Why You're Always Bad: Kent State
Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast
Richard Johnson and Alex Kirshner
4.9 • 916 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The history of the Kent State Golden Flashes is full of missed opportunities, real-life tragedies, and lots of losing—never more than in 2024, when Kent State had one of the worst teams in college football history. Why is the program perennially so bad? To answer that question, Rodger Sherman joins Alex and Richard for a deep dive into the Flashes.
* A long history of great, memorable players on bad teams
* Separating the challenges that come with being a MAC school from the ones that are specific to this MAC school
* A string of tragedies that affected the football program, led by the fallout from the killings of four students by national guardsmen in 1970
* More than one missed chance to hire alum Nick Saban
* The program’s best case-scenario over the next 10 years
* Should Kent State stay the course, drop to FCS, or do something else?
Read Rodger’s recent newsletter on Kent State’s miserable 2024, and join the thousands on his mailing list to get more of his one-of-a-kind writing.
This is a premium episode of Split Zone Duo for our paid subscribers. If you’re not a subscriber yet, you can try us out on a seven-day free trial.
Also, let us know if you liked this episode concept and if there are any other troubled programs you’d like to see us explore in the future.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're coming, and we ain't backing down. |
| 0:02.1 | We don't need a bunch of cats in here. |
| 0:03.6 | Looking in the mirror. |
| 0:04.8 | Everybody just do your job. |
| 0:07.0 | You understand that? |
| 0:07.9 | Hey, will you shut up? |
| 0:08.9 | I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. |
| 0:11.4 | Guys being dudes. |
| 0:12.6 | And they run through our shit like a through a ten horn, man. |
| 0:15.1 | Ah, fuck it. |
| 0:16.6 | Thank you, Lee. |
| 0:18.1 | Thank you to our listeners. |
| 0:19.8 | Thank you to our listeners. Thank you to Richard Johnson. And thank you, |
| 0:22.3 | Roger Sherman, joining the program this week to talk about one of the worst college football seasons |
| 0:27.9 | of all time, but more than that to talk about how the program that produced it got to this point. |
| 0:34.3 | Roger, it's Kent State Golden Flash's time. Yeah, you've had me on to talk about |
| 0:39.2 | Kent State and Trent Dilfer, and I'm starting to feel like it's just when they're like |
| 0:46.2 | huge disasters that I get called upon. And I'm not, I think I like that. I think I like being |
| 0:53.5 | sort of a disaster specialist. |
| 0:55.3 | Yeah, I like that Roger is our biohazard guy. |
| 0:59.2 | Like Roger coming on in like a hazmat suit to every episode. |
| 1:03.6 | I mean, you can't see this. |
... |
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