Less than a week from now, UC football will play in the Military Bowl. A ranking in the season-ending Top 25 probably awaits, should the Bearcats knock off Virginia Tech, while they also would reach the 11-win threshold for only the third time in program history.

Both previous seasons of 11 and 12 wins, respectively, have come in the last decade, along with other historically remarkable accomplishments such as appearances in the Sugar and Orange Bowls. Prior to 2007, UC had played 119 seasons of football, and been ranked nationally in the AP football poll a total of five weeks. Since 2007, they have spent 40 weeks among the AP’s Top 25, including finishing four seasons among the nation’s ranked teams.

Engineering long-term success for a football program is a goal built on literally thousands of decisions. But a few stand out as most determinative of all, and very few were larger than those made 15 years ago in 2003.

Director of Athletics Bob Goin had made bold choices to put UC in position as an attractive candidate for BCS-level conferences, and on Nov. 4, 2003, his gambit paid off with an invitation to join the BIG EAST Conference. A brand new horizon of possibilities were open for UC football, but the Bearcats were also in the midst of limping to the finish line of one of the most underperforming seasons during the 10 years that Rick Minter had been leading the program.

Three days after a loss to Louisville in Nippert Stadium gave UC a final record of 5-7, Goin announced on Dec. 1, 2003, that UC was going to make a coaching change.

“Bob did the right thing at the end of the day,” says Brian Teter, who had come earlier that year from his role as associate commissioner of Conference USA to serve as associate athletic director at UC under Goin. “(Rick Minter) had been at UC for a number of seasons at that point, and Bob believed we couldn’t get to the next level and be any kind of factor in the BIG EAST unless we made a change.”

Gino Guidugli was in his junior season and UC’s quarterback in 2003. Now back as UC’s quarterback coach on the current staff, he remains appreciative of playing for Minter, but says he also enjoyed the one season of coaching he had from Mark Dantonio in his senior season.

And just like everyone else who has a passion for UC football, he was amazed by both the level of success that came next and how quickly it happened. Gino’s younger brother, Ben, was a starter at tight end on the BIG EAST championship squads in 2008 and ’09, which remain the only previous UC teams to top the 11-win mark.

“I was geeked!” he says, laughing, when asked if he enjoyed the experience vicariously. “My brother was on those teams, and I was in and out of football at that time, so I was able to go to the West Virginia game, I was at the Pitt game when they won the BIG EAST championship, and I got a chance to be here the year before when they beat Syracuse and everyone was throwing oranges around. I was just so proud as an alum of the program and so proud of my brother, and to see the rise of the program to that level.”

You have to think it was similar to how his younger brother felt when Gino came within one play of upsetting the 2002 national champs in front of the biggest crowd to ever see a sporting event in Cincinnati. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

To fully find perspective, you have to go back even further back than 2003. In 1993, Tim Murphy had finally dug UC out of college football’s basement and posted an 8-3 record, the first winning season in a decade. Murphy left to take the Harvard job in his hometown of Boston, and in one of those moments of pivotal decision-making, UC had to find a new head coach to continue the momentum.

Teter, who was at Miami at the time as Sports Information Director, says then-UC Director of Athletics Rick Taylor narrowed the search down to three candidates for consideration by UC leadership. Minter, who at the time was Lou Holtz’s defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, was obviously one. The other two? They would be, at the time, the head coach at Youngstown State and the defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns – otherwise known as Jim Tressel and Nick Saban.

That certainly falls under the heading of a determinative decision for your football program.

Now, of course, there’s no way to project the millions of alternate histories that would have been possible had UC decided to go with one of the two other choices. Some of them, in fact, would have to be worse, as Minter did have success in pushing the program forward in certain ways.

You have to think UC would have been lucky to hang on to Saban for more than 2-3 years, and perhaps you could have had Tressel for a slightly longer run – he was winning his second Division I-AA national title for Youngstown in 1993, but stayed on as the Penguins’ coach for another seven seasons before being hired by Ohio State. Would they have put UC on a faster track to success? There’s simply no way to know.

Minter’s 10-year tenure was an up-and-down affair, a fact evidenced by his status as both the winningest coach in UC history and the coach who lost more games than any other. Highlights included an eight-win year and a victory in UC’s first bowl game in 46 years, the 1997 Humanitarian Bowl, along with a penchant for developing strong defenses and producing some memorable victories over bigger names. His 1999 Bearcat team upset No. 9-ranked Wisconsin with Heisman Trophy winner Ron Dayne, but then could manage only one more win in their remaining eight games.

And then there were the events of Sept. 21, 2002, a day which in retrospect has to be viewed as one of the most karmic in all of UC football history. If you had been blessed with a crystal ball to see the future of UC football’s fortunes, specters who would loom large hung all across the playing field at Paul Brown Stadium.

UC hosted Ohio State that day and failed to upset that season’s national champion only because of two dropped passes in the end zone in the closing minute of play. OSU escaped with a 23-19 victory.

Gino Guidugli, the future UC quarterback coach, threw for 324 yards in moving the Bearcats up and down the field against the defense of Mark Dantonio. No one could know it at the time, but within 15 months, Dantonio would cross the field to become UC’s next head coach. The Buckeyes themselves were coached by Tressel, the former UC coaching finalist. And also scrambling to help OSU avoid the upset was Tressel’s newly hired special teams coach, a young Buckeye alum named Luke Fickell. ’Nuff said there.

On UC ‘s sideline was Minter, and who knows how it might have changed the dynamics in 2003 decision-making if his team had managed to pull off the biggest upset in program history that day in 2002?

