Home > John Hawkes Archive

"Shotgun Draw!"
Dealing with 'The Demoralizer' and Fixing the Fledgling Football
Fan Base in Hoya Blue's New Era (Part 5, Section 2)

By John Hawkes

Possession #2: DURING THE GAME

One of my favorite things about High School football were the hot wings.

Our school's outdated football stadium featured the hallmark of High School concessions—the Booster-Club run shack selling undercooked hot dogs, Big Grabs of Doritos, and the finest generic sodas the local discount market/wholesaler could provide. Many a friend of mine made their weekly Friday meal a melange of Snickers, Skittles, and Dr. Thunder.

Occasionally however (but with no discernible pattern), a local vendor would set up a small folding table adjacent to the Home bleachers from which they offered a selection of fine foods sharing a similar theme—they were all pickled and shoved into oversized jars. Pickles, sausages, hardboiled eggs…if it was soaking in brine, they were selling it. The one exception were aluminum trays by the dozen filled with the best hot wings I have ever tasted in my life. Two dollars (roughly the price of a Snicker bar, bag of Skittles, and a Dr. Thunder) got you a half dozen spicy chicken appendages and your choice from a table filled with bags of white bread (I was a Wonder Bread man).

The Al Sutton Stadium was hardly an intimidating or aesthetically pleasing cathedral of football. The sod was in desperate need of replanting. The bleachers bore a double coat of rust. The stadium was affectionately referred to by its acronym—The ASS.

But it served the best finger lickin' chicken in the entire state of Florida, I'm convinced.

I think Matt Kamenski is probably onto something when he suggests that in order to improve the fan experience at the Multi-Sport Facility, Georgetown “needs to do something that doesn't even occur during the game.” Matt is referring, of course, to establishing a pre-game tailgate for Hoyas football games. One of the longest-standing suggestion by student and alumni fans alike, creating a tailgate tradition is often inexorably linked with improving football culture on a college campus—even a High School campus.

In the section of this series dealing with roadblocks to student football culture, much of the discussion centered on the football team's on-field performance. While it is clear that Hoya Blue is powerless to address won-loss records, what they can do “during the game” is stretch the game experience out beyond the constraints of four quarters of football.

Any promotion, any organized party, any plate of hot wings that turns a football game from an exhibition into entertainment for fans is a worthy cause (if done right). Such efforts turn a game “into an event,” Matt remarks, “and makes the experience all the more enjoyable.”

Hoya Blue's Lehigh game party follows in a long line of pre-game festivities in the vicinity of Kehoe and Harbin Fields and the MSF. For years, Lot T adjacent to the MSF's north end zone was a tailgate central for Georgetown Homecomings, visiting team spreads, and an entrepreneurial group of Georgetown alums known as the BEER G.U.T.S (Georgetown University Tailgating Society).

Tailgating at Georgetown is hardly a new idea. Football-focused tailgating probably is.

Each of the above tailgates is well-intentioned but falls short of an ideal situation for building a true football culture. The Lot T-era of Georgetown Homecoming tailgating was more remarkable for how few students came to the football game far up the hill at Kehoe Field; one could reasonably argue that Georgetown's current early-ending, no-cars-allowed McDonough parking lot Homecoming tailgates are a direct result of low turnout at Kehoe thanks to tailgating. The BEER G.U.T.S. are for the most part highly devoted die-hards of Georgetown football (many are ex-players); however, their impact on the game atmosphere was always limited by their location 20 yards beyond the end zone. Further, construction on business school facilities has officially shut the gates on the Lot T tailgate era.

Hoya Blue's Village A rooftop tailgate was a well-intention and well-promoted event; Matt is right to state that the event “got more people to the game and even rowdier than usual”. It's just hard to take a “rowdier than usual” football crowd as seriously knowing that they've been fired up with a tape of a basketball game.

The Duke tape poses the same problem for football promotions as the BBALL TIX sign Hoya Blue hung on their NSO tables. Neither item is anything but positive in and of itself. But if we're addressing football's place on the totem pole of students' attention, they are a troubling sign (or scene).

Football tailgates and pre-game parties are absolutely a viable and winning strategy for promoting Georgetown football to students, and for building a better sports culture on campus. But Hoya Blue needs to remember…they are FOOTBALL tailgates. Taking football seriously means treating it as a serious event and a serious promotion, not an afterthought to the upcoming basketball season.

