No support for football until players act right

Dear Beloved Football Stars of Temple University,

Another season is here and another year of hoping for a winning football season in vain. I have been at this university for six years now and have prayed for season after season of just .500 football, and yet I still wake up in cold sweats from the nightmares of being the Big East punching bag.

But the trend of bad playing and even worse play-calling seemed to end when Al Golden decided to move from the University of Virginia in 2005 – somehow thinking he could make the Temple University community forget about being the worst team in Division I-A college football.

But as true fans we were hopeful, still. We thought that the 2006 season was an improvement despite the embarrassing 1-11 record; now I am beginning to wonder how much we paid Bowling Green last year to lose to us at homecoming.

Through six years I have seen many football players come and go,all with a similar attitude: pride. I am ecstatic that the football team still can walk around campus with pride, even after going 4-42 the past four seasons.

I must admit, however, that the Aug. 31 game versus Navy was one of the best performances I have ever seen from a Temple football team, and I even had to stay to the very end and cheer my team off the field after what I considered a heart-breaking loss. I even gave the football players personal cheers and words of encouragement as I saw them on campus. I even let them take over the cafeteria and cut in line at the Student Center – all in the name of a job well done started.

But then they started acting up again. The football players’ pride somehow got replaced with arrogance, and that becomes a problem when you get blown out by Buffalo as Temple did Sept. 8. I would be less upset if the team decided to take its losses and competed in a Division II conference or even Division I-AA – or maybe you would like to play high-school teams? Maybe that would give us a legitimate shot of supporting a winning team.

And all of this bitter rambling could be avoided if the team just shifted its attitudes on campus a bit. Why do you think you own the cafeteria, take over tables and annoy everyone around you with your loud, boisterous conversation? You should be ashamed to walk in there without being booed – especially when you have not won a legitimate game in over three years. So have pride, yes, but please stop being arrogant about it.

When you hang around campus and try to “holler at the shorties” thinking you are something worthwhile, trust me, they are thinking the same thing as the rest of us: get your minds out of the gutter and into the playbooks. Because in case you have not noticed, you make us cry just as much as you make us laugh.

Sincerely,
Josh Rothstein
6th year Senior
Education major