My friend Jason woke up at 7 a.m. Saturday morning and began to apply blue and yellow paint to his upper torso. He is a drummer, rock band, not marching. Knowing some musicians, perhaps that simple phrase is enough to explain his behavior.
But no, Saturday morning had nothing to do with music, or losing a bet, or some crazy acid trip. Jason attends Michigan University and Saturday afternoon he and his friends were going to sit in row 100-something to watch their Wolverines take on Washington.
Jason spends $90 (a student price) on his Wolverines season tickets. It's his favorite thing about college. This impresses me, since Jason was born without a shred of athletic ability. He never played football. In fact, he couldn't play anything. He seldom managed to ride his bike down the street to my house without some sort of freak injury occurring (parked car, struck by a bird, etc.). He was the kid whose mother never allowed him to do anything without the proper protective equipment-all the protective equipment.
Jason is the last guy I would expect from my group of childhood friends to be painting his body blue and yellow on a Saturday morning. So why does he do it? Because when he got to Michigan, that was the thing to do. That's how you fit in; it's en vogue to be a loyal supporter of the Wolverines.
Here in Buffalo, it's en vogue to mock the football team during your hour-long break from class in the Student Union.
Many students already resent the fact that the football players receive scholarships to this university while they need three student loans and a "gift" from the Mafia to be here. They say, especially in my major (engineering), that UB should sack football and use the money to hire some teachers who actually give a damn, teachers who don't teach using 40-year-old overhead projector laminations to convey cutting-edge material.teachers who speak English.
Sadly, the team did nothing Thursday night that's going to change the situation. In fact, they may have made it worse.
UB lost to Division I-AA Lehigh. They didn't just lose, they were soundly defeated. The game was not nearly as close as the 37-26 score would indicate. Lehigh picked apart the UB defense to the tune of 508 total yards while the Bulls managed just 265 and put together only one sustained offensive drive (a Lehigh fumble on their own 15-yard line and a punt return accounted for Buffalo's other two touchdowns).
Know what they don't have at Lehigh that they do have at UB? Football scholarships. Yep, the Bulls were defeated by a bunch of guys who play football just to play.
So Thursday was an all-time low. The Bulls lost to a "minor league" team. In all of college football, only one other Division I-A team fell to a Division I-AA school on opening night: Rutgers (ironically Buffalo's opponent this week). In fact, every other Mid-American Conference team that faced a Division I-AA team last weekend blew them out of the stadium. The combined score from Thursday and Saturday's action was MAC 277, Division I-AA 104.
Another crop of freshman fans has been lost. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and the Bulls' first impression was lousy, and even boring at times. For the returning students, Thursday was just more ammo for the arsenal of mockery. Come October, the stands on the east side of UB Stadium will be empty again as students find other forms of entertainment.
I can't blame them.
Ah, a twist. I bet you were thinking that this was going to be another corny "Go to the game" piece or a "We lost, but it's OK 'cause we tried hard" type of article.
The truth is that it's not OK.
I know that Lehigh is a good football team, one of the best in Division I-AA. It's still not OK. I know that the Bulls are a very young team. It's still not OK. It's never OK to lose like that on your own home field in your opener in front of over 21,000 people to a team that does not give scholarships.
Jason e-mailed me Saturday night and asked if I had watched the Wolverines win on a last second field goal over Washington. "Did you see us beat Washington?" he wrote. The key word being "us," as if he plays on the team.starting linebacker, a 5' 5" 140 pound senior from Buffalo, N.Y. . (sorry, I drifted).
Oddly, I heard phrases like that here on Friday. Some of my friends used the phrase "WE were terrible Thursday," instead of "THEY were terrible Thursday". My God, it could be progress after all.
The Bulls will get better; there are 12 games in a season, not one. They, however, will not have the chance to play in front of 21,000 people at home until next year's opener. Thursday night UB didn't show their true colors, and they shouldn't expect any fans to be wearing their colors until they do.