Taking football seriously means that tailgates or pre-game events should be held for every Hoyas home game without exception.

The Duke tape at the Lehigh tailgate is ultimately more of a symbolic point; any fair assessment of the event should note the large crowd of students that attended both the tailgate and the game, as well as the fact that the event was held despite poor weather conditions. For those two facts Hoya Blue deserves a great deal of commendation. However, they likely also deserve criticism for cancelling a pre-game barbecue before the Stony Brook game and not planning an event for the Bucknell game, on two football Saturdays featuring ideal weather conditions.

The Stony Brook game fell on the same day as a mandatory freshman academic workshop scheduled during the football game (that this occurred should be noted when the importance of football at Georgetown University is considered). Hoya Blue made the decision that with 25% of its available audience for a football tailgate already committed elsewhere, it wasn't worth the effort to promote a tailgate. I wondered at the time—what of the other 75%? Further, as the academic workshop would force students to leave for the Healy building in the prime tailgating period period before the football game, why not bring the tailgate to the students by moving it to Harbin patio (where an entire dorm of students was guaranteed to pass as burgers hit the grill) once news of the workshop broke?

The Bucknell game fell the night after Midnight Madness—and Midnight Madness after-parties, of whom few were as well—attended or as well-promoted as Hoya Blue's. The lack of a Bucknell event was a consequence of fatigue more than anything else. But fatigue from what? Hoya Blue's role in another pre-game tailgate—the pre-Midnight Madness festivities—had been drastically downgraded from the previous season. Indeed, Hoya Blue's role at Midnight Madness seemed confined to making and holding (rather successful) poster board signs for Hoya recruits. Surely there was someone in Hoya Blue willing to wake up an hour or so early on Saturday morning to move a grill and a cooler to the MSF? And yet as I walked into the stadium at 10 minutes to 1pm the morning after Midnight Madness, off of 5 hours of sleep myself, I found myself the first Hoya Blue section member to arrive at the stadium.

Here, a Head of Hoya Blue football operations can be an asset. On my way to Midnight Madness, I passed several flyers promoting the men's soccer game against West Virginia, which occurred at the same time as the Bucknell game. One dedicated die-hard, in this case Hoya Hooligan leader Peter Keszler, had single-handedly pulled of a reasonable and respectable promotion for a soccer game despite the “hectic” Midnight Madness season. I'm confident his American football counterpart could do the same for 5 or 6 home games a season.

One of the new wrinkles Coach Kelly has brought to Georgetown football this season is the team's entrance to the Multi Sport Facility. Rather than a long walk up the alley-way next to the McDonough-adjacent power station, the blue-clad Hoyas now run through the archway of the Southwest Quad on their way into the stadium. Curious, then, that with the Southwest Quad becoming the scene of what should rightfully be the most electric moment in the pre-game buildup to a big Saturday contest, that Hoya Blue has been conspicuously absent from the SWQ on their way to the MSF. Whereas last season, each of the Hoya Blue football tailgates was held yards away from where the football team would make their grand entrance (and perhaps more importantly, their walk from McDonough Gym to the pre-game staging area), this season Hoya Blue's one planned event took place in a location—the Village A rooftop—where it is impossible to see the MSF or even hear the band's pre-game warmups.

Many members of Hoya Blue view the rooftop apartment two of their board members share as one of the club's most important promotional advantages. Having been to a number of promotions (and other events) there, I would agree wholeheartedly.

Except for in the case of football.

When you get down to it, a barbecue next to a football stadium on a Saturday morning is a tailgate. A barbecue on the Village A patio on a Saturday morning…is a rooftop party.

Future Hoya Blue tailgates, whether organized by the club, the athletic department, or the Gridiron Club, must always be within sight of the MSF if they are to truly be a representative part of the Georgetown football culture.

Finally, Hoya Blue should approach both the Athletic Department and the Gridiron Club for support in their efforts to build a pre-game atmosphere at Georgetown football games. As a member of the Hoya Hoop Club Executive Board, I'm proud of our relationship with Hoya Blue—both as a promotional partnership and a financial relationship. Funding 5 to 6 tailgates for an expanding student section at an early stage in the year places great strain on Hoya Blue's budget. But holding tailgates and building student support from the get-go are crucial to the success of football promotions on campus, and they should receive the full financial and logistical support of all relevant parties.

Once that financial support is secured, the combination of good food, good music, and good times will be easy enough for students to support.

