By Jim Sochor

(An oral history as told to Susanne Rockwell)

This game with Stanford will be big. The alumni believe this raises our association level in those circles. I do, too. We've been waiting for this a long time because we feel we belong there, competing with the best the same as we do in academics.

I know Stanford has been anticipating our game. I've been talking with Ted Leland, athletic director at Stanford, and he'd like to play us every other year. It's a wonderful time for UC Davis and for UC Davis alumni.

Although we're moving to Division I for all sports, football is different. We will be Division I-AA, determined by the number of scholarships we have.

For Stanford, it's I-A: basically our team will have 23 fewer scholarships than Stanford.

This chance to play the best is so exciting. You asked me what was the toughest game I ever had to prepare for. Well, every game is a challenge, but the game with University of the Pacific comes to mind. This is when they had a football team. They were a I-A school when we played them in 1986. This was a school with 60-80 full rides. We had zero scholarships. UOP had spring practices, six to eight full-time coaches and a beautiful stadium. We had one truly full-time coach.

Preparation is critical

As we prepared for the University of Pacific, we watched a film of the game they had just played with Minnesota. It was a big game for UOP, playing somebody in the Big 10. UOP beat Minnesota 24-14, so we evaluated the film in preparation for UOP, who we were playing next week.

We were saying, "Wow, UOP looks awfully good here. What do we do here?" But the more we watched the film, the more things came to light of how we could approach our offense and defense and special teams (like the kickoff team).

We put together a really wonderful game plan. On the Thursday of that week we had a dress rehearsal. We covered every detail, every substitution, every play on the game field at Toomey.

On Friday, the athletic director and I went down to UOP to speak at their luncheon. UOP had 300 people all in orange and black there. They were the boosters, the alumni and the fans, all terribly excited over their win over Minnesota. So when I spoke, I related to them how marvelous a football team they had, what a great victory they just had and how proud they must be of that football team because of how well it represented their university.

I had just read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It was the first classic book ever written on the art of war. I was well aware how important the element of surprise was in battle — and how significant it was to take a low profile about your own forces.

Even though I knew we had a very good football team, I didn't really relate that to them in particular detail. I did say I thought we would be very competitive and they would see a great football game.

The game was on Saturday. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the game was regionally telecast. When we began, we immediately took the football down the field and scored. We went into halftime with a 21-6 lead.

We immediately came out in the second half and scored 10 more points and led 31-6. This was against a team that just beaten Minnesota. Well, UOP regained their composure and returned the next kickoff for a touchdown and proceeded to take control of the game and even went ahead of us in the score.

We had programmed our team very well that year. We picked up a motto from the Oakland Raiders that said you always play hard when you are ahead and you never give up when you are behind. We actually picked this motto up in my early years of coaching — 1970 was my first year — and we picked up that motto after the first season.

In 1971, we really programmed the players with this motto in mind and came back in five different games that season to win after being behind. One of those games was the "Miracle Game" at Cal State Hayward, where we scored 16 points in the last 20 seconds of the game to win. We ended up 9-1 that year.

Back to the UOP game, we battled hard to regain the momentum and ended up winning the game 45-41 in the last minute of the game. We learned early on that much of our success was in our belief system that we could compete with the best.

Our goal in football in those years was to represent the university with the same kind of respect, dignity and quality that we saw in the schools of Medicine and Law, and the colleges of Engineering and Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, etc.

We have always sought the best student-athletes for our athletic program. And this we will always do. We were looking for the best players that we could find. Consequently we had first-round and second-round draft choices in the NFL, even without scholarships.

Our philosophy always has been, "You came first as a student and athletics is a bonus. And we want that bonus to be the best experience you will have in the university." So UC Davis has a lot of history and pride in the fact that our athletes are students first.

Academic endeavors

And the goal for the future is to maintain that philosophy. A good example of this is Elliott Vallejo who transferred from UCLA to UC Davis because he knew he would have much more opportunities to excel in engineering, which was his primary academic goal. I'd say that 99 percent of our football players go into an academic endeavor and not the NFL, and that will continue.

When we go to Stanford on the 17th it won't be about winning and losing. It will be about belonging. It will be about playing our best. It will be about rejoicing in the excitement of having the opportunity to compete with another highly academic institution on the gridiron. It will be about the association that our alumni, students, faculty and staff will have in enjoying that moment in time.

Jim Sochor was UC Davis' head football coach from 1970 to 1988 — winning 156 games — athletic director from 1989 to 91, and golf coach from 1992 to 1998. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999. Retired, he still works a quarter-time for UC Davis to help raise money for a new multi-use stadium on campus.