By Teddy Allen

RUSTON -- Comparing teams and players from different eras presents a problem or two. Or a couple hundred.

Some player or coach, key to the conversation, gets left out. Some key point now hazy by time is misunderstood. Some key kneepad's left unturned.

But just because comparing is unfair doesn't mean it's not fun. Few things are more basic to the fan of sports than wondering, even arguing: Would They beat Them:, or would Them beat They?

So a question: If one of the championship teams from Louisiana Tech's early-1970s era played one of Tech's high-scoring teams of today, who would win?

As an old soul with ties to both eras, I offer the following for your Christmastime, Bowl-Season pondering. Consider it a gift.

Louisiana Tech (8-5) plays Navy (9-3) in the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl at 3:30 Friday in Amon G. Carter Stadium on the campus of TCU. That's a third-straight bowl game for the Bulldogs, a program first in the FBS era.

But it's not the first time the program has been to three bowl games in a row. The 1971-74 teams went to seven "bowl" games in four seasons, a time fondly called "The Golden Era" of Tech Football, and for good reason. Here's the resume:

1971: 9-2, Southland Conference Champs in Tech's first year in the league, NCAA College Division Midwest Regional Champions; this is two years before a College Division playoff began; 1972: 12-0, SLC champs, NCAA College Division Midwest Regional Champions again, and Co-National Champions (by the National Football Foundation); 1973: 12-1, SLC champs, Division II National Champions, making Tech the first football team to win an NCAA title on the field, something four teams are still in the running to do Jan. 9 in Tampa; 1974: 11-1, SLC champs, Division II semi-finalists.

In those four years, Tech went 6-1 in postseason. Five of those games had "bowl" titles; Tech went 4-1 in those: Pioneer Bowl, Grantland Rice Bowl, Camellia Bowl. Tech went 2-0 in its other two postseason games, labeled only as "quarterfinals" in the newly formed Division II playoffs.

That's a 44-4 record if you're scoring at home. Golden.

It's funny: Randy Crouch, who lived The Golden Era as an offensive guard and co-captained the 1974 team with Roland Harper, coached at Tech in the 1980s. Often, during a tough practice, maybe to keep egos at bay or maybe to make a point or maybe just because he could, he'd smile and say to his guys, "44-4, boys. 44-4."

Humbling? "You never could stick your chest out too far," said Karl Terrebonne, an early-80s' All-SLC receiver. "Those teams cast a long shadow."

Between 11 and six Bulldogs were All-SLC each of those years. Each postseason a Tech player was named the SLC's Offensive Player of the Year (Ken Lantrip, Roger Carr, Denny Duron, Charles "Quick 6" McDaniel). Three times a Bulldog was Defensive Player of the Year (Fred Dean in 1972, then Joe McNeely, then Fred again), and Maxie Lambright was Coach of the Year each season except '74, even though his team ran the table until the national semifinals.

They were good. And they have the hardware to prove it.

But the recent 'Dogs have a resume worth noting too: a chance to win 9 games for the third straight year; a Conference-USA MVP in quarterback Ryan Higgins; two Biletnikoff Award semi-finalists in Trent Taylor and Carlos Henderson; an average of 44 points a game; the league's Coach of the Year in Skip Holtz.

And the 'Dogs have not only won their last two bowl games, but have won them convincingly: 35-18 over Illinois of the Big 10 in the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl and 47-28 over Sun Belt champ Arkansas State in the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl.

These new pups have done what new pups do: they leave you scratching your head sometimes, but they sure are entertaining and hard not to root for.

That said, who wins? Yesterday or today?

"That's difficult to answer," said Pat Collins, a former Tech player, defensive coordinator for Tech during The Golden Era and Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer. "The game has changed so dramatically."

