Keys: SU seniors leave it all out on field

• By PERRYN KEYS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Dec 1, 2008 - Page: 1C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Let’s get one thing straight.

There’s a notion out there, a ridiculous theory, that college football players today don’t care as much as those who came before them.

If you’re still holding onto that belief, put down your Efferdent, put on your trifocals and wake up. You should have been there, on the floor of the Superdome, just moments after Southern lost the only game that seems to matter.

The Jaguars had dropped the Bayou Classic, 29-14, to a team that will probably win the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship.

They could’ve only beaten Grambling with a flawless effort, and their effort Saturday — four turnovers, 12 penalties, missed chances in all four quarters — was not flawless.

Suddenly, Southern’s senior players lost the ability to stand.

Many of them took a knee, one hand holding their helmets, the other holding their foreheads. Some of them sat on the turf, staring down at the plastic grass, trying to remember a college career that ended in a flash.

Almost all of them wept.

They had hoped for the chance to play one more time, on Dec. 13 in Birmingham, Ala., at the SWAC Championship Game. Saturday, that chance vanished.

“It just hurts so much,” senior linebacker Johnathan Malveaux said, “because with the talent we have, we should be going to Birmingham.”

Others didn’t know what else they could’ve done.

“I commend my guys. We played our guts out,” senior safety Glenn Bell said. “In the end, I can look myself in the mirror, and I’m sure all my teammates can look themselves in the mirror. And we can say, ‘You know what? We fought. We didn’t just lay down.’ ”

As for the rest of the Southern team ...