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"Shotgun Draw!"
Dealing with 'The Demoralizer' and Fixing the Fledgling Football
Fan Base in Hoya Blue's New Era (Part 4B)

By John Hawkes

I like to think that I was a Hoya Blue Dorm Captain before Hoya Blue Dorm Captains existed. Back in the fall of 2000 however, my job description was “volunteer who puts up flyers”. On countless weeknights throughout the football season, I taped multicolored 8.5 X 11's to the walls of Village C West to promote the next game at Kehoe Field, and turned the door of VCW 614 into a billboard for all-things Hoya sports.

I'm a big believer that the most important members of Hoya Blue are the volunteers who work on the grassroots level in their dorms and amongst their friends trying to build interest in Hoya athletics. I personally learned a great deal about sports promotion by simply putting up flyers.

One of my favorite flyers, which I still have a copy of today, came from the Georgetown-Holy Cross football game that opened up my freshman year—or as it was promoted, the “Clash of the Jesuits”.

I can't recall a significant boost in student attendance in anticipation of this religious clash, but I was more impressed as a new Georgetown student that we apparently had a football rival. Of course I soon figured out that the “rivalry” existed largely in the mind of an enterprising Hoya Blue officer. Even still, I confess that I remember the phrase “Clash of the Jesuits” every time the Hoyas square off against the Crusaders to this day.

In truth, Georgetown doesn't have a true rival in its new football league as of yet; in fact, the Hoyas have yet to defeat half of their fellow Patriot League members since arriving in the conference. Holy Cross does present a compelling religious angle, and Bucknell has provided several of Georgetown's most exciting games over its Patriot League years, but in the end no Patriot League opponent can consistently claim “most hated” or even “most noticed” status among GU fans.

Part of the problem stems from the league itself. Of the Georgetown sports for which Hoya Blue actively encourages student attendance, only football does not play at the highest possible competition level, the Patriot League being a Division I-AA conference. Further, only football and men's lacrosse do not compete in the Big East conference. What both sports miss out on, then, is a sense of familiarity among fans with Georgetown's regular conference opponents that breeds interest in otherwise unremarkable games.

To use one example, there is no reason that an early season men's soccer match between two teams with little preseason buzz or postseason aspirations—who will both ultimately finish second from the bottom of their division—should generate much fan interest. And yet, because those two teams were Georgetown and Syracuse, several hundred Hoya Hooligans showed up at North Kehoe Field and formed the largest student section at a men's soccer game in recent memory.

The cache offered by a Big East rival that competes with Georgetown across a number of sports is hard to underestimate. Though Georgetown fans may have little knowledge of Villanova's women's field hockey team, their reflexive psychological hatred of the home of the 1985 NCAA Men's Basketball Champion and frequent Hoya Big East foe is more than enough to stir up interest in a future game.

What's more, the Big East conference provides quality as well as cache. For the second year in a row, the Big East Conference sent seven men's soccer teams to the NCAA Tournament, a mark equaled by the Big East women's teams. The season finale of the women's season offered the chance for Hoya fans to see the #1 and undefeated Notre Dame Fighting Irish at North Kehoe Field. Across the board, Big East affiliation means not only notable rivalries, but also a notable step up in the quality of opponents and what Head Hoya Hooligan Peter Keszler has rather artfully described as “sexier opponents”.

Even the ECAC offers solid, if slightly less familiar, rivalries. Georgetown's men's lacrosse home schedule this past season featured a game with eventual NCAA runner-up UMass, a perennial Hoya conference rival. The season before, an overtime win at North Kehoe Field propelled another ECAC squad, Penn State, into an at-large NCAA berth.

The Patriot League, and I-AA football in general, have yet to provide the kind of buzz needed to bring students out of their dorms automatically. Part of the problem is simple ignorance of the teams involved. In his discussion of sexier opponents, Keszler remarked to me that if Georgetown ever even played a top 25 I-AA football team, we'd get destroyed. Of course, the Hoyas did play a Top 25 team a few weeks ago—and fared respectably enough, losing on the road to Charleston Southern 24-10.

It's hardly a condemnable mistake. While most casual football fans have sufficient knowledge of the Top 10 in the latest BCS rankings at any given time, how many Georgetown football fans would even know 10 of the Top 25 I-AA teams?

(I made it to six before I had to look.)

Matt Kamenski does perhaps the best job of cutting right to the core of the problem: “By playing in the Big East in practically every other sport,” he told HoyaSaxa.com, “I think students view football with its Patriot League affiliation as somewhat of a ‘lesser' endeavor, as we play teams that many of us hadn't even heard of prior to coming here.”

There is some help on the way on the Hoyas' schedule. If there are any teams in I-AA football that carry instant name-recognition among the common Georgetown student, the programs of the Ivy League would be it. Thanks in part to an initiative begun by former Coach Bob Benson, the Hoyas have recently played no less than five games against Ivy League opponents including Cornell, Brown, and Columbia, and are slated to play non-conference games against Yale, Cornell, and Penn in the 2007 season.

