Is HBCU football sleeping giant Johnson C. Smith finally ready to rise?

There was a rare HBCU football phenomenon that took place in Virginia last month when Johnson C. Smith’s name showed up in the CIAA predicted finish.

JCSU was picked to finish sixth in the 12-team league and third in the CIAA South despite dragging the baggage of a 2-7 season from last season. It was actually picked to finish above four teams it lost to in 2022: Bluefield State, St. Augustine’s, Winston-Salem State and Livingstone College.

Second-year head coach Maurice Flowers will be the first to admit there were growing pains in his first season back at his alma mater.

“It was just a learning experience every day in practice. Every meeting was just new and improved throughout the course of the year, but we’re excited to try to just improve upon last year,” Flowers said. “So many close games, so many opportunities for growth for us and we’re looking forward to continuing the building process.”

True to Flowers’ statement, the team’s first three losses included two one-point losses (Bluefield State and Lincoln) and a three-point loss to eventual CIAA North champion Chowan University. It also occurred with 53 freshmen on the field along with 12 to 15 players from the transfer portal. That included quarterback Tyrell Jackson, who followed Flowers from Fort Valley State in 2022. He missed most of last season with an injury, but he’s back and healthy, according to Flowers.

“He’s a coach on the field and knows the offense backwards and forwards,” Flowers said. “And really the place where he’s improved most is his leadership on the field and off the field, gathering the young men and having workouts and having board sessions and just reviewing the offense. So I look for him to have the best year that he’s had as a college football player and leading the offense. And we look to be explosive. We look to get back to putting a lot of points on the board and just being a scary team on offense.”

JCSU will be one of five teams chasing reigning CIAA champion Fayetteville State for the Southern Division title _ a crown that has resided in Cumberland County since 2017. Flowers knows this as he helped Fayetteville State ascend to the top of the CIAA South that year, taking a spot on the throne the rest of the division is hoping to knock off of.

“You look at the Southern Division, it has been part of Fayetteville State and everyone else,” Flowers said. “But if you look at those scores in the last number of years, it hasn’t been just blowouts with Fayetteville State. People are playing Fayetteville State tough. Coach (Richard) Hayes and his administration, they do an outstanding job with their commitment to supporting football. They have 36 scholarships, the maximum in Division II. They have the maximum amount of coaches you can have. And so to compete with Fayetteville State, you’re going to have to have what they have or something close to it.”

The Johnson C. Smith football program has been around as long as HBCU football itself. Back on December 27, 1892 the school - then known as Biddle University — traveled up the road to Salisbury to take on Livingstone College for the first football contest between black colleges.

Despite being a part of the historic first HBCU football game and located in one of the largest HBCU hubs in the country, Johnson C. Smith football has largely been an afterthought for much of the following 130 years.

The private school located on the fringes of downtown Charlotte has never been a powerhouse football program as it has just one CIAA title to show for all of the games it has played - and that happened in 1969. The more recent history follows suit. JCSU has won 56 games since 2005 for an average of 3.2 wins per season.

Flowers knows JCSU’s tortured history well having played quarterback at Smith back in the 1990s. He’s hoping to change things around, and he’s got a few things working in his favor.

“The plan is to fund football — fund athletics even more than what it has been. Very, very proud to say, Johnson C. Smith University — we have 36 scholarships for the first time in school history and very proud to say we’ll be at nine full-time coaches for the first time in school history,” Flowers said at CIAA media day. “The university has definitely put an emphasis on athletics and how it can help build the school.”

That’s something that most CIAA programs, and many HBCU Division II schools overall, cannot say. But scholarship numbers are just a part of the Flowers formula to make JCSU football relevant beyond Beaties Ford Road. The other part of the equation is new and upgraded facilities.

“Proud to say we have a new turf field, we have a new weight room, we have a new locker room coming in,” Flowers said. “These are things that we’re not saying they’re going to come in two to three years. The field is done now. The weight room will be done in about a month and the locker room.”

Flowers and JCSU are banking that better facilities and more scholarship money will help turn things around. That combination is super important in North Carolina where there are 14 Division II football programs — including six other CIAA schools.

“We can say that we have something similar to Fayetteville State, schools like Lenoir-Rhyne and Wingate,” Flowers said. “Those are schools that Johnson C. Smith could never win recruiting battles with, and a lot of times it came to facilities. We can say right now we have some young men from Lenoir-Rhyne that are on our roster. We’re winning some recruiting battles in the portal and with high school young men and it has to do with the commitment our university has made to athletics.”