"Dramatically" is no exaggeration. Consider the differences through 40 years:

The old 'Dogs had 65 scholarships; there are 85 today;

Sometimes it seems there is a coach-per-player on today's teams. Collins and backfield coach E.J. Lewis were the only defensive coaches on a six-man, one-graduate-assistant staff whose team gave up just 59 points in the 1973 regular season. (That's about six points a game, and the offense averaged 26.5 a game. Solid recipe for a national championship);

If you don't count Fred Dean throwing hay bales into the back of a truck, there were no off-season training programs in the 1970s. Student-athletes worked during the off-season and summer, in construction or on oil rigs or wherever they could. After the spring game, the coaches didn't see them until August practice. A lot of players now train together, in Ruston, around their summer jobs;

Facilities are much, much nicer, and weightlifting used to be a thing the coaches required of players just so they could keep an eye on them and basically get them tired and angry. Today, teams have strength and conditioning coaches;

The schedule is longer today. More room for error, but travel can be taxing. Jump ball;

The players are, on average, bigger, stronger and faster. NFL Hall of Famer Fred Dean played at 208; one of three NFL Hall of Famers along with Terry Bradshaw and Willie Road, Fred's in every way the exception to the rule;

There is steady television coverage today, further altering scheduling; ESPN changed the world, if you really think about it. Today's players even have nutrition specialists;

Today's teams seldom huddle. The cutting-edge offenses of the 1970 averaged 55 plays a game; today's Tech averages 67. That's a dozen more chances for something to happen;

The rules, most of them favoring offense, are different. Roger Carr led Tech in receiving 1971-73 with 109 catches, total. The most he caught in a year was 40 in 1972. Trent Taylor, second in the nation in catches going into his final college game Friday, has 124 since the season opener at Arkansas. (Billy Ryckman caught an at-the-time head-spinning 77 in 1976.)

Those national championship teams were "one of the first to be a real throwing team with a lot of diversity offensively," said Collins, yet they had in their playbook only about a dozen plays -- eight runs, three passes -- that they'd go left or right with. Obviously, they knew when to call them and how to run them.

All that said, "It's still football," said Mickey Slaughter.

That said, Slaughter, a member of the ArkLaTex Hall of Champions, a former Tech (1959-62) and Denver quarterback and the offensive coordinator of Tech's Golden Age, said matter-of-factly and most accurately that "it's hard to measure, in my opinion, one team in one time span against another team in another time span."

Here's another reason that's so: Slaughter was Tech's operations guy. He'd get money in a little leather zippered pouch from Flo Miskelley, Lambright's administrative assistant, ticket manager and the athletic department's all-around fire extinguisher, and pay the hotel on the road after the team checked out, counting out 20's and 100's. This was after he'd made the travel plans, including accommodations and meals. Usually, Slaughter, Collins and Pat Patterson, who shared offensive line coaching with Wallace Martin, would drive one of three or four vans with five or six players in each to away games; the rest of the players were on the one bus Tech took to games.

Speaking of Patterson, he coached baseball in the offseason and is the state's all-time winningest college baseball coach; Martin was golf coach in the spring. Lambright was head coach and also the University's athletic director.

"It was a different day, a different time," Slaughter said. "But we were a lot like today's team in that we had some really great athletes and some really great football players."

Even practice was different. Sports Illustrated once printed that if you really wanted to see football in the South, go to Ruston on any given Tuesday in the fall. Lambright often ran 1's against 1's. "The defense didn't want us to get a first down, and we couldn't stop trying 'til we scored," said Roy Waters, one of the team's star offensive linemen. "Some days we couldn't get a first down. Might go on for maybe an hour.

"Put it this way," he said. "We had guys who liked to compete. The odds of winning 12 in a row like we did, astronomical. These guys now -- and I like what Tech's doing over here -- they're bigger, stronger...But we had good players and coaches too, and we had chemistry. It just all came together."

"We were gears in a gearbox; we just meshed," said David Wilkins, who played outside linebacker/stand-up defensive end. "We might not have gotten along so well in practice, but we sure liked playing for each other."

Carr from tiny Cotton Valley, who wasn't even on the team until Lewis saw him blurring around the track one day, hated practice and kept quitting; the team kept accepting him back. Guys like Wenford Wilborn and Larry Griffin and Dean were welcomed with open arms into what had previously been an all-white team.

