Last year, before Mike Haywood coached a game at Miami (Ohio), he was having dinner at the house of Tammy Walker, the wife of late Northwestern coach Randy Walker. After dinner, Walker’s son, Jaime, took Haywood into his father’s study and showed him a ball.

“He said, ‘Coach, this is the ball from my dad’s first win and I want you to know that we only won two games that year,’” Haywood recalled. “’But we turned the program around because we went out and recruited speed.’ And then he said to me, ‘I want you to know that if you win two games, you’ll be lucky.’

“I left the house thinking, he must be kidding me.”

But early on, Haywood started to understand the mountain he had to climb to make the RedHawks competitive in the Mid-American Conference.

After the first workout, Haywood was informed that more than half of the team didn’t pass the fitness drills. Other players started dropping off the squad because they didn’t agree with Haywood’s philosophies or didn’t want to work hard.

The RedHawks finished the season 1-11, but during that process, Haywood started to see the cream rise to the top. Players such as freshman quarterback Zac Dysert started to become a player Haywood could build a solid team around. Dysert, who really took the reins of the team during the fourth game of the season, asserted himself as one of the top passing quarterbacks in the conference. He finished the season completing 61 percent of his passes for 2,611 and 12 touchdowns. He also rushed for 258 yards and five scores. Haywood’s only concern was Dysert’s 16 interceptions, which were mostly because of his inexperience.

“Once we made the transition at quarterback and realized what we had at quarterback, he started to become a leader,” Haywood said of Dysert. “He was a leader by example and a vocal leader and the players started to follow. So, as we started looking at our recruiting board from an offensive standpoint, we started looking at the players we have to get to fit this puzzle so that we can support him.”

Haywood said he’s also looking to change the RedHawks' offensive scheme to a more balanced attack. The team was too reliant on Dysert to make the plays. He threw the ball more than 40 times in five of his nine starts and didn’t throw fewer than 30 passes during those starts.

“This is a quarterback conference, and usually the team that has the best quarterback wins the conference,” Haywood said. “I was talking about the one thing OU [Ohio] and Temple do that nobody else does in this conference; they run the football. Everybody else in this conference wants to spread you out and try to throw on you. I think that Temple and OU do the best job at running the football and lining up and playing solid defense.

“We’re going to try to do some of the same things. We’re getting those players in position where we can go out and compete for a title now.”

Haywood doesn’t have a timeline for his team’s transition, though he said he started to see signs of change as the year progressed. Two of the team’s final four losses were by five points or fewer, and the RedHawks took Temple to the brink of their first conference loss at the time, before the Owls hit a last-second field goal.

“There’s been progress,” Haywood said. “One of the first things I had to deal with when I got here was kids saying that it was too hard. Well, if they think it’s too hard now, they have no idea where it’s about to go.”