The Rail Rivalry Is No More

Or at least not recently in men’s basketball as ETSU has dominated Chattanooga.

Marky Billson, Tri-Cities based sports talk show host

With East Tennessee State drawing Chattanooga in the first round of the Southern Conference Tournament, it is time to ask what the rivalry is anymore.

More times than not in their Southern Conference histories, Chattanooga represented the team ETSU wanted to be or had to beat to win the league title.

Twelve times Chattanooga has won the Southern Conference Tournament. ETSU has won it seven times. And though one may be quick to point out ETSU wasn’t in the Southern Conference two of the times the Mocs won it, there was even the wondering of how the Bucs would have done against their old rivals, or the schadenfreude Buccaneers fans felt when Chattanooga lost 103–47 to Connecticut 10 years ago in the NCAA Tournament.

ETSU used to have a call-in radio show after their games.

The problem was nobody called in with one exception; when the Bucs beat Chattanooga in 2006. Then everyone wanted to celebrate.

But nobody is jacked up for the first round Southern Conference basketball game against Chattanooga. It’s more of a formality than anything else.

The real challenge, ETSU fans figure, will be the test to see if the third time is the charm against 22nd ranked Wofford in the semifinals.

Such things happen when a 23–7 team plays a 12–19 team. The Mocs haven’t been a factor in Southern Conference basketball since collapsing at the end of their season in 2017.

Frankly, it’s shocking the rivalry between the Bucs and Mocs has fallen so far so fast. But then it’s shocking how far the Mocs have fallen.

Now playing at SMU, Nat Dixon’s pose here seems to represent Chattanooga’s recent basketball position.

Maybe it was former athletic director David Blackburn campaigning for the Tennessee AD position when he was still at Chattanooga. Sure, the budgets are bigger, but it created an atmosphere of the grass was greener on the other side of the Mocs fence even as Chattanooga was beating Tennessee in basketball.

Maybe it was, as Chattanooga Times Free Press columnist Mark Weidmer wrote last year, “the mess that former coach Matt McCall left this program in” or the fact head coach Lamont Paris decided to rebuild the Mocs the Carl Torbush way with four-year players instead of the Steve Forbes way with transfers when Paris inherited a team without any returning starters.

ETSU head men’s basketball coach Steve Forbes’ biggest challenge is that he doesn’t look beyond the Mocs on Saturday.

Whatever the reason, the Mocs have lost 42 games the last two seasons, the most in a two-year span in school history.

The real threat for ETSU on Saturday against Chattanooga is complacency. Once upon a time, when ETSU was in a stretch of back to back 7–20 seasons a generation ago, ETSU beat a Chattanooga team on their way to the Sweet 16 because the Mocs overlooked the Bucs.

That’s basically the hope here.

There will always be geography, as both ETSU and Chattanooga are in east Tennessee, but in reality it’s 217 miles from Johnson City to Chattanooga but only 128 to Spartanburg and 170 to Greensboro.

History? Fine. Georgetown and St. John’s was once a great rivalry. Today? Not so much, even with Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin coaching the respective teams.

The “Rail Rivalry,” as it is now called in football thanks to a marketing campaign by ETSU athletics, threatens to go the same way in basketball as the Hoyas and Red Storm unless Chattanooga can become more competitive.

Which hopefully can happen soon. True, an upset by the Mocs on Saturday would seem as little more than an aberration, though it would prevent ETSU from winning their school-record 100th game in four seasons.

But a stronger Chattanooga means a stronger Southern Conference. And that’s good for all of the members of the league.

Paris has received mostly positive coverage from the media, but results like the 77–59 loss suffered to ETSU in last season’s SoCon Tourney seem more the norm than the exception.

ETSU has defeated Chattanooga seven straight times. The last time the Mocs won was a memorable 73–67 victory in the 2016 Southern Conference Final.

But it seems so distant. No ETSU player has ever tasted defeat at the hands of the Mocs, and no Chattanooga player has ever defeated the Bucs.

And even if Paris’ rebuilding effort is successful, with all of the starters returning at ETSU next season, it seems the next time Chattanooga beats ETSU on the hardwood will be in the distant future.

Marky Billson is a Tri-Cities based sports talk show host. His show can be seen here live 12–2 p.m. ET weekdays or archived.