Don’t look now, but just like that LCU’s football team is touting that it has the best season winning percentage (.889) and most season wins (8) in the modern era for Louisiana Christian University, formerly known as Louisiana College. Parenthetical note: It’s still privately known as Louisiana College among many alumni, who weren’t consulted about the name change that happened out of the blue (and orange) almost two years ago.

School name changes can be bummers. NLU and USL alumni know all about that.

Nonetheless, it’s a marvel to think the little college “on the hill” in Pineville is enjoying such unprecedented football success, even if the Wildcats are doing so at the NAIA level, rather than the previous NCAA Division III level. The architect of this upsurge is 36-year-old Shreveport native, Andrew John Maddox, who answers to the name “Drew.”

A former Army cavalry scout who did two tours of duty in Iraq, Maddox inherited a football program in 2020 that had deteriorated significantly from the days when he played defensive tackle for the Wildcats under Dennis Dunn, his former Dixie Youth baseball coach in Shreveport. It had bottomed out in an even shorter time since he had risen through the assistant coaching ranks to be defensive coordinator under Justin Charles in 2017.

In the meantime, Maddox built a head coaching resume by resurrecting a high school football team at Class A Glenbrook High School in Minden over two seasons. Then he got the call to try to do the same at LCU. To make the challenge tougher, he took over on Feb. 6 in 2020 and had all of two meetings with his new team when Covid and the feds shut everything down for several months. The Cats played an abbreviated schedule in the spring of ’21, finishing 2-3 in the American Southwest Conference.

LCU then switched from NCAA Division III to NAIA, but the football team was a lone wolf in finding a conference in which to play because all the other sports teams at LCU went to the Red River Athletic Conference, where none of the schools play football. The closest NAIA football league LCU could find, said Maddox, was the Sooner Athletic Conference, which has eight other teams from Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona.

“That allowed us to get some scholarship money,” said Maddox, who doles out that money along with some academic scholarship funds to recruit players. In his first full season, the fall of ’21, his team finished 4-7 but lost four games by less than a touchdown. Last year, the Wildcats finished 7-4 for the first winning season since his senior year, 2014 (following military service), when the Wildcats went 6-4.

Now, they are 8-1, and their lone loss, by three points at Ottawa University of Arizona (OUAZ) two weeks ago, is one that haunts them because the Wildcats muffed a makeable field goal earlier in the game because of a fumble on the snap, and they fell 5 ½ inches short of a fourth-quarter first down that could likely have led to a tying field goal, forcing an overtime and decent prospects for a victory.

How did it get to this point, where a victory in two weeks at Texas Wesleyan – after an exhibition game this weekend against John Melvin — can clinch at least a share of the SAC title?

For one, Maddox made a bold and impressive hire last spring, bringing David Feaster to LCU to be the offensive coordinator. Feaster boasts an impressive 188-77 record as a high school head coach at every stop over two decades: Many, Minden, Leesville, Parkway and Glenbrook. This season, he has overseen an offense that leads all of NAIA teams in total yards (4,397), red zone scores (42), red zone touchdowns (35) and first downs (240).

“Work hard and believe in what you do,” said Maddox. “God’s been good to me. The players bought in. If players buy in, you can probably turn things around.

“I took a discipline approach,” he added. “If you don’t lift weights, you don’t practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t play. It’s built on hard work and trying to do the right thing. There are no short cuts to being good.”

Sal Palermo III, the fifth-year senior quarterback from the Denham Springs neighboring town of Watson, calls Maddox “a great leader, not just in football but in life as well. He’s a great Christian leader, he helps us be good men, and that translates to us being good football players.”

On a team blessed with several fourth- and fifth-year players, Palermo said Maddox “preached from day one that all our work will pay off. ‘If you work,’ he said, ‘things will change.’ We’re seeing that.”