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"Shotgun Draw!"
Dealing with 'The Demoralizer' and Fixing the Fledgling Football
Fan Base in Hoya Blue's New Era

By John Hawkes

It's midway through the fourth quarter on a beautiful mid-October afternoon on the Hilltop. The weather is absolutely ideal for watching a football game-59 degrees and sunny with a slight cooling breeze. The home stands at the Multi-Sport Facility are packed with Hoya families in town for Parent's Weekend. The campus is still buzzing from last night's Midnight Madness festivities, and one could reasonably argue that sports culture on campus at this very moment is at its highest point in the near-decade of Hoya Blue's existence. For a group of football fans accustomed to most of our recent gridiron successes being played out against a backdrop of cold, driving rain, as were memorable home victories over Duquesne and Fordham last season, it's been a long time since the stars have seemed to align so neatly in favor of a great football experience.

Yet midway through the fourth quarter on this beautiful mid-October afternoon on the Hilltop, I'm doing something I haven't done in a long time during a Georgetown football game-sitting down.

The Hoyas are trailing Bucknell 10-0, and the Bison are driving just past my seat in the third row, deep into Georgetown territory. Minutes earlier, Georgetown's most promising drive of the second half ended in the most frustrating way possible. On a rare trip inside the Bison 40 yard line, Matt Bassuener-who was 5 for 6 for 56 yards on the drive-fumbled after a big first down gain, turning the ball over and effectively ending Georgetown's chances of an upset victory.

I'm officially bummed out.

Sensing the all-too-inevitable, a friend and fellow GU football die-hard to my right-he's also now seated-turns to me and casually remarks:

"They need to run 'The Demoralizer'."

There is an overwhelming sense of fatalism that surrounds Georgetown football these days. It would be too simplistic to refer to the Georgetown student body as "apathetic" about their football program. On the whole, that may be true-the fraction of students who have attended or will regularly attend football games remains alarmingly small. However the truth is that those die-hards who do make it to the Multi-Sport Facility for every game are larger in number than at any time in the past several years, thanks to the remarkable dedication and commitment of Hoya Blue. What remains the same however is that even the most die-hard fans still walk into the MSF expecting to walk out with Georgetown on the short end of the scoreboard.

This fatalism has manifested itself in rather intriguing ways over the past season and a half. Among the more enduring has been the use of the phrase "Shotgun Draw!" (a reference to a frequent offensive play call) as a sarcastic rallying cry in the student section-a sort of pejorative "Cowboy Up!". As the aforementioned play has a versatile role in the Hoya playbook, so too does the rallying cry serve multiple functions in the Hoya Blue lexicon. It can be yelled out as a command ("We need to run the Shotgun Draw!)-in this sense it functions in the same somewhat ludicrous context as asking for "More Cowbell!" It can also be a mock badge of honor-one prominent member of Hoya Blue advertises himself on the Hoyatalk message boards as a "Sketchy Disciple of the Almighty Shotgun Draw."

Most of the fatalism stems from Georgetown's offensive ineptitude. Earlier this season, the Hoyas snapped a streak of thirteen consecutive games without scoring in the first quarter. As of the writing of this article, Georgetown ranks 95th out of 116 teams in Division I-AA in total offense, and 112th in scoring. Neither is far removed from the offensive rankings earned by the team during the 2004-2005 campaign.

Unsurprisingly then, when it came time last season to adopt a favorite GU football player, the student section chose the kicker. To his credit, Brad Scoffern did deliver the game-winning field goal in a famous 10-7 victory over Duquesne before dozen of shirtless Hoya Blue members in the driving rain. But his most lasting relationship with the student section came through the somewhat tongue-in-cheek chants of "MVP!" after every long punt he delivered. Perhaps Hoya Blue had broken new ground in sophisticated understanding of a team by its fans. Where many teams claim to win with defense, Georgetown's fans saw the key to victory in directional kicking.

"The Demoralizer" is the latest fatalistic catch phrase applied with surprising accuracy by Georgetown students in describing the action on the field and the gallows humor prevalent in the student section. In fact, mere seconds after my friend called for "The Demoralizer," Bucknell running back Kevin Mullen narrowly missed scoring a lead-padding touchdown for the Bison, stepping out of bounds at the 4 yard line. On the next play, he easily scooted into the end zone to give Bucknell a 17-0 lead with just over three minutes to play in the game.

It's been another demoralizing season for fans of Georgetown football. The loss to Bucknell sealed the Hoyas' seventh consecutive losing season dating to the start of the new millennium and their transitional year into Patriot League membership. There isn't necessarily a method to the maddening string of futility-losses have run the gamut from a 69-0 shellacking at the hands of Lehigh to a 20-19 heartbreaking last-second defeat to eventual I-AA National Runner-up Colgate. If anything, what both of these contests have in common (other than both being season openers) is that they were each in their own way terribly demoralizing to Hoya football fans.

What's especially demoralizing about the last two seasons of Georgetown football is that they've started out with such promise.

The 2005 campaign started with the Hoyas rallying from a 16-0 second half deficit to beat Bucknell 19-16 in overtime; the home opener saw the debut of the Multi-Sport Facility and Georgetown's first home game against an Ivy League opponent in 112 years. On this momentous occasion, Alex Fumelli wrote in "The Hoya" ["Beat Brown-and Ivy Envy-at Saturday's Football Game" 9/16/05]: " we should appreciate our football team for what it is. It's a team that managed to squeak out an overtime win against Bucknell by blocking a kick with seven seconds left in regulation, and a team that made history last year through the ceaseless rushing of senior running back Kim Sarin. It's a team whose dedication, in every whistle and adrenaline-heavy cry, can be heard from the far reaches of campus during those practices on what was once known as Harbin Field. As long as we keep hearing them, there should not be a single empty seat among those stands, cosmetically enhanced or not.

