Let’s drop our years of sympathetic support for this rugged and healthy campus pastime and finally forthrightly ask: Should schools like the University of Rhode Island drop football? Few schools have as violent and inept a team as Rhody, to be sure, but several other schools are in their league. At several other schools pretty much the only play the team completes successfully is ganging up on other students and beating the shit out of them.
And there’s an unfortunate synergy at work at schools like Rhody: When the team loses – and at Rhody it always loses, most humiliatingly – the guys go out looking for revenge, and they find it. They’re in a bad mood, see.
Just how embittered are these embittered motherfuckers?
[The] team is 0-5, having lost to Brown, 41-31, Saturday night after leading 31-27 in the fourth quarter. [The coach] is trying to revive a program that has produced only three winning seasons since 1985 and has lost 22 of its last 24 games. If opposing coaches on the recruiting trail this fall and winter need more evidence to dissuade recruits from considering URI, this is it.
If you’re on Rhody’s team, you’re a loser. If you were going to be recruited anywhere else, you’d have gone there. Other teams only want to play you because it’s a guaranteed big win. The university is giving you millions in scholarships so that you can put other students in the hospital.
Hm.
Hm.
Nah! Let’s keep football at the University of Rhode Island!
October 7th, 2015 at 7:03PM
I realize we see xceptions among the mega-football powers, but the rule of thumb always is: You need to be a lot more wary of the players acting like assholes on losing football teams than on winning ones, and that extends from DI to DIII. Same thing holds for rugby in South Africa with a slight variation — you need to worry less about the “firsts” causing trouble than the “4ths” (a typical university rugby club will have multiple level, the 4ths being a 4th team, which is to say with a desire to play rugby, but a long way removed from that top squad — sort of a jv thing.)
dcat
October 8th, 2015 at 8:09AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/sports/ncaafootball/beer-alcohol-college-football-west-virginia.html