SECOND DOWN: IF THEY WON'T BUILD IT, BUILD AN ATMOSPHERE!

Recently, as part of a piece exploring the potential of the Multi-Sport Facility, Hoya columnist Raymond Borgone interviewed Georgetown Director of Athletics Bernard Muir [“MSF Can Be GU's Asset,” 11/03/06]. Readers are enticed with a detailed list of proposed improvements to Georgetown's home football stadium, all part of a by now well-known multi-phase development plant. New stands, a renovated press box, exterior construction, and a state of the art scoreboard paint a picture in the reader's mind of if not a football cathedral, than at least a comfortable home for the Hoyas.

And then, Bernard Muir runs The Demoralizer.

“As for a timetable, I can't give you one,” he tells Borgone.

After reading what begins as ostensibly a positive, forward-looking glimpse into the future of Georgetown football culture, I was convinced that we ought to change the acronym from Multi-Sport Facility to Maybe Someday in the Future.

To be fair, the Multi-Sport Facility isn't The ASS. It's actually a great Division I lacrosse venue (and perhaps in future years a Major League Lacrosse venue). Yet in many ways, students are correct to compare it, sometimes unfavorably, to their High School's stadium. Indeed, of all the facilities improvements to the MSF over the past two years, the most striking may be a horse race between the installation of FieldTurf and the installation of dual-level double-wide bathroom trailers.

And yet, none of this means it can't be the site of a memorable game atmosphere.

While the MSF may not be a luxury high rise, it does have perhaps the most important advantage in real estate: location, location, location.

Framed by two freshman dorms (Harbin and Village C West) and the newest dormitory on campus (the Southwest Quadrangle), the MSF is at the heart of roughly a quarter of the undergraduate living space on campus. Literally thousands of students pass within yards of the MSF each Saturday morning, as the only dining hall on campus is a long post pattern away from the south end zone.

Football faces some constraints that other Georgetown sports do not, not the least of which is a somewhat fan-unfriendly setup.

“Just from the setup,” Pete Keszler tells me, “soccer is a much more fun environment for fans. It's unique that the fans are so close to the opposing teams' bench, able to directly heckle people.”

Where soccer profits from proximity, volleyball games (a relatively recent addition to the Hoya Blue calendar) benefit from the cacophonous noise-box that is McDonough Arena, where a crowd of 50 die-hards might as well be a Sea of Gray at the Verizon Center. The aforementioned sea makes its impact with wave after wave of students pouring through the entry ways to the NBA-caliber arena.

Football has neither the closeness, the echo, not the head count of Hoya Blue's other hot tickets.

But all the same, none have as good a location as football.

On the same screen saver slide show with the picture of the Hoya Blue table at NSO, I also have a snapshot I took at the Georgetown-Holy Cross football game. Midway through the first half, I glanced beyond the visitor's fans to the west side of Harbin Hall. Reading up and down six stories, I noticed poster board signs hung by enterprising freshmen spelling out HOYA SAXA vertically along a group of windows. Occasionally, I'll peer over towards Kennedy Hall and see the open windows of Southwest Quad fans taking in the game, or just hanging a GO HOYAS sign out the window.

If it may be years until Georgetown's football facilities are upgraded, there is no reason why Hoya Blue and Georgetown's student body can't undertake a few aesthetic improvements to the neighborhood right now. With the help of their dorm captains, Hoya Blue should encourage students living in Village C West, the west side of Harbin, and Kennedy Hall to hang pro-Hoya propaganda from any and every piece of available property. Banners should hang from windows. Student catching a glance at a dorm should get a spelling lesson.

The signage shouldn't stop a few stories up. Hoya Blue, as anyone who attends Midnight Madness and follows basketball recruiting will recognize, is a surprising artistic force in addition to being a promotional juggernaut. Banners, signs, and sheets should be seen at every game, in every part of the MSF.

Interestingly, the most encouraging sign for the potential of the MSF in Ray Borgone's column was a hypothetical scenario cut from the draft that made it to print in The Hoya. In the un-printed introduction, Borgone asks readers to imagine a sold-out MSF where fans “line the railing of Harbin Patio and the Leavey Esplanade” and “pack the terrace connecting the esplanade to the new business school building.”

What may be the most encouraging sign yet for progress on building a new MSF is the progress being made on another project next door. With construction underway on the new McDonough School of Business facility on Lot T (the site of so many Georgetown tailgates), the MSF will now be connected not only to the center of residential life on campus, but also the nexus of academic and social life on the Hilltop. Perhaps the future of football culture on campus lies not in the MSF, but in the MSB.

