College Sports are People, Too

I didn't start following college sports until 2001.

Not the movie, no, that wouldn't make any sense. There were no sports in that movie, except perhaps jousting in its most rudimentary form. No, the year was 2001, and it was my final year of college. I have told this story to people I know, enough times that they are sick of it. However, in theory, only people who follow sports would be reading these words at all, and of the people I know, not a one of them like sports. Not even the one guy who works for Fox Sports.

The year was 2001, and the Southwest Conference was already dead. I was vaguely aware of the shenanigans SMU had gotten up to; point of fact, I was only vaguely aware of SMU, at all, despite attending school in the Dallas area, only 30 miles from its campus. I hated college sports and I hated college football, if for no other reasons than (a) I knew no one who followed them, save for my brother, who was a bandwagoner, and (b) I had never attended a college with a good team.

Now, some qualifications, matching the letters in the previous paragraph:

(a) My brother is a younger brother, he never attended a four-year university, only an art school. He graduated from it and is working in the industry, but as a youth he would hang out with his friends in the 1980s and early 1990s, and they would watch sports, and if you were watching college sports in those decades, you were watching the basketball programs at Duke and North Carolina absolutely obliterate anyone who would stand in their way. For reasons not altogether clear to me, my kid brother selected Duke as "his team," and (to his credit) has kept up that loyalty, unwavering, for nearly two decades. He has not ever, to my knowledge, been within twenty miles of their campus (we've driven through North Carolina as part of a family trip; I have family on both coasts).

(b) My first school was tiny little liberal arts bastion for rich Dallas kids, Austin College. I use the word "liberal" lightly. The kids were, the majority of them, a wonderfully liberal bunch, and so were a fair amount of the professors, but the people who actually ran the school, as with most institutions of learning... no, they were not liberal at all. Great school if you wanted to be a doctor or lawyer (as I did not). Terrible school, at the time, if you wished to do anything in the arts... or, bringing it back to the subject, at sports. The "stadium" for football consisted of one set of bleachers on one side of the field only. I think it sat 500 or so, I can't remember exactly and can't be bothered to check. Stadium donors specifically stated lights were not allowed to be built at the stadium, because "evenings should be spent studying, not attending sporting events." The basketball gym was similarly set up, doubling as a convocation arena for class registration, fundraisers, and other events. There was no permanent seating, only folding chairs. I'm sure there were other sports going on at the school, I don't remember anyone mentioning them; I did not care about college sports, less so NAIA sports. I had never heard the term "Division I" in my life, having heard Division 5 or I-AAAA or some damn thing in high school, and I cared even less, then. I followed the Houston Astros and the Houston Rockets, and I loved the Houston Oilers until a selfish business man stole them from my city in 1997. That was my first lesson in politics. My point, and do I have one:

Sports were indeed a part of my life, but college sports were irrelevant because I had no investment in any of them. I was a theatre major when I transferred to the University of North Texas, I was enraged from day one that the university seemed disinterested in the program at all, not wishing to help improve it, recruit people, or advertise what it was creating. And while the building WAS renovated during my time there, money continued to be poured into sports at an alarming rate: This was North Texas, for crying out loud, not UT, not A&M. We were not a football school. Students would wear UT hats and Texas Tech jerseys openly, there was no school pride at all. These people were bandwagoning a team that they'd seen do well, just like my little brother. The school was a joke.

And so at my desk, in the fall of 2000, I stuck a piece of paper on the storage cabinet over it, with a running tally of our football teams record. I had been to one college game at this point; homecoming 1997, North Texas played a tiny unknown team called Boise State. The stadium was packed. We watched as the opposing team scored two touchdowns in the first quarter; a third touchdown to open the second. My friends and I bailed. I didn't pay the team any additional attention for three years.

In that third year, as my graduation loomed, I'd had enough: I told the people in the office around me, at my on-campus job, "I'm rooting for a perfect season. We will go 0-12, the university will see this is a waste of time, and put that money into something worthwhile." We didn't do that badly (though we had come close, every year I was there), and finished something like 3-9 or 4-8. "There's always next year," I thought, as so many sports fans often do, but with a different result in their minds.

In the fall of 2001, we lost our first six games. 0-6, just like that. Bam. "This is it!" I told my uncaring, if bemused, coworkers. "This is OUR YEAR."

Especially because it was my last chance. I was graduating in December, and that would be that. Let's show the world that OUR football is the WORST football.

Then we won our final five games in a row, all against conference opponents. That left our overall record at 5-6, but our conference record at 5-1 (we had lost our first conference game, but one the final five). We had won our conference. We were going to a bowl game.