These sorts of “sexy opponents” offer Hoya Blue their best chance yet to ingrain in the psychology of Georgetown's student fans that their football team does in fact play marquee opponents. No student will be under the illusion that Cornell is somehow the Division I-AA equivalent of playing Notre Dame. However, if Hoya Blue were to put them under the illusion that a rivalry against Cornell was the Division I-AA football equivalent of playing Notre Dame in basketball, that might not be such a bad start.

As I was walking with a group of Hoya Blue members to Midnight Madness a few weeks ago, we paused outside of O'Donovan cafeteria to take a look at the handiwork of a particularly motivated volunteer. This particular volunteer had seemingly on his volition gone throughout campus flyering for an event the following day that seemed destined to be conducted in the shadow of Midnight Madness.

Had an enterprising football fan taken up the charge of spreading the word about tomorrow's game?

Well, technically yes. The flyers—advertising the Georgetown vs. West Virginia soccer game—were the work of Head Hoya Hooligan Peter Keszler, who had indeed conducted his promotional effort largely on his own and without any formal direction (or, to be honest, any knowledge) from most of the Hoya Blue leadership. The night of Midnight Madness, I saw more of Pete's flyers than Hoya Blue flyers advertising the Bucknell football game.

Hoya Blue was placed in an awkward position by the fact that Pete's Hooligans would be marching on together at North Kehoe Field at the same time Hoya Blue was banging their Pots-n-Spoons at the MSF. It's one of the scattered times a soccer and football game have collided on campus. But it was the first time that soccer seemed to have the upper hand.

At halftime of the Bucknell game, no less than five members of the Hoya Blue cheering section—a larger percentage of the total crowd than anyone would like to admit—pledged that they'd be back after they “checked out” the soccer game. None returned before the final minutes of the football game, after the soccer match was decided.

So what drew them up to Kehoe Field?

Much of it has to do with a fundamental difference between soccer culture and football culture at Georgetown. The former is predicated on creating the most enjoyable and participatory fan environment possible. This is not to say that Hoya Blue doesn't attempt this for football games. Yet soccer games are, by the admission of everyone I talked to in Hoya Blue, a far better setup for creating the type of fun, rowdy, and memorably student fan experience on which a culture can be created. The soccer bleachers are literally an arm's length from the visiting bench. Students are packed tightly into standing rows of dark blue shirts, singing remixed British soccer songs. Above all, there is a distinct sense of camaraderie among the Hoya Hooligans that doesn't yet exist among the members of Pots-n-Spoons.

Pete Keszler's efforts have been instrumental in the success of soccer promotions as well. Almost immediately, soccer games were the scene of pre-game barbecues and impromptu sandwich runs for Keszler's mother, whereas the first legitimate Hoya Blue event for a football game didn't take place until the Lehigh pre-game event in mid-October.

What's more, the Hoya Hooligans even spawned their own superstar in freshman Matt Hare, or “British Matt” as he's often referred to by Hoya Hooligans who have a rudimentary understanding of foreign accents but not last names. The sometimes-Santa Hat clad Leeds United fan has become to the student section at soccer games something of a combination of Hoya Blue President Kurt Muhlbauer's basketball alter ego and the uber-Yell Leader of Hoya Blue's 2005-2006 campaign Mark Murphy. That dozens of Hoya Blue volunteers, some for whom soccer isn't even on their sports radar, can sing the chorus of the Leeds United song “Marching On Together” is a testament to the tremendous impact even one dedicated fan can have on the culture of a particular sport. If Pete Keszler is the heart of the Hoya Hooligans, Hare is its soul…and slightly off-key singing voice.

“Without [Matt] we don't have nearly as successful of a season in the stands,” Keszler wrote me last month, “No such individual exists for football.”

It would be too simplistic to minimize the difficulty Hoya Blue has had promoting football to a student audience to the fact that there's no “British Matt” for American football. But this problem does speak to a large issue regarding sports culture at Georgetown.

No matter what the sport, no matter what the record of the team competing, no matter how sexy the football…at the end of the day, attending a sporting event is an entertainment choice. And that sport is, indeed, an EVENT. A football game, soccer match, swim meet…none of these are events in themselves for fans. Rather, they are part of an entertainment package that includes the game/match/meet itself, the fan experience in the stands, and the promotion provided before, during, and after the game.

Hoya Blue has had tremendous success with the Hoya Hooligans despite the worst men's soccer season in two decades because they've recognized these facts, and have promoted a culture of soccer fans rather than a game to attend.

This should be an instructive lesson for the club. While there may be numerous roadblocks to a legitimate student football culture placed before Hoya Blue by lack of style, stars, and suspense, these CAN be overcome if they aren't permitted to be the sum total of the football experience at Georgetown.

Hoya Blue can't make the football team into a winner overnight. They can't bring SexyBack. But with a coherent, season-long strategy for making football games into a true event for students, Hoya Blue might one day soon move football much higher on everyone's totem pole, and move football culture into the forefront of campus life in the fall season.

(Running back Erik Carter caught the game-winning touchdown pass against Marist from…you know…that #10 guy.)