College Football. It is a game full of tradition, pageantry, moments of extreme joy and disappointment, as well as intense rivalries. Any good description of collegiate pigskin competition is nothing without a mention of rioting fans. This past weekend, from Hawaii and California to Ohio and the Carolinas, college students celebrated their football team’s big win by tearing down goalposts, rushing the field and causing overall mayhem. While in some cases it did get out of hand, with people hurt and arrested, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must feel like to rush the field after your school, your team, just pulled off a big victory.
Kids from Ohio State, Miami and Washington State all know what that feels like. They understand the intensity of college football, and for them, every game is a grand event, with food, festivities and plenty of fun. When I see these fellow college students participating in displays of school pride and so forth, all in the name of football, I can’t help but feel envious. When I see the fans rush the field and the excited looks on the players’ faces after a huge win, a small part of me shares in their joy and their purity of emotion. But as soon as I turn back for another look at college football, it is as if I’m watching my best friend run off with the girl of my dreams. I’m angry, frustrated and wondering how this could have happened. I wonder, ‘Why couldn’t that be me?’
I’ll never completely fathom the fervor of a rivalry such as Harvard-Yale or Ohio State-Michigan; I can only hope to capture some small sample of that passionate fan response through my observation of it, if only vicariously. Since we don’t have football at BU anymore, I’m left with a hole, a gap in my life, a space to be filled by other activities. But is that indeed the case? Does a breach in my life even exist, since I’ve never been at BU when it did have a team?
Most of the time when I tell someone where I go to school, I get one of two responses. Either, ‘Wow, good for you. That’s a great school,’ or ‘Wow, that’s too bad for you. What’s it like not to have a football team?’
Football has been gone from Nickerson Field five years now, and since I’ve never experience it firsthand and am only armed with the knowledge that we once had the sport, I find it almost impossible to answer that question that I often get asked. What is it like not to have a football team at a Division I college, no less?
Lately I find myself awake at night pondering that question that is so hard for me to answer. Visions of Buff Donelli, Tom Masella, Harry Agganis, Robert Dougherty and Brad Costello wobble through my brain like a poorly thrown football. You may ask what two coaches, two quarterbacks and an All-American punter have to do with all this, but to me, they’re my only connection to BU football. What I’ve experienced of Terrier football exists only in the history books, old newspapers and media guides of a bygone time.
As far as I know and will ever know it, BU football is dead, never to return and never to exist in living color again. Frankly I’m not sure whether I should be angry or apathetic. Should I miss something that I’ve never known, or would I just be guilty of misplacing my emotions?
So when I try to answer the question of what it feels like to not have a football team, I find myself saying it’s not so bad. After all, I’ve never been at BU when we had a team, so I don’t know what I’m missing. But after that canned phrase comes out my mouth, my heart starts to beat with a deep rhythm of lost possibilities, and terminated futures. I wonder, ‘What if?’
Oh, what if there still was a team here at BU? If only for a moment we all had a chance to catch the sweet smell of barbecue chicken wafting down Babcock Street as tailgaters readied for another gridiron contest. Or if we got to be in the stands with Nickerson field packed to the brim, as a sea of scarlet and white greeted our team as they took to their positions. If it gets quiet enough, I can actually hear the roar of the crowd on that opening kickoff; but then again, it’s only the roar of the crowd as I have imagined it.
That will never be something I get to experience at BU, and it is a shame because in a way it was too easy for BU to cancel football. It was way too simple for the university to cut the program, and that’s the real sad part. Back in 1997 when the program got the ax, the team had lost 25 of their last 27 games, average attendance was under 2,000 a game and because of all that, it made the team more difficult to support financially. Yes, the university is to blame for taking the easy way out in quickly cutting the program, instead of remaining patient and exploring other options in order to save what was then a 91-year tradition. And while there were fans who were outraged and many others upset about the cutting of BU football, the university was never challenged enough in their decision. They were never made to feel bad about their choice. The support or lack thereof from fans made it all too easy for BU to cut its team.
In 1961, then-BU president Harold Case was considering cutting football. About 1,000 people protested this by marching by Case’s office, and the president announced he would not cut the team since he was so pleased to see the students take it upon themselves to save it. Where, I ask, was that kind of response five years ago? There was no great concern over the loss of football, and that apathy is something that still exists, now developed into a much broader problem today at this fine institution.
If polled, more than half the students here would tell you they could care less that we are without a football team. And it doesn’t stop there. These are the same people who don’t support any sports at all. They miss the soccer games, the basketball games and even the hockey games, and it is too bad to see. Yeah, maybe these people just aren’t sports fans, but I find it hard to believe that at a university of our size, there are so many people who ‘just aren’t sports fans.’
Maybe our reputation as a hockey school has hurt us. Maybe it makes it easier for people to neglect the other sports. It shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to stay that way. I’ve learned from the football situation that anything without fan support will soon begin to crumble, no matter how sacred it is. So for those of you who consider yourselves supporters of Terrier athletics, but never find the chance to attend a single game, get off your butts and change that. You’ll find that when anything you love is neglected, it will soon depart. So don’t neglect the sports we do have, because we have some great ones. You’ll be thankful for it, and I’ll be thankful for it as well.
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