THIRD DOWN: A Sea of Blue

If, to extend the real estate metaphor, the Multi-Sport Facility is in a nice neighborhood, it is one that lacks entertainment options.

Last week, I had a conversation with Hoya Blue's President Kurt Muhlbauer during which I joked about the overblown mini-controversy over the addition of an America Online logo to the “We Are Georgetown” student section t-shirt for the 2006-2007 basketball season. Playing the role of an anti-corporate activist, I playfully suggested I'd find a roll of duct tape to cover the offending logo, or go without a new WAG shirt in protest.

Whatever, Kurt told me. As long as I wore gray it didn't really matter what was on the shirt.

This is a significant point to make. Creating school spirit, or a strong and unified student section, isn't about the logo on the front of a shirt—or even the color of said garment. Rather, the important thing to be preserved is the atmosphere and experience of attending a game. To the extent that a common color of shirt contributes to that, it should be protected and encouraged as much as possible.

Each sport at Georgetown has something of a unique atmospheric touch that provides a compelling draw for fans. Men's basketball draws its appeal from the size of the student section, the national TV audiences, the scores of cheers and songs yelled out in unison from two seas of gray. Men's soccer is a singing man's sport, with Hoya Hooligans belting out English soccer songs and harassing visiting opponents and coaching staffs. Volleyball has the advantage of often catching students at the peak time of week-ending energy releases on Friday nights, ensuring a raucous and celebratory student section.

Then there's football.

If Friday afternoon soccer starts are the least “busy” work period for a student, and Friday night volleyball games catch students at the height of their pre-gaming routine, Saturday morning football catches them coming off of a hangover.

If the Hoya Hooligans can stand mere feet away from an opponent's bench, and volleyball fans frequently harass opponents into mental errors, football seems surprisingly dull by comparison, with fans hunkered down behind the home bench near the 20 yard line.

Soccer has become successful because of making a British soccer tradition Hoya Blue's own, and volleyball has become a unique but unrivaled partner to creative promotions such as a Halloween costume contest. Football's most recognizable “unique” student section feature, by contrast, is Pots-n-Spoons, an idea stolen from a (forcibly) discontinued Hoya Blue soccer tradition of several years prior.

What's more, as the football season wore on, the student section increasingly adopted a futbol feel. Students at the Homecoming game were heard on several occasions to chant “The referee's a wanker!” and begin the first lines of popular soccer songs.

Hoya Blue die-hards have lamented that their spirit often fails to reach beyond a pocket of student fans in the front three rows of stands. This is as much a consequence of lack of attendance—plenty of student fans come to games and don't sit in the Hoya Blue section—as much as lack of a compelling reason to join in the fun.

The lack of a sufficiently defined Hoya Blue section is the most immediate problem. While generally the cast of students wearing “I Bleed Hoya Blue” shirts sit in the same part of the stadium, one would be hard pressed to call a pocket of blue amidst a hodgepodge of students and parents a “true student section,” as Hoya Blue members often refer to their ultimate goal.

Part of this problem is the physical lack of a defined student section. Whereas at basketball games, students are turned towards a specific set of sections, at football games it is left to Hoya Blue to create their own space. As the trend in student fandom has increasingly been to arrive at or just after kickoff, finding enough contiguous empty spaces can be a challenge. During the Bucknell game, Hoya Blue's “section” became a single row of barely 10 seats, owing to the lack of any other reasonable space for student fans at the start of the game. At the Homecoming game against Marist, the front row of the student section for the first quarter was populated by a Marist parent and his two elementary school aged sons. Something tells me had this occurred at a McDonough men's basketball game members of Hoya Blue would have gone into shock. As it was, the father and sons grew quickly tired of the continuous clanging of pots and spoons and left for the visitor's stands. Yet the fact that Hoya Blue shares its section with opposing fans and casual supporters poses questions about how compelling the student section experience truly is at Georgetown games.

The immediate remedy is to go back to a strategy attempted off and on for years at the MSF/Harbin Field—cordon off a separate student section prior to every home game, and permit only students to sit within that area until 15 minutes after kickoff. A true student experience at football games demands a true student section—there are no substitutes for this.

With this foundation built, Hoya Blue can move to expand and capitalize on other aspects of the fan experience at football games.

