OUR VIEW: Football killed the rodeo star

Here at The Statesman, we love our rodeos. We love everything associated with agriculture – farming, ranching, horses, cows, chickens, fenceposts, pearl snap shirts, cowboy hats and above all, those tight wranglers those cowboys and cowgirls wear.
   
Heck, we’re so agriculturally-minded that we came to the largest ag school in the state and became True Aggies. Well, most of us.
   
We also love football. Conveniently, USU has a football team. A pretty good one too, we might add. Head Coach Gary Andersen and quarterback Chuckie Keeton have Aggie fans everywhere excited about the possibilities of double-digit wins this season.
   
Unfortunately, this year we are forced to choose between football and rodeo as the USU club’s only home rodeo of the year is at the exact time of the Homecoming football game against UNLV.
   
How did university officials let this happen? Why should we be forced to choose between two of our favorite things?
   
We realize Aggie football is a varsity sport competing at the NCAA Division I level, while our ropers have to settle for National Collegiate Rodeo Association-status and compete as a club sport. You’d think the officials at a land-grant university would do a better job of communicating so this type of thing wouldn’t happen in the first place.
   
Maybe we can just combine the two events and have Matt Austin and Kerwynn Williams compete in the team roping event at halftime. With the way he makes tackles, linebacker Bojay Filimoeatu would probably break some records in bulldogging – if he didn’t accidentally break the steer’s neck in the process.
   
And whatever happened to having a live bull at football games? It would be awesome to have a bull run around the football field like Ralphie the bison does during Colorado football pre-game rituals. It can’t be that dangerous, right?
   
In all seriousness, we at The Statesman support all USU athletic teams – from handball and club tennis to basketball and volleyball, but it sure gets a lot tougher to show school spirit at all our sporting events when they are scheduled on top of one another.
   
Fortunately the rodeo will be two nights – Friday and Saturday – and the whiteout will last only Saturday. Yes we’ll miss the slack, but you can bet your boots we’ll watch as much team-roping, steer-wrestling and goat-tying action as possible on Friday night.