Losing, that is– Ball State 29, EMU 27. I didn’t see the game or hear anything about it on the radio, but I found this quote from the annabor.com article rather striking:
Ball State coach Stan Parrish, a former University of Michigan assistant, said he never could have imagined winning a game with just a single passing yard.
“No, I couldn’t imagine even being in a game,” he said. “I’m a coach that’s always thrown the ball for a lot of yards. This is a record. We threw for one yard and won.”
Seriously? EMU can’t beat a team it holds to one yard of passing? Huh….
Just when you think it can not get any worse…it does!
But you should show your support and get behind the team and give the coaching staff at least 4 years and then support the new coach then until…we do it all over again!
Unbelievable that a win less team can run all over us…oh, wait a minute, we need to give time to the coaching staff to get some of his own players in there because the previous coach left him with..not much…riiight, it’s like a broken record and when you raise the issue everyone looks at you like you do not support the school when they are all gutless to make the tough and right decisions! Bottom line, EMU football is allergic to winning and it’s a whole lot of money (hard to come by these days!) down the drain hoping hopelessly for a miraculous turnaround (so we can have the coach leave in a flash to a bigger school!).
And on and on it goes…Guys, remember this was Ball State, the other winless team and we can’t stop them from running all over us in our home….No excuses!!!!!
EagleG, I like your passionate voice! But I’ll try to step back and be dispassionately analytical about this dilemma. Question for all: Even if Eastern had won yesterday, defeating Ball State instead of losing narrowly, what real difference would that have made to the well being of EMU as a university? A bit. Not much. No lasting difference, in my estimation.
I am very sorry that EMU football is having such a bad year. EMU football, as many long time EMU community members acknowledge, never has a good year. EMU football is irrelevant to EMU’s own well being, at least as the life of the university is experienced by most community members.
I am grateful that the well being of the university is barely affected by the travails of the football team: a losing year on the field doesn’t much matter to the real tasks of the university. Still, I always root for the home team. Relatively few members of the EMU community care about EMU football, and that won’t change even if the team wins a few games, or has a winning season, or upsets some powerhouse team once or twice in the next decade. A sustainable, regular winning football team is a heart felt dream for some at EMU, but the obstacles to achieving that are harder and harder each year that goes by. It’s a dream that edges into fantasy land, actually.
EMU’s most serious sports fans are not fans of EMU football, by and large; and that is true increasingly for many university communities’ sports fans across the land – ESPN has created a huge killzone. Sports fans are fans of the best quality of play around, and of teams with national reputations. College football is increasingly expensive, and no amount of money will allow a school positioned like ours to really provide the quality of entertainment on the field required to make it a real draw to more than a small number of fans.
EMU football remains the most heavily subsidized form of entertainment in the entire county; and if that subsidy was counted on a per capita basis for actual fans who voluntarily pay cash for their tickets, it’d be a shockingly high figure. Most of that subsidy comes directly from our students, few of whom ever attend a game. These are facts.
So be it. This is the way of college level athletics in this day and age. Question is, how sustainable is it, and what does a university get out of this level of subsidy for the game? These questions are bigger than EMU. Hasn’t Phil Power argued against the continued subsidy of college sports by student fees? Some observers are now predicting that when the long term brain damage that is increasingly showing up as a result of normal playing of the game is better known, colleges and universities will flee from the game, in order to minimize their long term liabilities. Class action lawsuits are likely on the horizon.
Meanwhile, in a society where most fans prefer a living room and a big screen TV to an actual seat in a stadium, unless the stadium seat is for a really spectacular match up, who really has a realistic scenario by which the football stadium gets filled up and contributes materially to the well being of a university’s educational mission? I mean, outside of those relatively few schools that do have large fan bases for the sport….
So I wish we’d defeated Ball State. If we had, though, not much would be different in the actual life of the university.
Go Eagles! Education First!
When an emphasis is on the “process,” you may wonder about the mindset.
