COLUMN: Section F
I’m not sure what lengths that I personally would go to to get an atmosphere at Romney Stadium for football games that would be in the same league as what Utah State has at the Spectrum. Seeing what 4,000 students can do inside the Spectrum, I can’t imagine the madness of what 7,000 of us could do on Saturday’s in the fall.
I don’t quite know the feeling of being a college quarterback or what kind of focus it takes to read a defense before the snap of the ball and make adjustments at the line of scrimmage, but I do know that it is just about a proven fact that a raucous crowd making tons of noise can make that whole process much more complicated than it might otherwise be for a quarterback. If the 159-12 home record under coach Stew Morrill at the Spectrum is any indication, Aggie fans are pretty good at making life difficult for opposing teams.
The part that gets a little tricky is that during the past couple years, Utah State football has made things a bit more difficult than they needed to for the non-die hard fans to get on board with the team. Particularly what I’m talking about is having the names on the back’s of the player’s jerseys. Not many people will argue that the Brent Guy era was the lowest point that USU’s football program had ever sunk.
As if fans didn’t need more reasons to stay home from Romney Stadium on Saturdays the last couple years, alienating the more lukewarm level of the fan base from having any chance to identify with or know who their own players were on the field did not help at all. I get that Guy wanted to portray team unity by putting “Aggies” in place of the player’s names, but with attendance struggling as bad as it was over the last couple years, the last thing the casual Aggie fan needed was to have the ability to mentally attach a name and possibly a face to the numbers they out on the field taken away from them.
Granted, there are far fewer players for people to see and recognize at basketball games, but I can bet you that every single person in the back row of the Spectrum could point out Tai Wesley or Gary Wilkinson if they were to run into them around campus. I’m not sure fans as far back as the fifth row at Romney Stadium could accuaretly point out who Diondre Borel or Robert Turbin are in public, at least not by name. I’d bet that they are much more widely known as “number 12” and “number six” to just about every fan who didn’t buy a program at games last year or bring their own printed roster.
So if I can make a plea on a public stage to new head coach Gary Andersen about how to do at least one small part in helping people get more knowledgeable, involved and attached to USU football, please, coach … put the names back on the jerseys. The sooner that 7,000 Aggie students know exactly who it is they are screaming their lungs out for, the sooner they will actually care enough to show up and actually do just that. After all, it comes pretty naturally to us.