Larry Blakeney
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"Larry Blakeney" is a former American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Troy University from 1991 to 2014, compiling a record of 178–113–1 in 24 seasons. Blakeney is only one of two coaches to have taken a college football program from Division II (NCAA)/NCAA Division II to Division I (NCAA)/NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the other being UCF Knights football/UCF's Gene McDowell.

Blakeney was the recipient of the Johnny Vaught Lifetime Achievement Award by the All-American Football Foundation in 2000. He was inducted into the Wiregrass Sports Hall of Fame in 2008 and was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame on May 30, 2009. On December 21, 2010, he received the Sun Belt Conference 10th Anniversary Most Outstanding Head Coach award.

In the spring of 2011, Troy University honored Blakeney by naming the football playing surface Larry Blakeney Field at Veterans Memorial Stadium. On August 10, 2012, Blakeney was inducted into the Troy University Sports Hall of Fame. He was part of the inaugural class along with DeMarcus Ware, Don Maestri, Chase Riddle, Bill Atkins, Sim Byrd, Denise Monroe, Vergil McKinley, Ralph Adams, Mike Turk, and Charles Oliver.

More Larry Blakeney on Wikipedia.

I might be wrong to do what I did. [But] I did it because I knew he'd be credible and accountable.

I think his first year at Florida was our last year at Auburn. And the only other time was in 1966 - when I was a sophomore at Auburn and he was a senior at Florida.

We had some guys who made plays on offense. But we had 15 or so negative plays. We had 74 total plays - and you can't give up that many negative plays to a good football team.

Those games were going to give us visibility and some extra money, for starters. From the get-go, we knew that in order to gain credibility and respectability and have the chance to shock the world, we were going to have to play with the big boys.

After his freshman year when figured out what was going on around here, he wouldn't let us have a bad practice. He played hard every day and demanded his teammates do the same. He was a force in our program.

(Lucas) was one of the best players I've ever been associated with. I told the team the other day that he was one person everybody should find out something about, so they could be like him.

It's another comedy of errors. It's something that's totally unacceptable.

I told our players that if there's a player they all wanted to be like, it was Al Lucas.

I'm worried more about Troy than I am Missouri and they're probably worried more about Missouri than they are with Troy.