’s final drive of the game.
Jackson State fans started chanting his name.
“There were some great moments there,” he said. I’ve been waiting for a long time to lift it. It was an incredible feeling.”
There have been many great moments at Jackson State over the years. Taylor’s victory on Saturday offered the promise of more to come.