When there is an announcement during the first half that the bus taking students back to the main campus will begin its runs at the start of the third quarter, you may wonder about the mindset.
When the cheerleaders throw pink footballs into the stands, you may wonder — well, you may just wonder.
That having been said, I would rather show up and watch a 0-7 team that plays schools of equal or better caliber than watch a team that racks up its victories over schools that are way down on the food chain.
That’s one of the benefits of not being a person who gets his self-esteem from the performance of football or basketball players but who instead gets it from his own accomplishments.
Imagine that.
I think people good accept the football program if everyone would come to the reality that Eastern is a D-II school at best and quit throwing shrinking resources at a fantasy that will not happen. Where is the Prez on this? The State budget crisis will hit home soon at Eastern but we have the 260k coach that can’t win a game. Someone help me with this picture.
It’s hard to teach calculus to 2nd graders no matter how good the teacher. Give the guy a break for Pete’s sake. He hasn’t even recruited a full class and has been decimated by injuries. He is keeping his best freshman on the bench all season to build for the future. He is building a team the way it should be built.
No matter how superb Coach English may be, no matter how successful his strategy for building a winning team proves to be, this much is certain: Football will never be a central aspect of EMU’s purpose or mission, not as defined by most EMU community members; yet football will always be a financial drain. Read the Knight Commission reports. Some facts are inescapable.
I think that Mark is right, basically: there is absolutely no way that EMU’s football team is ever going to be a “big deal,” even if they end up with a winning season. But simultaneously, there is absolutely no way that and EMU President or Board of Regents is ever going to eliminate football or scale it back.
It would seem that we are at an irreconcilable impasse.
Now, I suppose it is possible that if finances get a lot bleaker and EMU and other institutions in the MAC are in serious danger of insolvency, maybe then the powers that be would revisit football. But I’m not exactly hoping for that kind of crisis as a solution.
Brad, don’t bother. This forum is NOT about football, it’s for bashing anything outside the college of arts and sciences.
Our kids are talented and they fight hard. The wins will come, the games against Army, Northwestern, Temple, Ball State were all close games that could have went our way.
It will be interesting to see how many Football related posts show up on emutalk.org once things turn around.
Josh – I think you confuse analysis with bashing. Universities are all about critical analysis – no subject is exempt from analysis! The Oct. 30, 2009 CRONICLE REVIEW has a very interresting excerpt from a new book on college football since the 1960s; it’s author is Michael Oriard, who played football at Notre Dame and in the NFL briefly, and is now an English prof & associate dean at Oregon State. Get hold of it and read it if you care about football and higher education. He reports, among other things, the well known fact that at fewer than two dozen universities does the athletics department earn more than it costs the university to run. Stating such facts is not “bashing” any sport, it’s dealing with reality, Josh.
And here’s part of Oriard’s conclusion: “Big time college football’s current financing is probably unsustainable for most universities, and the fiction that the sport exists above all to serve the educational interests of the student-athletes has grown increasingly ludicrous…with state legislatures announcing cutbacks in their higher-education budges, the allocations to athletics while academic programs are being squeezed is already receiving more scrutiny.” Read his new book, BOWLED OVER: BIG-TIME COLLEGE FOOTBALL FROM THE SIXITES TO THE BCS ERA, published by U of North Carolina Press.
And by the way, Josh, would you care to wager dinner at an Ypsilanti restaurant of your choice over what year the EMU football team will have a winning season? Name the year and I’ll take the bet, and I’d be happier to lose than win such a bet. Of course, I follow the rule of not betting for your hopes, but betting instead on what informed judgment indicates is most probable.
I’d be happy to post here about EMU wining a football game. But first, they’ll need to actually win a game….
Don’t hold your breath for a victory at Arkansas. They will get killed and English will call it some kind of moral victory. When does he start earning the 260k they are paying him? As with other areas of the University there is no accountability just tell a good story and that is enough.