COLUMN: This column isn’t about heavy metal
I noticed my last column about Pantera got a lot more response than any other article I’ve written this year. This implies people are more interested in reading about rock stars than they are in reading about sports, even if they find the article in the sports section.
While I acknowledge that by appealing to people’s base desire to read about heavy metal musicians behaving recklessly with drugs, it’s time to move on.
Last Saturday’s home loss to New Mexico State was a severe black eye for USU, and I’m not talking about the final score. No, I’m referring to the attendance, which was just 7,108, the second-lowest in the last 20 years, according to The Herald Journal. Give me a break, there wasn’t anything else worthwhile going on in Logan that day.
I am really surprised that with so many extended families in the valley for the holiday and tickets reduced to just $5, there weren’t more alumni in attendance. USU’s very Division I status is on the line every home game, and the alumni and students have by and large not answered the call of duty.
People cite all kinds of reasons for shirking their duties and not attending football games, but I regard these as mere excuses. “It’s cold out to go watch USU lose,” they say. If you think Romney Stadium is too cold, you ought to think of it in terms of what the pioneers went through. You people are soft.
I propose a partial solution to the attendance problem. While acknowledging that the only real way to put butts in seats (or on concrete abutments, as the case may be) is for the team to win some WAC games.
Hours after watching Terrence Washington, Ryan Wilson and the other seniors jog off the field at Romney Stadium for the last time, I was in the Spectrum watching USU play Weber State in men’s basketball. Lo and behold, the place was packed.
Thinking about how desirable half-court seats to men’s basketball games in the Spectrum are to USU students, I had inspiration for a way to leverage basketball’s popularity into better football attendance.
The way it works is you show up to a football game and scan your USU card and you get a tattoo. When basketball season starts, the most heavily tattooed kids are allowed into the VIP area of the Spectrum student section, the first few rows right above the half-court line.
Not only would this improve the student section in Romney behind the players’ bench, the students would be getting free tattoos. Tattoos are a really hot trend among young people right now. My schoolyard chum Fred Appel has spent more than $1,000 on his tattoos and he’s not even finished yet.
Sure, it’s a totally futile gesture, since it wouldn’t affect attendance amongst people who actually pay to get in, but my proposal would at least hopefully fill up the student area to an extent that fans of the other schools wouldn’t openly mock our attendance and laugh at our fans.