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Lee Venable never had to worry about motivation at the end of a USL football season. There was always McNeese.
"Usually at the end of the year you're slacking off in practice and not beating yourself up," Venable said. "But that last week, the coaches never had to get the team up for a game. That was a given."
It was a given for three and a half decades, most of those years featuring the Cajuns and the Cowboys on the final Saturday night of the season. It became tradition.
And it was always heated, regardless of records or situations.
"At Cowboy Stadium, you'd go down the steps to the field," said Lark Hebert, a native of Port Barre who played four years for the Cowboys. "On one side fans would be patting you on the back, and fans on the other side would be spitting at you."
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Dan McDonald
dmcdonald@theadvertiser.com
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In this series, spit happened.
"That's the biggest rivalry there was," said Dwight Prudhomme, who quarterbacked the Cajuns in four games against McNeese. "You've got best friends from high school playing against each other."
There's no way to know if this Saturday's UL-McNeese contest - the first meeting between the neighbors since 1986 - will reach that level of intensity. And there are no other games currently contracted between the schools.
But that won't take anything away from a large group of former Cajuns and Cowboys, who will flash back a generation or more when the teams collide at 6 p.m. at Cajun Field.
"It's very important for guys my age and older," said Mac Barousse, a lifelong Lafayette resident with the exception of four years spent on the Cowboy roster. "I've been getting the calls this week, hearing from guys that I played with and against.
"I've got invitations to both alumni tents and I'll make it to both of them."
"The fans enjoy the rivalry just as much as the players," said Venable, best known as the Cajuns' deep snapper for four years from 1977-80. "And the players enjoyed it a lot. It was always a hard-fought game."
Venable was on the starting end of three John Roveto field goals during a regional ABC television broadcast that ended in a 9-9 tie in 1977.
Hebert, now the Cowboys' co-defensive coordinator, only lost once to the Cajuns (two wins, one tie) in his career that spanned 1982-85. Prudhomme, at UL from 1979-82, never won and managed only a 10-10 tie as a senior.
"That was the one we should have won," said Prudhomme, who played with Mac and younger brother Mark Barousse at Lafayette High before the two went to McNeese. "I did my part by throwing three interceptions."
The series between the schools ran from 1951 - the first year that McNeese became a four-year institution - until 1986. For the first 20 years the teams were part of the Gulf States Conference, and many times the traditional season-ender figured prominently in the GSC title chase.
UL won the contest in 1965, 1968 and 1970 to lock up GSC crowns. McNeese took the finale in 1957, 1961 and 1963 to claim conference titles.
The schools later joined forces in the Southland Conference for a decade until UL left that league to retain its NCAA Division I-A status in 1982. The teams continued to play through 1986, so none of the players on either team have childhood memories of UL-McNeese games.
Barousse, who followed his MSU career with a record-setting run as Carencro's head football coach, said that the current players' lack of background is offset by familiarity.
"UL's gone back to recruiting the local kids a lot more than they did some years in between," Barousse said. "With local kids playing on both teams, if they continue to play for a few years, it would become a rivalry like it was before. These kids from STM, Breaux Bridge, Erath, they're playing against kids they played high school ball with. It won't take it long to mean a lot to them."
It's also a sure bet that players on both sides have heard the war stories.
"We'd always have a bunch of the older UL players talking to us before the McNeese game," Prudhomme said. "That put a lot of pressure on us. But that's what rivalries do."
"It's probably more important to the guys that played back then," Barousse said. "That's where I see all the excitement. But it's good for both programs and it's good for the area. Mark my words, it'll be the biggest crowd of the year. There's a lot of UL alumni in Lake Charles and a lot of McNeese alumni in Lafayette - a lot more than you know."
"When I first heard they may play, my first thought was it's about time," Prudhomme said. "These two schools should be playing each other. I don't think the rivalry's died out even though they haven't played in football. I think it'll pick right up where it left off."
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