I am a sports fan.
Perhaps not enough of a fan to be writing for another section of the Collegian, but I am a sports fan - I'll prove it.
I cried for Kerri Strug when she stuck her landing off the vault at the Atlanta Olympics despite mangling her leg.
I watch Billiards - sometimes.
I know the rules for water polo.
I keep a straight face when professional bowlers refer to themselves as "athletes."
I am the sort of sports fan who wakes up on a football-Saturday morning with a voice that could sing in the New York Metropolitan Opera and by the end of the day my throat is so raw from screaming I am coughing up blood.
Mmm ... the sting of battle.
So it should be no surprise that I love K-State football. I do. I think it's great.
I received a call Wednesday from Willie the Wildcat.
Naturally it took me a few minutes to figure out who I was talking to because Willie can't speak. I had to interpret what he was saying from the sound of air rushing past the receiver as he gestured wildly.
Willie wanted to beat someone up, so naturally he chose me, because planet Earth seems to think it's funny to watch the stick-boy get pummeled. I obliged, because I love this school, and I love football and because I thought I could meet the challenge.
It was perhaps the pinnacle of my college career.
I played a sports reporter from ESPN who - true to form - thought K-State still was the worst school in college football history and deserved to go down in flames. Willie was watching me give my report on the JumboTron, got fed up, and proceeded to run outside of KSU Stadium to tackle me. Broken and beat up, he chased me on the field so I could repent by doing the K-S-U in front of the stands.
Let me describe to you what it is like to do the K-S-U in front of 50,000 people. The noise is deafening, the stands reach into the sky, and you cannot bring yourself to let your eyes focus on anything in the stadium because it is too overwhelming. There is no other time when you can be surrounded by so many and feel so helplessly alone. You try to lift your arms and legs into the shape of those letters, and as you do so a little bit of stomach acid works itself up in your gut and your muscles tighten. I imagine that's how people who are afraid of heights must feel dancing along the edge of the Grand Canyon.
No ego could possibly take that much attention - it's crippling.
Well, some egos could take that much attention. I suppose that's where politicians come from.
But I actually was relieved when Willie gave me the elbow-drop to sink me to the field. I was more comfortable lying prone on the astroturf than I was having to look at the crowd. Perhaps the people who are forced to go out on the field every week can get used to that. I never could. I'm too dedicated to the stands - too dedicated to giving high-fives to random people when K-State does something special, too dedicated to tossing body-surfers to the top of the student section, too dedicated to wiping blood off my ears when that stupid ringing-phone-football-scholarship-alarm-clock commercial comes on the JumboTron.
There is a certain contingent of K-State students and faculty who think I'm a flaming idiot for my dedication to the sport. An academic institution, after all, should stand on its own, shouldn't it? Notoriety should extend first from the quality of academic programs, not from an activity with relatively little ... erm, relevance.
Clearly, football is not an academic pursuit. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. There are leadership and coaching classes designed around football, and I guarantee there were more students studying the intricacies of the BCS system last year than there were students studying calculus.
But popularity doesn't make something academic. If that were true, the Backstreet Boys would win the Nobel Prize for ... something.
The truth is, not everything on a college campus needs to be academic - much to the chagrin of a few in K-State's research faculty.
If employers are looking for increasingly diverse students to fill their ranks, there is room for any distraction to true academic life regardless of how remote it might seem or how many people are jealous of the attention it gets.
The Chronicle of Higher Education showcased K-State in their Oct. 15 issue. The cover features a photo of K-Staters going wild after the K-State-Nebraska game followed by the title: "A Reversal of Football Fortunes, Kansas State's Rise and Oklahoma's fall challenge beliefs about the impact of gridiron success on the rest of a campus."
Featured for our (somewhat) newfound football prowess, the Chronicle said conventional wisdom maintains that universities with winning football teams see increases in donations, increases in applications and increases in money from bowl payoffs, fans and big TV contracts.
It doesn't appear, however, that annual donations are too intrinsically tied to football wins - Oklahoma is going through their strongest cycle of donations ever, inversely related to the performance of their football team. Applications to K-State were higher in 1989, when our football team was the doormat of the Big 12, than they are now.
Pat Bosco, associate vice president for institutional advancement and dean of student life, said in the Chronicle that the jury still is out on whether or not football has a definitive effect on enrollment.
"But there's no doubt the reason every eighth-grader in the state of Kansas is wearing Kansas State football jerseys is because of the team," he said.
I contend athletics are not directly related to enrollment, but on the spirit of school and state. If there were no discernible value to athletics, the Ivy leagues would have abandoned their programs long ago. Why would Harvard bother maintaining a football team when they easily could ride the tide of their academic record alone?
A good football and volleyball team give us an added degree of pride. They give us bragging rights. They give us something to believe in, if you will excuse the clichˇ. They provide us with an opportunity to become invested in our school, and it is well established that the schools whose students become involved early are usually the ones with the lowest dropout rates.
As long as the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics is solvent, spending only the money it makes off of its programs, academics and athletics can happily coexist.
Dale Herspring, political science department head, said in the Chronicle that while members of his department were not all fans of football, many recognize that it gives the school a national recognition that might not be achieved any other way.
"Kansas State is not Moo U," he said. "Do people come here because of football? No, but they know who we are because of football. They at least know it's a real university."
So eat 'em up, eat 'em up, KSU.
You're a real school.