Towson football on an impressive run, thanks to the demanding Rob Ambrose So Ambrose, a former Towson wide receiver and straight-shooter to the core, took the Tigers outside and emptied his arsenal of running drills. Bear crawls and crab walks and log rolls, until the quitters quit and all who remained were the only men Ambrose wanted around. "He pushed us to the max, just to find out if we wanted to be on this team," senior defensive end Romale Tucker said. That's what we needed, to get the guys who weren't for the program out of here. The roster cleansed, Ambrose has since built Towson into a Football Championship Subdivision contender. On Saturday, Towson will measure itself against one of the nation's preeminent programs with a nationally televised game at Louisiana State, ranked third in the top-level Football Bowl Subdivision. Because of Rob When Ambrose took over in 2009, after seven seasons as Connecticut's offensive coordinator, he first heard that the Tigers never finished games. Towson looked like a junior varsity team when Ambrose first saw them in action. Monsters against little kids, he said. At the time, Ambrose couldn't hold his players accountable for being slower and weaker than their opponents. Instead, he set out to reverse a quitting mentality. "If you had quit in you, we ran you off," Ambrose said. There's no way I'm going to accept losing and having fun doing it. You ever seen "Moneyball"? The scene where Brad Pitt smashing the stereo? That's what losing sounds like. In Ambrose's second season, Towson lost to James Madison by just four points, not 31 like in 2009. The Tigers finished 1-10 but set the program's all-time attendance record. After the season, Ambrose told his players just how close they were to becoming a playoff team. Their eyes widened. Then, in 2011, the Tigers started winning. They overcame an 11-point deficit with 3 minutes 13 seconds left against Old Dominion, beat seventh-ranked Maine by 10 points and 12th-ranked New Hampshire by 14. Towson went 9-2 in the regular season and hosted a FCS playoff game for the first time in program history, doubling the previous attendance mark along the way. "At our team meetings in January after we won one game, you'd have thought we were perennial championship-caliber guys," said Ambrose, who was named Colonial Athletic Association coach of the year last season. I've never seen a more excited one-win team in America. These kids worked their face off. It's awesome, to see nothing become something really big.