"And the coaches were all-stars as much as the kids were," said Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer Keith Prince, the University's sports information director at the time. "That group was so much fun to be around. That's my favorite time in football. Everything was clicking."

"It's like Maxie said one time when he was asked who his favorite player was," said defensive back John Causey, who'd become Coach Lambright's son-in-law. "He said that in a bar fight, he'd choose Joe McNeely. On his death bed, he'd take Denny Duron.

"In other words, we had some wild and crazy people and some serious people," he said. "I had to be halfway serious just to survive because some of those guys were mean. It was just a very, very unique group of guys."

Causey led the nation in interceptions in 1972 with 10, including four one afternoon in old Arlington Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers. (The "interception" he remembers from that day is the one he dropped. "Could have had five," he said.)

"I thought I was a pretty good player," said Causey, who enjoyed a career in north Louisiana as a coach, including a few years at Tech. "But about five years after college, Fred Dean starts making All-Pro, and every Sunday on television I'm watching Pat Tilley with St. Louis, Roger Carr in Baltimore, Roland Harper with the Bears, Mike Barber with the Oilers, and they aren't just playing -- they're making All-Pro.

"My senior year I went to Baton Rouge and watched the LSU-Alabama game, and I sat in the stands and was I guess a little amazed," he said. "Don't get me wrong; those teams were good. It's just that I'm looking at the field and thinking to myself, `There's no Fred Dean out there. I don't see a Roger Carr.' I just had a feeling that if we were to play those guys, even with them at a higher level, I think we could have competed against them."

"The key to those teams was just tremendous overall talent, especially at the skill positions," said retired longtime sportswriter Nico Van Thyn, a Tech alum who watched those teams play. "Plus they were so well-coached. Slaughter was one of the country's best passing-game coaches and quarterback-wide receiver teachers, and Collins and E.J. Lewis had their defense playing so aggressively."

"Nobody was satisfied with average," said Collins.

Apples to apples and all things being equal, ponder this:

Who from the Old Dogs would cover Taylor or Carlos Henderson? Who would block Jaylon Ferguson? How DO you cover the spread offense without either breaking the rules or using 18 safeties?

Don't think that when Collins is sitting at West Monroe's Well Road McDonald's with his coffee bunch that his mind doesn't wander to that exact spot. He was always a "man the torpedoes" guy. Does he rush at least five every time, maybe six? Maybe play with one linebacker and keep five DBs out there all the time? Mix up man and zone, but no matter what, never break Lambright's rule of having somebody back in the middle of the field to give yourself a chance, whether you're rushing one or 10?

What a joy it would be to see what he and E.J. came up with.

On the other paw:

Who from today's Bulldogs would cover Carr and Tilley? And Barber? Or tackle McDaniel, who Slaughter says was "untackleable," making up a word for the hard-to-describe talent of Quick 6. Who would stop Harper on all those screens? Who would block Fred Dean? (Unfair question, because nobody could block Fred Dean, not even in the NFL.) Could anybody get open often against Causey and Griffin and Wilborn?, especially when you consider that `we had some pass rushers,' secondary coach Lewis said, `that could flat get on the quarterback."

We'll never know. Both teams bring different things to the table. Today's Bulldogs, in a completely different era, are trending in the right direction and in the conversation when the talk is of eras in the program's history that have been the most pure fun. The Golden Era teams left a resume to shoot for.

"When you're talking about the best teams in Tech history," Prince said, "start with the 71-74 teams. Pick out any of the best Tech teams you want, and those 71-74 teams are the ones you compare them with."

In Slaughter's mind, one thing can't be argued. A self-proclaimed "non-defensive purist," Slaughter loves a 55-52 game.

"A 10-7 game is not for me," he said. "I mean, the offensive ball Tech is playing now, I love it. It's just so much fun seeing the ball fly down the field and Henderson or Taylor grabs that baby and BOOM!, off they go, and then in 10 seconds they're running another play."