Doug Martin needs a hug.

There he sat during Saturday’s press conference; his face pale, his hat still dripping, his team having just lost its fifth in a row. Kent State’s coach looked like he needed a bowl of hot soup and a warm shower. Instead, he got a manilla-colored room and reporters bombarding him with questions.

Did you expect your job to be this hard? Is this where you thought your team would be right now?

The cynical questions were all greeted with Martin’s attempt at being polite. He tried to put on a smile and look confident while answering them, but it wasn’t working. He looked tired and shell shocked.

“Yes, this is about exactly where I thought this team would be,” he said.

Another question.

“We’re on a journey right now. We are gonna have a good football program here.”

Another question and he finally had enough.

“This school has a losing mentality right now,” Martin said as he stared directly at the reporters who had been bombarding him. “And I will out-stubborn it. I will out-stubborn everybody to make this program better. And we will get there.”

With that he got up and left without a word.

This is what life is like when you’re not winning. Everybody is against you and nobody believes you.

It has been said sports are 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.

Never has that been more true than in scenarios like this.

Take teams like Kent State, Buffalo and Temple; these are college programs. The athletes who play there are all good enough to compete at the college level just like every other program.

Sure, players at Ohio State may have more talent, but in the MAC, the playing field is much more level. There are no top draft picks. It’s a conference of blue-chip athletes.

So why do these teams always lose?

Is it recruiting? Is it bad luck? Or is it just ingrained into those players, even before they go there, that theirs is a losing school?

Martin talked in the press conference about how NIU and coach Joe Novak have been inspirations for him.

While fans enjoy the Huskies current success, they forget how bad NIU was in the 1990s.

The Huskies enjoyed one winning season; a 6-5 season in 1990. And in Novak’s first three seasons, he won three games.

But Novak did the impossible. He took a program bent on losing and turned it into a winner. This is the task facing Martin and many other MAC coaches; change a school’s mentality or receive your walking papers.

Hopefully Martin will get a chance to do what Novak did. Having listened to him and watched him coach, I do believe Martin can do what he says.

But as they exited the press conference, the two reporters who had been asking all the questions weren’t as optimistic.

“Do you think he’s gonna do it?” One asked with a small sense of hope.

The other just laughed and shook his head.

This is why it’s so hard to change a mentality. It’s easy to cheer a winner, but hard to cheer a loser.

It was a very sad thing to watch.

If Martin is to turn his program around, he’s going to have plenty of days like Saturday to come. But the main thing is he honestly believes he can do it.

For Martin’s sake, I hope somebody else in Kent, Ohio believes he can, too.