The bowl game was on Tuesday, December 18th, 2001.

My graduation day was Friday, December 14th, 2001.

My birthday was Wednesday, December 12, 2001.

That was a week, alright. "SCREW THIS," I said, telling any friends who would listen. "Let's go to that thing and see how much alcohol we can consume. We're gonna be on TELEVISION."

Only one friend went. We drank and ate excellent seafood, for four days straight. Our team lost, 45-20. It was one of the best weekends I'd ever had, and certainly THE best that wasn't related to live music, or sex, or a combination.

After I graduated, North Texas won the conference again in 2002, and went back to the same bowl game. We won. Then we kept winning the conference again, in 2003 and 2004, and I went to all four games. I had a wonderful time each time, always dragging along a coalition of both the willing and unwilling. In 2002 I was living in Los Angeles, but still made it back. In 2003-04 I was in Dallas, but went down to New Orleans anyway. North Texas, the school, got no press, but my TEAM was on television. "Look world," said the low ratings, which still numbered in the (very low) millions. "North Texas is not to be trifled with. We exist, we're not going away. And certainly not going back to I-AA, you crazy kooks."

And so I learned about UNT's place in the overall scheme. What was the Sun Belt Conference? How long had it been around? What conferences were better, worse? What WERE the other conferences, who played in them, and who had we scheduled? Who could we BEAT? I devoured the information as voraciously as I used to memorize baseball statistics in elementary school, as hungrily as I pored over movie credits in my adult years. The verdict was in: We were at the very bottom of the conference-respect-o-meter, but tops in our conference. And our basketball team was awful.

Our coach had a terrible year in 2005, and was fired not long after. They hired a new guy, who was a genius in high school but a terrible college coach (not really a surprise; that's like saying someone is a genius at checkers but terrible at chess). Our basketball team was improving. Now I was following March Madness, particularly when our team won the conference and went to the big dance. Twice.

And so is the story with most ANY major university, outside the ones that have always been household names: Texas, Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC, Florida, Georgia, etc, etc. These and the Ivy League schools, now I-AA, began what we have today, but as the population of the U.S. has grown, so have other schools grown and risen to meet them.

What the Southwest Conference was a part of, lives on... from their remnants came the Big 12, which joined with the SEC, ACC, Big East, Big Ten, and Pac-10 to form what would be the BCS, each conference winner guaranteed a national game against an equally-matched opponent. And hot on their heels were conferences made up of schools which, in the 20th century, were often just as lowly as my alma mater had been: the MAC, the WAC, Conference USA, the Mountain West, and my own Sun Belt. Sure, schools like BYU and Tulane and UTEP and Houston had made national waves in years past, but mostly it was schools that were hardly household names, outside of their own geographic areas: Boise State, New Mexico State, Central Michigan, UAB. "Who cares about them, anyway?" people thought, and often wrote, on message boards and in conversation. "Things don't change. A champion is a champion."

Well, maybe they were spoiled by pro sports, or maybe just by ignorance, but then Boise State, TCU, and Hawaii happened.

Division I-A became the FBS, and the division between they, and I-AA (now FCS) was getting wider every year. North Texas moved to the higher of the two, and immediately won 5 games its first year as a full member. By comparison, Western Kentucky won the FCS championship in 2002... their first year of FBS was 2009. They went 0-12.

Are North Texas students still frustrated by all the money going to sports? Probably. It took the student body two separate votes to approve funding for a new stadium. But, as much as I still love theatre and want to see it get support, I can't watch their productions on television from Seattle. I can, however, dial up ESPN (or ESPN360, if my ISP would get on board), and watch my old team, at my old stadium, do their best... and try and make a name for themselves. So, too, will the alums of Boise State, TCU, and Hawaii, and now SMU, Houston, UCF and Nevada. A return to glory, or glory for the first time, there are 120 FBS teams, and over twice that many in college basketball.

So if Eastern Washington gets the call... I hope they'll take it. But I love having options, and knowing that even if all ESPN is airing today is a Western Michigan vs. Toledo match-up... somewhere there's a student who went what I went through, and is hoping that maybe, just maybe, this year might be the year.

Because once you get to the FBS level, your team isn't going anywhere. They're not moving, and they're not holding anyone hostage for a new stadium.

I love football, and basketball, and baseball, but individual owners frustrate me. We all have opinions about the NCAA, but the individual universities... though money is a factor, a LOT of people are responsible for that money, and a lot of people get a vote. Passions run high enough that it's never JUST about the money, saving this from being a fascist enterprise.

It's a democratic one, or as close as we can manage.

Until kick-off. Then it's anarchy.

Or as close as we can manage.