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"Shotgun Draw!"
Dealing with 'The Demoralizer' and Fixing the Fledgling Football
Fan Base in Hoya Blue's New Era (Part 3)

By John Hawkes

To the American sports fan, wind-swept Sunday afternoons in October are traditionally the domain of the National Football League. This is clearly the case at Georgetown University. As the freshman move-in armada of sport utility vehicles with license plates from New Jersey, New York, and across the northeastern United States provides an informal cultural portrait of Georgetown each August, so too does the wave of Eagles, Giants, Steelers, Cowboys, and countless other jerseys seen in Red Square and on Prospect Street each Sunday throughout the winter.

Football, to put it one way, is kind of a big deal at Georgetown.

In ten years of existence, Hoya Blue has made countless investments in programs aimed at promoting school spirit at Georgetown—from tailgates to t-shirts, post-game parties to Pots-n-Spoons. Of all these, perhaps the most underrated was the decision almost five years ago to secure funding for television sets in the Village C Alumni Lounge and to support the purchase of the DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket package that allows a full slate of NFL football games to be shown on campus each Sunday. For out of town football fans at Georgetown, the Village C Lounge has been a must-visit destination ever since, and one of the most consistent unifiers in campus sports culture. From time to time, it has also been the scene of victory celebrations rivaling anything seen just outside the Lounge doors Multi Sport Facility, as was the case on October 23rd last year, when a group of New York Giants fans destroyed a table in the aftermath of a last-minute go-ahead touchdown in a victory against the Denver Broncos.

Exactly a year since the weekend of that Giants-Broncos game, it’s another NFL Sunday at Georgetown. I’m standing in the middle of a football stadium—well, what used to be a football stadium. I’m on Kehoe Field watching football—no, not the NFL, and not even American football. On this wind-swept Sunday afternoon, I’ve just attended—along with another strong Hoya Hooligan crowd numbering several dozen—the final soccer game of the season, an intensely competitive 1-0 victory by top-ranked Notre Dame over the Georgetown women’s soccer team. Now I’m on the sidelines for another surprisingly intense affair—one of the preliminary matches in the Breast Cancer Charity Soccer Tournament, a joint promotion between Breast Cancer Outreach and Hoya Blue.

Perhaps more remarkable than the surprising amount of soccer talent amongst the mostly-Hoya Hooligan stocked teams competing is surprising amount of NFL diehards on the rosters missing great games at the moment. The team on the field behind me features players I recognize from previous Alumni Lounge gamewatches as die-hard Eagles fans; while they’re competing on Kehoe Field, Philadelphia will score a go-ahead touchdown in the final minute of a game against Tampa Bay, only to lose on a 62-yard field goal as time expires. Several Redskins fans in attendance shall willingly miss the first half of a hotly-anticipated contest against the undefeated Indianapolis Colts. As for me, I’m unaware that my favorite team, the Atlanta Falcons, is in the latter stages of one of the most exciting NFL games to date this season, which they will ultimately win in overtime 41-38 over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

So what do a charity soccer tournament and Week 7 of the 2006 NFL season have to do with building a strong culture of support around the Georgetown football team?

One of the most common arguments made as to why students don’t attend Georgetown’s home football games is that the majority of die-hard college football fans on campus are content to watch “marquee” Division I-A games featuring their favorite teams on television. Why, the argument goes, would a student spend three hours outside in the elements watching the Hoyas lose to a Patriot League opponent, when they could see a Big Ten game or a Notre Dame contest at the same time from the comfort of their living room. Isn’t it too much to ask for fans to give up seeing their favorite college football teams in order to attend a game with only a few dozen other students where the chance of victory is slim?

Based on football attendance over the past seven seasons and a mountain of anecdotal evidence from friends, I’d say most Georgetown students have answered in the affirmative.

I suspect many of those students would answer the same way if you asked: isn’t it too much to ask for fans to give up seeing their favorite NFL teams in order to attend a game with only a few dozen other students where the chance of victory is slim?

