Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series looking back at the 2012 University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Golden Lions, the only football team in school history to win an outright conference championship and post 10 wins in a season. On Saturday, UAPB, which is 4-0 in a spring schedule resulting from the covid-19 pandemic, will take on Alabama A&M University for the SWAC title in Jackson, Miss.
Ben Anderson wore No. 11 as a University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff quarterback, matching the year he started as a true freshman.
Armed with a tough task for such inexperience, the Little Rock product carried the Golden Lions to their first winning season since 2006, the first time the program played in a conference championship game.
“They were trying to bring me along and still perform as well as the team,” said Anderson, who played professionally and was named Japanese X League MVP in 2017. “Even as a freshman, to go 6-5 gave me confidence.” To say Anderson was a consistent performer in Pine Bluff would be an understatement. The Parkview High School graduate started 44 of 45 games — giving up one start to William Dunn for UAPB’s 2012 Senior Day game.
Anderson’s most important start came on Dec. 8, 2012, in Birmingham, Ala. UAPB went into the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game with a 9-2 mark, having matched the school record for most victories in a season (the 1994 NAIA runner-up team went 9-4), and took on Jackson State, a team the Lions had beaten 34-24 at then-Golden Lion Stadium two months earlier.
With that, Coach Monte Coleman’s Lions had just kicked off a six-game winning streak going into the title game.
“We were just close,” Anderson said. “Close as a team. We knew how good we were going to be. We knew how good we could be that spring. In 2011, had we not fought Southern, we realized we could have been in the SWAC, playing Alabama A&M.” An all-out brawl following a one-point UAPB win against Southern University led to a large number of suspensions for both programs. The SWAC allowed UAPB to stagger its bans over a three-week period, since enforcing all of them at once would have left the roster too thin.
“At Pine Bluff, before I got there, we didn’t really know how good we were,” said linebacker Bill Ross, an Alabama native who transferred from New Mexico Military Institute. “We realized it when we had our first winning record. At that point in time, if we had beaten Grambling, had we not had 22 players suspended — that’s when the lightbulb went on. The whole program and our fans realized. Our whole defense was coming back and we had a pretty good quarterback.” The Lions learned their lessons from 2011 and looked out for each other throughout the offseason and regular season.
“We all stayed close, three- and four-deep in our apartments,” Anderson said, “The camaraderie, how close we were — we could go to the basketball games and might even wear the same colors — it felt like a brotherhood. That, more than anything, is what I remember.” Said Ross: “That’s what was so special about that group. Everybody cared for each other. It was a real good unity.” The 2012 season started with a hint of what was to come. California junior college transplant Tyler Strickland booted a field goal on the last play of the game to beat Langston University of Oklahoma 17-14 in Little Rock.
“We went with a chip on our shoulder that we were the team to beat,” Ross said. “No one in the SWAC probably thought that way, but we did.” To prove that, UAPB would have come from from an 0-1 hole in conference play.
Alabama A&M — then coached by future UAPB offensive coordinator Anthony Jones — edged UAPB 14-10 in Pine Bluff the next week, one year after UAPB blew a 20-point lead in Huntsville and lost by one point. UAPB took out its frustration on Alcorn State in Lorman the week after, winning 24-6, and then beat Alabama State 24-21 in Montgomery on a Thursday night ESPNU telecast.
Tennessee State pummeled UAPB 40-13 for its homecoming in Nashville before the Lions started their winning streak. Following the Jackson State game, UAPB greeted Dawson Odums to his interim head coaching role at Southern with a 50-21 win in Baton Rouge, blanked Mississippi Valley State 10-0 in its own homecoming, secured the Western Division title with a 49-3 rout of Texas Southern at the new BBVA Stadium in downtown Houston, held off host Grambling State 24-17 and edged Prairie View A&M 42-41 in Pine Bluff.
Anderson threw for 2,346 yards and 16 touchdowns against 13 interceptions in 2012, but he said the common denominator to the Lions’ success that year was the defense, led by defensive end Brandon Thurmond
(17.5 sacks, 70 tackles) and the linebacking trio of Ross (127 tackles, three interceptions and two sacks), Xavier Lofton (107 tackles, 10.5 for losses) and Jer-ryan Harris (six pass breakups, three fumble recoveries).
“We could put up some points but our defense could stop the other team from scoring,” Anderson said. “Even if we made mistakes, or settled for a field goal instead of getting six [points], our defense had our back. I feel like our defense brought us along in 2012.”
Thursday: Anderson and Ross look back on the 2012 SWAC championship game.
SWAC championship
What: UAPB (4-0 overall and SWAC) vs. Alabama A&M (4-0 overall, 3-0 SWAC)
When: 2 p.m. Saturday
Where: Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, Jackson
Audio/Video: KPBA-FM 99.3 in Pine Bluff; KARN-AM 920 in Little Rock; Sirius XM ESPNU Radio channel 84; OpenMic Broadcast Network; UAPBLionsRoar.com/live and UAPB Athletics app
Last meeting: ESPN2 and ESPN app (Tiffany Greene, play-byplay; Jay Walker, color commentary
The Pine Bluff Commercial