The Hot Corner: Cosgrove and Colby a welcome combo...The Black Bears made not one, not two, but five appearances in the FCS playoffs. Maine even won three first-round games while competing against schools that were merely buying time before making the often ill-conceived leap to an FBS conference.
Three times, Cosgrove’s team won or shared the regular-season title of an Atlantic 10/Colonial Athletic Conference in which it had zero business competing. Maine was surrounded by programs – James Madison, Richmond, Villanova, even dastardly UNH – with championship pedigrees. Not to mention better weather, superior facilities, and infinitely more bells and whistles.
Countless individual players under Cosgrove’s tutelage channeled the program’s knack for the whole exceeding the sum of the parts, parlaying low-round draft picks or free-agent training camp invitations into meaningful National Football League careers.
All this unfolded while the big-picture athletic program at Maine was in the midst of an avalanche toward mediocrity.
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