Letter to the editor: Give football a break
Three weeks until basketball season was the front page headline of the Statesman this week.
Unfortunately, this sort of attitude is all too prevalent in our fan base here at Utah State.
Being, as so many fans say, a basketball school is not a good thing. Football is the money maker in college sports. If you ask any honest athletic director he or she would tell you they would rather have a good football team than a good basketball team. Here at Utah State we happen to have neither.
If the argument is that our football team is bad than so is our basketball team. Since joining the mountain west the football program has far outpaced basketball. Football has contended for Mountain West titles while basketball has not really been close, finishing in eighth place last season.
Before the Mountain West days our basketball team saw a little more success but were not has good as everybody thinks. We were playing inferior opponents both in conference and out. We would get a bunch of wins under our belt, impress the casual student fan who went to the games, then lose big in the NCAA tournament if we were lucky.
We need to give our football team a break. They are playing good opponents week in and week out. We still have a good chance of making a bowl game. Our schedule is front-loaded and there are still many beatable opponents coming up. That is far more than we could have said a few years ago when we were truly a basketball school. If you ask me I don’t want to go back to that pre-Gary Anderson, pre-Matt Wells world.
— Bo Lamb