So, come tomorrow, let us go to the game at our near-perfect school and cheer on our pretty good football team as it takes on its first Ivy opponent since Cornell in 2003." Our pretty good football team lost 34-3.

The 2006 season marked the debut of Coach Kevin Kelly, a universally respected veteran of the coaching staff at the U.S. Naval Academy. It also opened with something that sent shock waves through the student section-a five wide receiver formation on Georgetown's first offensive play. Though the Hoyas again lost their home opener, this time 26-13 to Holy Cross, Hoya columnist (and Hoya Blue Treasurer) Raymond Borgone wrote that he saw a number of things to be positive about, not the least of which was the improvement in Georgetown's student section.

"One of the most encouraging things about the game," Borgone wrote, "had nothing to do with the action on the field; it was the students that braved the light rain and came out to the Multi-Sport Facility to watch the game."

"While the MSF was not quite jam-packed or sold out, the atmosphere was still supportive," he continued, "When you put Georgetown football into perspective, an increase in fan interest could be one of Kelly's most important contributions." ["Opener Gives Reasons for Optimism," 9/08/06]

Six weeks later, on a picture-perfect Saturday afternoon, that increase in fan interest had failed to materialize. The Hoyas fell to 1-6 as perhaps 15 students-mostly Hoya Blue die-hards-showed up to cheer them on from an ill-formed student section. Some showed up late, still shaking off the after-effects of post-Midnight Madness revelry. Some left at halftime to try their luck with the Hoya Hooligans up the hill at North Kehoe Field at the men's soccer match against West Virginia. Still some toughed it out even through "The Demoralizer," including Raymond Borgone, who sat dejectedly on my left side.

What makes the Bucknell game something of an unusual study for a commentary on fan support for Georgetown football is that the stands on the home side of the MSF were mostly full-something that cannot be said for that rainy day game against Duquesne last Fall. And yet, something that bothered me throughout the Bucknell game is probably a more significant symbol of the trouble with Georgetown football culture than we'd like to admit.

The student section wasn't sitting dejectedly throughout the game of course. Because of the late arrival of some of the student fans and the small number of students overall, however, a true "student section" never did form. In fact, it took until midway through the first quarter before most of the students mixed in with families and parents (including myself) finally decided to stand up and risk blocking the view of our neighbors. Owing to our location just in front of the main walkway through the home side of the MSF, we very clearly were blocking at least a full row of Hoya fans and parents in the section behind us. Yet strangely, despite my worries, at no point during the game was I or anyone around me asked to sit down. Looking back at several points during the game, it became clear to me why this was the case-the fans behind us either weren't watching the game at all, or they simply weren't interested enough to care if they could see the field.

November 4th marks Georgetown's annual Homecoming celebration. The centerpiece of the festivities will be the Hoyas' final home football game of the season against Marist. Homecoming reliably provides both the largest attended football game of each season, and the one most populated by parents and older alums. Further, it takes place in the vicinity of a tailgate that remains, despite several format changes over the past decade, wildly popular among Georgetown students. In this sense, Homecoming is a barometer of sorts for the state of Georgetown's football culture.

It can hardly be an encouraging sign then that on October 24 "The HOYA" published an editorial entitled "Homecourt Homecoming," proposing that Georgetown's Homecoming weekend be moved to coincide with the first game of the men's basketball season.

There are several flaws in the suggestion. The enormous logistical and financial burden needed to transport an entire tailgate of fans from the Hilltop to the Verizon Center is vastly underplayed in the editorial. Further, though the idea of a Homecoming tailgate + basketball game is appealing this season, as the Hoyas open play on Saturday November 11th against Hartford at Verizon, this marks the first time Georgetown has played its home opener on a non-Thanksgiving weekend since 1998. That the editorial board of the university's paper of record is willing to make these logical leaps in an effort to replace football as a Homecoming event is, in a word, demoralizing.

More demoralizing still is the rhetorical question that opens the editorial:

Homecoming is a school-wide celebration based on tradition, spirit and pride at universities nationwide, but is holding this event in concurrence with a football game really the best way to celebrate these values here at Georgetown?

Three (football) seasons ago, I wrote a column outlining my ideas on how to improve student football culture on campus ["Generation Burton, Meet Generation Hester," 9/02/04]. In the column, I tell the story of going to Hoya Blue's opening meeting a few years prior and hearing one of the Executive Board members tell the assembled crowd of freshmen:

"The football team sucks, nobody cares about them anyways."

In my view, The HOYA's editorial is merely a more polite phrasing of this sentiment.

But is it an accurate sentiment?

Probably not.

The truth is that for all the fatalism that still permeates the student section at football games, the fact that there even is a functioning student section means that somebody cares about the football team. Indeed, the student spirit club that four seasons ago was openly insulting the football team has, thanks to a change in leadership and philosophy, been on the forefront of spreading the gospel of Coach Kelly and…okay, fine…the Shotgun Draw!

Indeed, re-reading my column from three years ago, it occurs to me that nearly everything I recommended-from increased involvement by Hoya Blue to the promotion of pre-game tailgates for students-has come to pass, often in ways far beyond what I could have imagined at the time.

So why has nothing made a lasting impact on student football culture? Why am I sitting with maybe a dozen fans at a football game pondering when Bucknell is going to run The Demoralizer?

None of these questions has an easy answer-although in the remainder of this column I'm certainly going to try to provide some suggestions.

One thing is clear however: Georgetown football culture is at best stuck in a rut; at worst it's facing a fourth and long. Whether there's a Hail Mary pass in the playbook-or any receivers around to catch it-remains to be seen.