Yet there were more than a few dozen students in the stands—one of the strongest women’s soccer crowds of the season at North Kehoe Field—to see our women’s soccer team, who didn’t make the Big East Tournament, play undefeated and top-ranked Notre Dame. And there were eight teams, most composed of Hoya Hooligans, competing in the Breast Cancer Charity Soccer Tournament. Together, these events overlapped with the entire 1pm NFL slate of games, and at least the first half of the 4pm games.

So, a few dozen students did in fact give up watching football in favor of a Georgetown sporting event…in a sense.

More accurately, they gave up watching football in favor of a Georgetown sporting event AND the chance to compete in a charity soccer tournament. That the turnout was so high owed as much to the quality and drawing power of the women’s soccer team as it did to the promotional effort put in by Hoya Blue and the Breast Cancer Outreach volunteers. In a particularly inspired promotional tour de force, the check-in time for teams in the charity tournament was set at halftime of the women’s soccer game, encouraging attendance at both events.

Too often, I believe, discussions about why it is difficult to encourage students to come to Georgetown football games revolve around the product on the field. If only the Hoyas had a better record, played more recognizable opponents, or ran a more fan-friendly offense, the line of thinking goes, more student fans would come to games. While I don’t disagree with the premise that a winning team, or at least an exciting one, can generate significant fan interest, I believe that operating from this premise alone is defeatist and short changes the positive impact Hoya Blue can—and should—have on football attendance regardless of the team’s on-field performance.

On Hoya Blue’s website appears the following biographical note:

Founded in 1997, Hoya Blue is Georgetown's official student spirit organization. We support all Georgetown sports, men's and women's. We prowl the MCI Center at men's basketball games, organizing our student section and making our opponents fear us. We organize massive road trips to away games, anywhere from Virginia to Connecticut. We grill burgers and hot dogs before football games, and bang on pots and spoons during the game. We throw pre-game barbeques for soccer and lacrosse, and raise hell in the stands. We sell shirts and tickets and give away free stuff in Red Square and in front of Leo's. We make banners and post flyers for games and throw victory parties afterward. Most of all, we LOVE Georgetown athletics and have a great time doing what we do.

Within that paragraph there are twelve specific actions listed as examples of what Hoya Blue does in support of its mission as the “official student spirit organization.” Of these, only three involve actual attendance at games. The remaining nine are Hoya Blue promotions. By their own description, Hoya Blue is focused not just on attending games, but promoting them as events.

When you speak of Hoya Blue’s role at a basketball game this season, for instance, you naturally have to include the 2,000-plus student fans who attended the game. At the same time, you would be ommitting a key part of the story if you failed to mention the We Are Georgetown shirts each student wore, or the cheer sheets they read from that Hoya Blue had placed on their seats before the game, or the email sent to the listserv the night before reminding students where the buses to the Verizon Center pick up on campus, or the banner hung from Red Square the day before the game.

In my view, winning games may create a large fan base, but good promotions create a culture around a particular sport.

Recognizing this fact is the first step to addressing why a football culture has still failed to take hold at Georgetown. To focus on the football team’s run of seven consecutive losing seasons is ultimately a useless endeavor, as until Coach Kevin Kelly allows Hoya Blue Executives to make play calls, the club has little tangible way to turn the streak around. Intangibly, however, Hoya Blue promotions if done right can have a tremendous and direct impact on the team through an improved atmosphere at the MSF and on the campus as a whole.

This is not to say that the football team’s on-field performance is irrelevant to the discussion; in fact, it remains one of the key obstacles to getting students away from ESPN and over to the MSF on Saturday afternoons.

However, I believe we must acknowledge there are certain things we can control about football culture and certain things we cannot. A 2-7 season is a rather large obstacle, but it is out of our control. What Hoya Blue and the Athletic Department do to create a positive atmosphere before, during, and after home games are very much in our control.

The remainder of this series will be divided into two parts. The first will address the obstacles to building a student football culture on campus, most of which we cannot control. The second will look at what we can control—and what can be done to promote great events, create a consistently memorable atmosphere, and maintain a strong culture around our football program.

If we manage to do each of these things, those students watching the noon Big Ten game on Saturdays may or may not be missing a great game at the MSF, but they’ll almost certainly be missing a memorable event.