You've got to respect the football team - and not because they won. I'll grant you one in the W column, especially as it's the team's first in 18 road games, is something of a novel triumph and deserves the appropriate accolades, but the reason they deserve respect is not that they won, but that they played. And so does anyone else with the courage to leave the safe, dark corners of the immobile masses and expose himself to public scrutiny.
I don't cite the football team because they are any more deserving than other student public figures, but because I made a careless mistake in editing an article about them last Friday that set me thinking. My error was the omission of "Yesterday, Hofher decided to make it 25" from Sports Editor Mike Scott's article detailing Bulls football Head Coach Jim Hofher's indecision over whether to start Joe Freedy or Randall Secky at quarterback Saturday against UConn. It was a single line, and not much of a line at that, as I have at best minimal knowledge of the intricacies of team sports, but as soon as it went to print, the words became swollen with importance.
First, my hasty mistake failed to change the story from an examination of an unresolved contest to an explanation of the how's and why's of Hofher's decision. Second, and more importantly, it resulted in the distribution of 10,000 imperfect copies of the Spectrum throughout campus, naked to public scrutiny, and a black mark, however small, in the paper's credibility box.
The public eye is a large, glaring orb, one that opens widest and most attentively when it senses even a deviation from perfection. I know this from experience. The feedback the paper receives is largely negative or self-serving, as people tend to either illuminate our mistakes or attempt to determine our coverage based on whatever very important event their organization is currently staging.
Rarely do I hear a "Good job" or, more distressingly, a "Good try." And, it seems, neither do many other of the students who perform on behalf of their peers. A professor who mentors UB athletes told me that one of his students, reflecting on the stresses of a losing season, was sorely frustrated by the fact that students simply did not attend his games. Faculty members, administrators and local community members came more frequently than UB students, who presumably are so fixated upon the W/L ratio that its tally supercedes any stirrings of school spirit.
Believe me, I know there are mistakes in the paper. Feeling their power project from flimsy newsprint the morning they print burns me in a way few people can identify with. It's failure, it's public, and it's unnecessary, because surely I am capable of injection a single line of text into a story, no matter how foreign the content is. Sometimes during the 13th or 14th hour of production, though, mistakes quietly slip past in its great grinding motion, just as sometimes clubs host boring functions and the football team fails to score a single touchdown.
But so what if they lose? They still play, and each game presents far more action than that on the court or the field. It's a massive gathering of people, a social event, and an opportunity to kill rather than propagate our accepted bent toward student apathy. And the administration gives away tons of free stuff.
Read the paper. Read it not for perfect copy, but because it's a vital means of disseminating knowledge. Read it because 15 of your peers each spend 50 to 60 hours per week churning it out, whether it's perfect or not.
Or don't. If you want to stay home, drink beer and disdain university-affiliated activities, go ahead - no one's going to miss you. But don't heap mountains of criticism on those who do perform, because we all recognize our failures, often more poignantly than our successes, without the nasty e-mails and snide comments zinged by lazy armchair quarterbacks looking to bolster their fragile egos.
