Football Game 4, 9/27 at 4 at Central Connecticut on 920 AM

[TruePoint]

Basketball is already here. We are talking about swapping out football for hockey, and what you'd stand to lose in that deal. Basketball isn't part of that discussion.

Basketball and football are the two classic college sports. They've been playing college football for 125 years. How long have they been playing college hockey? Six or seven years? Let's be reasonable about this.

[RhowdyRam02]

I didn't say that college football is vital economically for the school. It is vital for the community at a university. Getting students and alumni together to walk through campus during autumn - being able to hear the band playing and the sounds of pads and helmets colliding and crowds roaring and smell the grills burning and the feel of red and orange leaves crunching under your feet on your way to the stadium? Yeah, that is college. Hockey is a sport of minivans and predawn practices and horrible echoing sounds. More people would pay attention to a FCS football team that was in the top-25 more than they would a hockey team in the top-25, because more people like football. Hockey might be more popular here relative to other places, but it is still a distant fourth among the four majors. That is just the way it is.

And you just proved my point. Football is so vital to the URI experience that you have no clue what the members of the conference did just last year, including our number 2 and 3 rivals in the sport. In your list of the great things about college football you don't even mention winning. If you and people like you want to have a BBQ in the fall, great, but it's not URI's job to spend millions upon millions for a division 2 sport that's not viable here so you have a place to hold your cookout. Have it at your house. Meanwhile I'll hope they come to their senses and decide to either spend the necessary money to bring this program to an acceptable level or swap it out for a division 1 sport that we already have the proper facilities for with a better chance of being successful.

[STC]

Enough with the hockey crap already. That article posted in the other thread about alums wanting to explore hockey is much ado about nothing. Bjorn essentially shoots down the idea as outlined in his quotes. Not to mention, URI has enough floundering programs to fix before we add another to the mix.

Great, alumni's want to explore hockey at URI like I want to explore Mila Kunis, doesn't mean it has any chance of happening just because some puckhead writes an article on it.

Let's fix football!!!!

[TruePoint]

I didn't say that college football is vital economically for the school. It is vital for the community at a university. Getting students and alumni together to walk through campus during autumn - being able to hear the band playing and the sounds of pads and helmets colliding and crowds roaring and smell the grills burning and the feel of red and orange leaves crunching under your feet on your way to the stadium? Yeah, that is college. Hockey is a sport of minivans and predawn practices and horrible echoing sounds. More people would pay attention to a FCS football team that was in the top-25 more than they would a hockey team in the top-25, because more people like football. Hockey might be more popular here relative to other places, but it is still a distant fourth among the four majors. That is just the way it is.

And you just proved my point. Football is so vital to the URI experience that you have no clue what the members of the conference did just last year, including our number 2 and 3 rivals in the sport. In your list of the great things about college football you don't even mention winning. If you and people like you want to have a BBQ in the fall, great, but it's not URI's job to spend millions upon millions for a division 2 sport that's not viable here so you have a place to hold your cookout. Have it at your house. Meanwhile I'll hope they come to their senses and decide to either spend the necessary money to bring this program to an acceptable level or swap it out for a division 1 sport that we already have the proper facilities for with a better chance of being successful.

This makes no sense for the following reasons:

1. I do follow the FCS a bit, but I'm not going to list who did what because it is meaningless. Anyone with a google machine can do that in 10 seconds so it would prove nothing. Anyways, it is besides the point. Do you think anyone but the biggest hockey nuts can name ONE team that played in whatever the NCAA hockey tournament is called? No, of course not. My point remains that if URI was good at football, plenty of people around here would follow it closely.

2. I did not mention winning because there is the same goal for every sport. The goal of swimming is to win, too. How would that differentiate football?

3. URI should not spend money so some fans can have a barbeque; that obviously wasn't the point I was making. Shameful use of rhetorical device.

4. URI football does NOT get a pass from me. I have been as critical as anyone of the university for allowing the football team to become such an embarrassment. Obviously they need to spend the money. Not so some fans can have barbeques, but because good football is AWESOME. If the football was actually decent, going to campus for a football game is something everyone would want to do. Everything about going to football games at URI is already great, except having to watch our football team. If they would just be respectable then it would bring football games back as a viable option for people in the university community who are too busy to devote an entire day to watching our football team get mollywhopped by East South Central Connecticut State or some such thing.

Invest the money, commit the resources and execute the plan and there is no reason that the football team can't be good. But if they are given the excuse of "well, people don't really care anyways" they are never going to make the commitment. Everyone should want URI to be good at football. Reality dictates that basketball is the big-time sport we are best situated to compete in, but football is the king of college sports. And everyone should want their school to be good, whether you are Alabama, Stanford, Yale, UConn, Williams, URI or Salve Regina.

[RhowdyRam02]

It doesn't make sense to you because you can't see your own hypocrisy. You knock college hockey because supposedly only nuts know who is in the tournament, when even URI football nuts such as yourself have NO CLUE what happened last year in our own conference, let alone FCS as a whole. If hockey therefore isn't worthwhile because you don't know who was in the touranment, wouldn't FCS football fail to be worth our time by your own metric? Of course it would, but you like the BBQ's, so it stays.

[gorhody89]

I do not believe that if URI football was good people would care. We started something like 6-0 like 10 years ago and nobody gave a shit...how much national attention did that gain. Pretty soon the URI football supporters will be gone becausee they are all old and the university might actually have some forward thinking in regards to hockey

[RhowdyRam02]

And let's be frank, the only way to have a viable football program is with $20-30 million for a stadium, which would only give us a league average facility. On top of that we would also need to increase our spending for coaches and recruiting. What we're doing now isn't fielding a football team, it's lighting scholarships and stacks of money on fire until the East stands collapse on themselves.

[gorhody89]

By the way I love college football nothings better than it. I've been to FSU home game, Oregon home game against Stanford when college GameDay was there 2 years ago and several BC games...however @ URI and the FCS level no thanks, high school football in several states is bigger than FCS football unless you're north Dakota state...spend the annual million plus on the other athletic teams and plan for hockey to be a D1 sport

[TruePoint]

RR I feel like you aren't reading what I am saying, so I don't think we need to go back and forth anymore.

89 - if we started 6-0 and nobody cared it is because we have been conditioned not to care. A good month and a half isn't going to undo 30 years of being bad. Fans won't care until the team shows it can be competitive over a longer stretch than six games.

[seanmc94]

URI football is dead. Nobody has bothered to hold a funeral yet; but barring a ridiculous infusion of $$$; it's done like dinner

[scine20]

I disagree that people don't care. When I was a sophomore URI started off I think 7-0 and was nationally ranked before falling apart and losing 3 of their final 4. As the season went on the excitement was very high. Games were selling out and the atmosphere was very good. Obviously that season (2001) was not the norm but if the team wins people will care and notice.

[ramster]

URI football is dead. Nobody has bothered to hold a funeral yet; but barring a ridiculous infusion of $$$; it's done like dinner

SeanMc,
2 Serious questions:
How many URI Football Games have you attended in your lifetime - approximately
When was the last football game you saw live?