There was nothing brash or brazen about Matt Sherburne’s prediction.

Bates College’s senior tight end and tri-captain didn’t walk the New York Jets’ tightrope and talk about embarrassing Trinity or Williams this fall. There was no tipping of the cap to Terrell Owens and cautioning the rest of the New England Small College Athletic Conference to melt the butter for its popcorn.

Sherburne’s tongue wasn’t writing checks the rest of his body couldn’t cash, even if he won’t be assigned a set of shoulder pads this season due to a frayed Achilles’ tendon. He simply verbalized what any self-respecting football coach would want his team to believe in its heart: That the Bobcats would, or at least could, win all eight of their games this season.

The problem is, Bates can’t win all its games. And I don’t mean simply because Trinity paid a social call to Lewiston and dealt the Bobcats a 35-14 thumping Saturday afternoon.

In the academics-first, sprawled-across-the-region NESCAC, Bates is no closer to threatening 8-0 than is Vanderbilt to being in a BCS bowl or the Pittsburgh Pirates to waving a banner that reads National League East Champions.

We’re taught in this world of Hoosiers, Field of Dreams, Rudy and the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team to dream the impossible dream. Never say never. Well, I’ll be the killjoy. Bates will never win this conference or go undefeated in my lifetime or yours.

Even officials closely connected to the Bates athletic program were snickering about Sherburne’s innocent, well-intentioned forecast in the press box prior to Saturday’s three-touchdown loss.

To catch lightning in the water bottles and upset Trinity once would be a miracle on the same plane as a bipartisan health care solution. To think it’s possible autumn-in, autumn-out is patently absurd.  

There are too many geographic, academic and historic barriers to overcome. 

Bates hasn’t basked in a winning season since the first year of Ronald Reagan’s administration. A baby born that November of 1981 would have been a senior in high school when Mark Harriman’s second team went 4-4 in 1999.

You can make the case that Harriman is one of the best recruiters and defensive minds ever to head the program. He surrounds himself with hard workers and chronic overachievers on the field and gifted assistant coaches in the booth.

But the Bobcats haven’t won more than two games in a single season since the turn of the century. They’re 22-115 over the last 17-plus seasons. 

Part of Saturday’s halftime ceremony honored alumnus Jim Wylie on the 50th anniversary of his senior season. That Bates team went 1-5-1 and was lauded in the prepared statement over the PA system for playing out the string through injuries, foul weather and a plague of locusts, or something like that.

There you have Bates football in a nutshell. Gritty. Gutty. Overcomers. Outnumbered. Often overmatched.

I’ve been told by folks who maintain a straight face that the troika of usual suspects atop the NESCAC standings — Trinity, Amherst and Williams — don’t set a slightly lower admissions standard for football players than does Bates.

Not sure I believe that, but let’s give benefit of the doubt.

If the problem isn’t ACT, GPA and SAT, it’s location, location, location. All three vaunted schools are tucked conveniently in Massachusetts and Connecticut, which sorry, much as I love my Friday nights under the lights in our little tri-county region, feature an insanely higher level of high school football.

They’re also hours closer to New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And they have the benefit of name recognition. Players go to Trinity because they weren’t promised preferred walk-on status at Boston College or Holy Cross. Players go to Bates because they never got a call from Trinity.

Let’s face it: Bates will never get a cleaner shot to land an uppercut against the heavyweights than it did this fall.

Trinity suited up nine seniors Saturday. Bates unleashed 19 of the 22 starters that walked off the field at the end of last season. And it still wasn’t close. Oh, we can rationalize a red zone turnover here, an ill-timed penalty there. The fact remains that the Bantams won by three touchdowns. They used three quarterbacks and a bottomless cadre of running backs (including a starting linebacker) in an effort not to run it up at the end.

And in the end, the gracious guests said all the right things. We beat a mature team. That team’s better than Bates has been.

Veiled compliments, at best, from a program that would get cross-eyed looks if it didn’t predict an undefeated season at the end of each training camp.

Bates speaks, believes and commits itself to all the right things. We tell kids when they’re growing up that such a strategy will guarantee them success.

Not in NESCAC football, unfortunately.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].