SNY.tv: Online Home of All Things Sports

On this Monday, Edsall is driving to the airport, to pick up Jasper Howard's family.

There's a mother whose only son would call her twice a day. There are two sisters whose big brother paid homage to them with tattoos on his chest. There's a girlfriend pregnant with Howard's child. Edsall will take them all to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, where in Sunday's dawn, he had to identify Howard's body.

"I will be doing some of the things I have to do as a head coach, which," Edsall said, stumbling a little, "won't be easy."

No part of the last two days, since Howard was stabbed on campus, has been easy. And no part of this coming week will likely be either. But the Connecticut football team will play its scheduled game Saturday at West Virginia because their starting cornerback, Edsall said, would have demanded it.

"That's the real reason," he said on the Big East coaches' weekly teleconference.

"He was a competitor, a guy who loved the game, the spirit of the game and the competition of the game. His want and his will would be for us to go out and play."

Edsall valiantly tried to sound like a football coach, volunteering a seemingly typical start-of-the-week assessment of West Virginia's "very fast, very aggressive" defense and its offense of "really a lot of great skill players." But he did that as he was just hours from taking Howard's family to meet with the attending physician in Howard's operating room and then to the UConn Medical Center, where Howard's body is.

Howard was stabbed shortly after 12:30 a.m. Sunday, when a pulled fire alarm at a university-sponsored dance sent some 300 people spilling out of the UConn student center and set off some sort of fight. Howard and another still unidentified student were stabbed. On Monday, Edsall said it was another UConn football player who held him "in his arms," and yet another tried to staunch the wound with his bare hands, until a Life Star airlift arrived.

There has been neither news nor speculation as to what prompted the fight, nor any suspects identified. Howard was 20, originally from Miami's Edison High and the first in his family to go to college. He'd played a career game in UConn's win over Louisville on Saturday and, according to the Hartford Courant, he was extremely well-liked on campus.

The UConn police do not believe the killer is a UConn student, though the Courant also reported Monday that the police department does not have a composite sketch of a suspect to release to the public either. A 21-year old Hartford man was arrested at the scene on Sunday morning, but not for any reason related to the stabbing, police said.

While the police attend to an investigation, Edsall still has a team and program to tend to. He said on Monday's call that he desperately tried to find another coach who's similarly lost a player mid-season "to maybe try to call somebody to see how he handled the situation. And I really couldn't."

He said there's no comparable experience in his own life and South Florida coach Jim Leavitt, whose Bulls faced the death of Keeley Dorsey in a 2007 off-season workout, said a guiding experience ultimately wouldn't change anything. "When I heard on Sunday, I broke," Leavitt said. "There is no way you can describe the pain you go through... there is nothing worse."

Leavitt dialed up to Storrs, just as did every single one of his other Big East coaching colleagues, Edsall said. The 11th-year coach offered public gratitude for the support and West Virginia coach Bill Stewart said that support is automatic. Sunday Stewart talked about finding a way to honor Howard Saturday and Monday, he said the two schools' administrations will have a plan in place by Tuesday.

Where nearly all the coaches on Monday's call offered their condolences to the UConn program, Stewart paid an individual homage to Howard too, saying, "All I can tell you is the way Jasper Howard played is I'm sure the way he lived his life. And that's full speed wit a lot of fire, w/ a lot of energy," he said. "He was a real joy to watch play. He played the way the game was supposed to be played."

The Huskies will sport a JH sticker on the backs of their helmets and they'll take his jersey or helmet on the road with them through the season's final six games. And somewhere along the way, Edsall is hoping those meetings and film review and game-planning will help his team -- and himself -- heal up.

"It'll be good for us to get back on the practice field tomorrow and get back to, in this tragic situation, get back to a little bit of normalcy," he said. "We have to love each other, we have to be supportive of each other and we have to hug each other. And we have to let everyone grieve in the way that they feel comfortable... I think as time goes on, time heals wounds and I think that's exactly what's going to happen."