“Would that have changed the course of history?” wonders Teter in regards to the coaches. “Sometimes things are just meant to be. What happened that day changed the fortunes of at least two or three programs.”

Which brings us back to the topic of determinative decisions. Teter believes inconsistency with UC’s teams over the long run troubled Goin, who was the athletic director for Minter’s last seven seasons at UC.

The week following the OSU game, UC won at Temple (the same day Bob Huggins suffered his heart attack in the Pittsburgh airport.) But then they lost three in a row to Miami, Tulane and Southern Miss to fall to 2-5. The Bearcats salvaged the 2002 season somewhat by winning five of their final six regular-season games – the only blemish was the controversial one-point loss at Hawaii that ended with a huge on-field brawl – but then they dropped the New Orleans Bowl by losing to North Texas, finishing up with a 7-7 record.

With Guidugli back as the preseason all-conference quarterback, UC in 2003 was predicted to finish fourth out of the 11 teams in Conference USA. The season started with great promise – a 3-0 start, which included a road victory over West Virginia, but then came a loss at Miami in the final head-to-head meeting between Guidugli and Miami’s Ben Roethlisberger, and things went downhill quickly. UC won only two more times the rest of the year -- beating by four points an Army team that ended the year winless and then a 31-24 victory over Div. I-AA Rhode Island.

Guidugli says that no one on the team quite knew what to expect as the season ended. They went into the finale with Louisville owning a 5-6 record and with the players focused on winning to get bowl eligible.

“I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Coach Minter,” Guidugli says when asked if the players were surprised by the coaching move. Gino felt that inexperience in the receiving corps from graduation the previous year and at other spots contributed to the 2003 struggles, which was the only losing season for any team he quarterbacked in high school or college.

“He recruited me here and he gave me an opportunity to come in and put the ball in my hands as a true freshman quarterback, and I’ll be forever grateful,” says Guidugli. At the same time, he says he recognizes why Bob Goin decided to act when he did, in terms of gearing up for the best chance for success quickly at the BCS level.

Teter headed Goin’s search committee for a new coach, and with the potential that was arriving with a new conference affiliation and the commitment shown by the Varsity Village project, he says there was significant interest in the job in the coaching world. He recalls around 10 guys being seriously considered in the coaching pool, and mentions names like Bob Davie, Frank Solich, Jimbo Fisher and John Harbaugh (both former Minter assistants), as well as Rob Chudzinski, the young offensive coordinator for the Miami Hurricanes when they had won the national title two years before.

One name that wasn’t initially near the top of the list was Mark Dantonio. And then on the first day of the search, Teter’s phone rang.

“A guy I didn’t know whose name was Joe Malmisur called me out of the blue and said he had been around Youngstown State for a long time and that he was tight with Jim Tressel,” Teter recalls. Malmisur had in fact been YSU’s athletic director for 11 years and in 2003 was heading up their booster organization. “He told me the first guy Tressel hired when he got the Youngstown State job was Mark Dantonio, and the first hire he made when he went to Ohio State was Dantonio. He said, ‘You guys need to look at this guy.’ “

Teter believes Goin’s inclination was to look for a coach who could put a lot of points on the board. But things went great from the first conversations they had with Dantonio, Teter recalls, and soon Goin began to think he was the right guy for the job. They liked his down-to-earth demeanor and that he had so much experience winning while coaching in Ohio.

On Dec. 23, 2003, Dantonio was introduced in a press conference/pep rally at the Kingsgate Marriott as UC’s next head coach.

“I think Bob Goin made the move when he did to kind of set Coach Dantonio up, because he knew that after that first year, it was probably going to be a bit of a rebuild,” Guidugli says. “He was great, though. Mark Dantonio came in and he might have been the best coach I ever played for in taking time to get to know his players and what they thought. He was a player’s coach and he bred a little toughness into our program.”

As a first-time head coach, Dantonio had a bit of a transition in 2004, even with Guidugli as a fourth-year starter and a solid defensive core group to work with. They opened, fittingly enough, at Ohio State and lost 27-6, but they beat Miami finally and later in the season went on a four-game winning tear, which included hammering No. 21-ranked Southern Miss on the road, 52-24. With Guidugli out with an injury, they got hammered themselves in the season finale at Louisville. They rebounded, though, with a convincing win in the Fort Worth Bowl over Marshall to finish with a 7-5 record.

The dip that Goin saw coming did arrive in 2005, with a rough 4-7 debut in the BIG EAST. But Dantonio and his staff were working diligently on recruiting and player development, and by 2006, they won six of their final eight games -- punctuated by routing unbeaten and No. 7-ranked Rutgers, 30-11 – and finished 7-5 and above .500 in BIG EAST play at 4-3.

Dantonio left for the Michigan State job two days after the regular-season finale, with Brian Kelly being hired in time to coach UC to victory in the International Bowl over Western Michigan and the rest, as they say, is all history.

Most of it hinged on the determinative decisions Bob Goin made 15 years ago this month.

“It was unbelievable, really,” Guidugli says. “I think it was important to have a guy like Bob Goin, who would push to take the program to the next level, and was constantly pushing to get us in a bigger conference, and giving the kids in this program the opportunity to do that. It’s opened avenues now where people can’t recruit against you by saying ‘You can’t do this there’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ He had the vision and the persistence.”

“It changed the trajectory of the Cincinnati program,” Teter concludes. “You get Mark Dantonio, and then Brian Kelly and Butch Jones who kept winning. Who would have ever thought Cincinnati football would be in that position?”