Howard was actually paid $600,000 for the honor of beating UNLV.WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Not long after Mike London accepted the head coaching job at Howard University — leaving the college football big-time as a University of Maryland assistant to take over a program that had won three games in two years — he coined a phrase for his first season. “Mission Possible” would be the team’s slogan this fall, even if the mission didn’t actually seem possible.
“That’s all we talk about,” London said Sunday afternoon. “We break every huddle down with that. We break every meeting with that. People are moved by the way you make them feel.”
What feels possible for Howard suddenly looks quite a bit different than it had before this weekend began. The Bison went to UNLV as 45-point underdogs late Saturday night. They left with a 43-40 win that goes down as one of the biggest upsets in college football history.
A $100 moneyline bet on Howard to win would have paid more than $50,000. And Howard was actually paid $600,000 for the honor of beating UNLV, according to USA Today, which reported that “Howard had to arrange for its band and cheerleaders to arrive in Las Vegas by noon the day before the game to participate in various events” to receive the full guarantee. The Bison had never beaten a team in college football’s top level — now called the Bowl Subdivision — and every game against a lower-division team may not have a printed point spread. In an opening weekend that saw plenty of stupefying surprises — Maryland winning at Texas, Liberty upending Baylor — Howard’s was perhaps the most stunning.
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