If Stephen King were asked to document Nicholls State’s 2014 football season, he might turn the project down. Too frightening for human consumption.

Only the sickest of minds could draw up what the Colonels have experienced.

Two losses of 66 points or more. A coaching change. Five of their first six games on the road. Zero sacks by the defense to counter an offense that has allowed 30 of them. And, on those decidedly rare occasions in which the Colonels have crossed the goal line, they have made 3 of 7 extra points.

Fittingly, Nicholls turned to a guy with a superhero-sounding name to try and salvage something of a season that could go from lost to something far more demented.

Interim coach Steve Axman, who began September as an unsuspecting retiree in Arizona, has been brought in for the biggest challenge of his lengthy coaching career.

“The first week was as crazy as I ever had,” said Axman, who was hired four days before Nicholls’ Sept. 20 game at North Texas. “I went out to our first practice not knowing anybody’s names, not even the coaches. Then, two periods and we have lightning. We couldn’t practice the rest of the day.”

Of course. What’s a horror film without a good lightning storm?

Axman hasn’t been a full-time coach since 2011, when he served as Idaho’s offensive coordinator. Since then he has worked a variety of odd jobs, including coaching at Simon Fraser University in Canada and volunteering for a Phoenix-area high school.

“If you got my wife on the phone she would have said I’m retired,” Axman said. “Get me on the phone, I’d say I’m out of work.”

Axman has even coached in the USFL, though his most prominent position was serving as Troy Aikman’s quarterback coach at UCLA.

He also has experience as a head coach at the Football Championship Subdivision level, leading Northern Arizona from 1990-97.

McNeese head coach Matt Viator can relate to Axman in one sense. He took over the McNeese program mid-year in 2006 and rallied the Cowboys to the playoffs. Viator was far better equipped to handle the change, though, having been in the program as an assistant since 1999.

“The situation there is a lot different from when I did it,” Viator said. “I was the offensive coordinator, so everything we ran was the same. The defensive guys stayed here, so I knew all the players. It’s never easy, but not like this. I can’t imagine having a game on Saturday and you’re trying to figure out which key opens what door. That’d be interesting, to say the least, much less trying to learn the players.”

Viator was hired on a permanent basis, obviously, while Axman knows he is simply a placeholder until the offseason. And he’s OK with that.

“When I found out it was just an interim position, I felt good about that,” Axman said. “My attitude is I’m jumping into the frying pan and let’s see how many games we can win.”

Considering everything his program has already been through, Axman knows he has to be relentlessly positive to achieve that goal.

“I’ve been working very hard to keep them positive, to encourage them,” he said. “Today we’re going to be looking at short video before practice of about 45 plays in the last game where we looked like a football team. But we’ve got to play 60 minutes, not 45 plays. But when they look at how they were successful on those plays, it’s my desire to make them realize we aren’t that bad. We can go attack people.”(Rick Hickman/American Press)