Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:32 PM CDT
COLUMN: After fundraiser we can get back to football
By BRIAN NIELSEN, Sports Editor
bnielsen@jg-tc.com
Looking for any kind of complaint, one reporter misfired.
He apparently wanted Eastern Illinois football coach Bob Spoo to gripe about how long of a trip it is to Happy Valley, Pa., to pick up a check from Penn State University. Oh yeah, and to play a football game.
The reporter must not have realized that in the Football Championship Subdivision world, Spoo’s team spends up to six hours one way on a bus for an Ohio Valley Conference trip and might get home at 4 in the morning following a night game.
Not everyone pays Eastern $450,000 to be the white-jersey visitor to help bring fans into a 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium, a stipend that allows the football team to take a charter flight.
“The travel was great,” Spoo answered. “We’ll be back by 6 o’clock tonight.”
That was the case. In living rooms in time to watch Florida-LSU and/or Michigan-Iowa and/or the end of the Cardinals’ baseball season, EIU players and coaches could pretty much put out of mind a 52-3 never-had-a-chance football loss at Penn State one week after replaying and lamenting a pivotal play or two in the Panthers’ 36-31 loss to Ohio Valley Conference rival Eastern Kentucky.
Still, that reporter in the postgame interview room at Beaver Stadium was on the right track.
“They knew who we were playing,” Spoo said of his Panthers’ latest and most challenging venture yet into the elite world of college football. “We got our fannies kicked today but our kids are very resilient.
“I’m happy it’s over.”
Never do I recall hearing, overhearing and reading so much disgust about having to watch a team they cover win a ballgame as the past week around media covering Penn State.
Wake us up when we play Minnesota, one columnist wrote.
This game should have never happened, at least one person in the press box muttered during Penn State’s domination of EIU.
Maybe I should admire that some out there still are idealistic enough to question this practice of big schools paying for an automatic win against a smaller school whose football players have to swallow their pride for scoreboard and perhaps physical beatings to help support all of the sports teams at a university.
I remember back in 2002 when potentially the greatest team in EIU football history was forced to start a season 0-2 with losses at Hawaii and Kansas State, I questioned this as well.
By now, it’s a forgone conclusion. These days I routinely stop at red lights on Route 16 almost forgetting — until trying to think of some analogy, weak as this might be — how years ago I was so enraged about the needless addition of stop lights.
Hey, it’s part of life.
“We kind of expect to play at least one a year,” Spoo said of the games against Football Bowl Subdivision teams with checkbooks. “We anticipate doing it.”
In a world where good, ethical coaches get fired for losing while slimy, cheating coaches get better jobs because they cheated their way to victories, these money-making football mismatches are down the list of things that need fixed in college athletics.
If EIU has to play an unbeatable opponent, better to face a class coach like Joe Paterno, who could have run up a more embarrassing score if were a Steve Spurrier type.
Every once in a while these games even bring upsets or at least competitive games although some get confused with that Appalachian State win over Michigan.
“We’re not even close to Appalachian State,” Spoo said referring to the team when it was a defending NCAA Division I-AA champion.
In other cases, this at least gives players from the likes of Eastern Illinois to run onto Penn State’s field in front of an announced crowd of 104,488 — biggest ever for a game involving an Ohio Valley Conference team — although the common feeling was a good portion of that attendance were students who have paid their admission but chose not to actually attend to this non-conference yawner.
You did not sense any youthful exuberance from EIU players departing Beaver Stadium.
Even Austin Signor, who could have celebrated his 43-yard field goal to stand atop the OVC in that statistical list and a pair of kickoffs boomed to the end zone for touchbacks, only fell into the mood of a team that had been outgained in total offense 553 yards to 206 and beaten by 49 points.
“It’s kind of disappointing,” Signor said. “We were expecting to do better. I didn’t feel we gave ourselves a chance.”
In the big picture, last week’s loss at Eastern Kentucky stands as a much bigger blow to EIU’s hopes of reaching the FCS playoffs while an injury or two at Penn State just added to the obstacles.
Saturday did not spoil the postseason dreams yet, just those of starting SportsCenter with the nation’s biggest upset since Appalachian State at Michigan.
“We didn’t come here thinking we would lose, no matter what people think,” EIU quarterback Jake Christensen said. “It’s out of the way. We just have to go on.”
Brian Nielsen is sports editor of the Journal Gazette/Times-Courier. Contact him at bnielsen@jg-tc.com or 238-6856.
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