Marshall University Athletics
BOGACZYK: For Cato, Four Seasons Don't Seem Enough
11/27/2014 12:00:00 AM | Football
By JACK BOGACZYK
HERDZONE.COM COLUMNIST
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – He has most of Marshall’s passing records, and still has time to get the ones he doesn’t have.
Yet, for all of his many football accomplishments and high-profile play for the Herd, Rakeem Cato approaches his Senior Day game Friday at Edwards Stadium with the desire for a do-over of sorts.
"Senior Day, it’s a blessing," Cato said after the Herd’s Monday practice. "Just to run out, my second-to-last game here, it will be a fun experience. I love everything about it. I love the whole process of what’s going on here now.
"I love being a part of it. I’m just happy to get to be a part of it. I love everything here at Marshall, the fans, the excitement. I really appreciate it.
"I’m just sad I can’t play another four years here. If I could, I’d play my whole lifetime here. The acceptance, it’s a humbling experience."
As the No. 19/20 Herd (11-0, 7-0 Conference USA) entertains Western Kentucky (6-5, 3-4) at noon Friday, Cato needs only 71 passing yards to surpass Chad Pennington’s school-record 13,143 yards.
The senior from Miami already has the other primary Herd air marks. And with two touchdown passes in Marshall’s final three games, Cato will become the first Herd QB to throw for at least 30 TDs in three seasons. He’s been in the running for Camp, Maxwell, O’Brien, Manning and Unitas awards.
Yet, the record that Cato has wanted is the one Coach Doc Holliday’s Herd has strung together this season, with WKU, a C-USA title game and a bowl to play. Marshall has its second straight double-digit win season, after Cato won the Military Bowl MVP trophy to go with a victory over Maryland and cap a 10-4 year in 2013.
"Where we are now, it’s a great feeling," Cato said. "It’s everything I wanted to do since I came here, an undefeated season, a blessing. It’s a great experience to work with everybody, my teammates, the coaches, to see the transition from where we were to now. We’ve seen everybody grow, everybody becoming men.
"I hadn’t really thought about what we haven’t gotten done in the past. You can’t go back. I just want to win a championship. Me as an individual, I think this school deserves a championship year-in and year-out. That’s what we’re trying to bring right now. We want Marshall to compete with the best of the best in college football."
Maybe Holliday and his coaches really saw this coming.
Back on Feb. 2, 2011, I was in the Herd football offices in the Shewey Building working a column on National Signing Day. Marshall coaches took turns watching a fax machine crank out those NLIs, starting at 7 a.m.
Late in the morning, there was nothing yet from Miami Central High School – from Cato and his pass-catching buddy, Tommy Shuler. Holliday made a call to a coach at the school and was assured a signing ceremony had taken place.
A few minutes later, Cato’s NLI rolled off the fax. It brought the largest reaction from the Herd coaches of any signee. The way they slapped backs, cheered, spilled coffee and quit paying attention to their cell phones, you’d have thought they’d just landed a Heisman Trophy candidate.
Uh … they did.
And when Cato showed up weighing 147 pounds and could only lift 65 pounds in the Dunfee Weight Room, Holliday didn’t flinch about the guy who started the 2011 opener at West Virginia as a true freshman.
"He’s amazing," Holliday said this week of Cato. "You guys have all seen it too, you’ve watched him grow and watched him mature in those four years. The way he’s handled himself and the offense is totally different (from his freshman year, when he had an emotional bump in the road).
"He’s grown up every year, and I can’t give him enough credit and I’m proud of how far he’s come and how he’s handled himself. He’s going to walk out of here being talked about in the same terms as Chad and Byron (Leftwich), and that’s really good company.
"I knew he had skills, but for me to think, that Cato as a 150-pound freshman would come in and break every record Chad and Byron had, you would have thought I was smoking something … He’s just a really good player."
Cato will make his 47th Herd start Friday, and if he throws a scoring pass, he’ll have one of those for a 44th consecutive game, the NCAA major-college record he set a few games back. Overcoming his own emotions at times was only a small part of getting to this point, he said.
Four years ago, not everybody was on the same page in the Herd program. Some players still weren’t buying what Holliday was selling.
"It was hard to get everybody to buy in," Cato said. It was hard. Just trying to get the guys to love the game. Like when you miss a rep, you just don’t care about it. Now, if a guy misses a rep, we get down on ourselves. You really want that rep back, you really want to be great. It just goes to show how far we’ve come, how much we have grown.
"I take a lot of pride in being one of the leaders to help us get this team where we wanted. This was my goal since I walked in here. Every year, take one at a time and win every one we can. I don’t doubt myself; I don’t doubt our team; I don’t doubt our coaches.
"It’s just been fun to watch, fun to see, guys flying around, in the weight room, going to class, on the field, being early for practice, getting everybody better."
After Cato quarterbacked MU to a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl win over FIU in 2011, his sophomore season wound down to a win-and-in game for bowl eligibility at East Carolina. The Herd lost in double overtime and Cato finished the game on the bench, injured.
That game, in the star quarterback’s mind, wasn’t the turning point for Holliday’s program. The pivotal game when the Herd turned the corner came in Week 4 last season.
"I think it was the Virginia Tech game last year (a 29-21 loss in triple overtime in the driving rain at Lane Stadium)," Cato said. "That’s when we really learned what we were capable of doing. We could have won there; we should have won.
"We learned what players can make what plays, and guys had to buy in. I just felt that game we knew that talent wasn’t an issue here anymore and we could play with anybody in the country, and we just moved on from that and became a better team."
As Cato approaches his Senior Day, he might pause to think that down the road, Herd fans will think of him and teammates for their accomplishments the way they look at Pennington and his former teammates who won titles and went unbeaten in 1999.
Then, Cato is likely only thinking about Western Kentucky, the C-USA title game and what bowl the Herd could get. He’s a one-at-a-time kind of guy.
"It’s a blessing," Cato said when asked to consider his legacy as No. 12 for the Herd. "Those other guys work hard, just like me. Those guys work hard at their craft every day, come out, give their all, don’t complain about anything, just go at it.
"Compete. Live up to what you can do. Be the man, be a great teammate and then you can have a great team – overall, on and off the field."
So, if in 2024 and 2034, he’s remembered as one of the Marshall greats?
"It’s just a blessing for me," he said. "Getting back (to success) was one of my goals when I got here. It was something I wanted when I walked on campus. I wanted to help bring everything back alive and be a part of this great history here that Marshall had.
"I’m just thankful I’ve had a great group of men in my corner – our coaches and my teammates – who love football just as much as I do and have gone at it, day-in, day-out."