If Pots-n-Spoons is to be the defining characteristic of the student section, it must be encompass the entire student section. Hoya Blue current rotates approximately 8 pots and spoons between fans at football games. In the future, Hoya Blue's budget should allow for this number to be increased by at least another 8, and students should regularly be encouraged to bring their own kitchenware to football games.

These Pots-n-Spoons should ring out from a Sea of Blue. As successful as the Sea of Gray promotion has been for men's basketball, it would be foolish not to encourage a similar effort for football games, substituting the “I Bleed Hoya Blue” shirts worn in off-basketball seasons. With the success of “black outs” and “white outs” at major college football games across the nation in recent years, even a modest effort by Hoya Blue would pay a significant dividend here.

In-game cheering should also be improved. Soccer cheers, as good as they are, are best suited for soccer games. By working with the rapidly-improving GU Pep Band and Georgetown cheerleaders, Hoya Blue can create a unique and powerful game-day atmosphere that will not only bring in additional fans, but create additional havoc for opposing players.

A final idea centers on Hoya Blue's recent institution of a Volunteer Rewards Index (VRI) to track volunteer participation in the club's activities. In short, students who attend sporting events or Hoya Blue promotions are asked to mark a sign in sheet to confirm their participation, for which they are given rewards points on a scale according to the event (attendance at a football game is the second-highest point earner). While I favor the use of the VRI points system to promote attendance at Hoya Blue promotions, I would suggest that sign-in sheets are better distributed during the 4th quarter of games rather than the first half, so as to encourage students to attend full games.

Because after all one unique element of the fan experience lately at the MSF has been a number of last-minute victories.

FOURTH QUARTER: The Cult of that #10 Guy

At the time of this article's publication, five members of the Georgetown basketball team (plus one parent and a radio announcer) had been the subject of nodak89 songs. When the Georgetown pep band plays a certain Fountains of Wayne song at football games, Hoya fans replace the lyrics in the chorus to honor Jeff Green's Mom.

The cult of personality surrounding men's basketball personalities on the Georgetown campus is as integral a part of campus culture as chicken finger Thursdays. Students hold signs up at games claiming “The Chief Export of Roy Hibbert is Pain.” There is a Facebook group called “Jon Wallace for POTUS”. One of the hottest selling items on campus this fall has been a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “JTIII is MY Homeboy”.

I-AA football is a long way from Big East basketball when it comes to cults of personality. A basketball recruit's visit to Leo's will create instant discussion threads on the internet, not to mention more than likely a hand-drawn “Welcome” sign over the cafeteria. Yet most students wouldn't have recognized Luke McArdle, Georgetown football's career all-purpose yards leader, if he sat down at their table. In the days after basketball victories over Duke and Syracuse, students told stories of seeing players at parties across campus. Yet in the weeks after arguably Georgetown's biggest football victory in decades, its first Patriot League victory over Bucknell, Walter Bowser wasn't exactly beating off groupies in New South and Darnall. Students know what prospective basketball recruits such as Samardo Samuels look like based on recruiting web site videos, but I'll bet most can't pick starting QB Matt Bassuener out of a lineup.

Georgetown football lacks the star power of men's basketball, but not it's powerful personality. Reserve QB David Fajgenbaum is a Rhodes Scholar Finalist. Matt Bassuener has spanish-language broadcast experience. Freshman running back Charlie Houghton may well turn out to be the most explosive Hoya offensive player since Luke McArdle if his recent game performances are any indication of his future.

While none of these facts may prove worthy of immortalization in lyrical form, they are worthy of notice from every Georgetown student fan. What's more, the stories behind each of these three players are readily available: Fajgenbaum and Bassuener were profiled in a summer series on GUHoyas.com, and the Charlie Hougton-Luke McArdle comparison is offered up by tight end Matt Cooper in The Hoya's article recapping the Lafayette game.

Before each men's basketball game, a thread is tacked to the top of the Hoyatalk message board containing preview (and later recap) articles about the upcoming contest. Though I-AA football doesn't receive nearly the local or national coverage of I-A basketball, the articles that do make it to print deserve a read.

Hoya Blue can have an important educational role here. If one of the roadblocks to building student football culture is the lack of star power on the football team, this is at least partially because nobody knows much about the football team.

Accordingly, Hoya Blue should take it upon themselves to be a source of knowledge about Georgetown's football program. Promotional flyers should feature individual players and key facts about the featured player, rather than generic reminders of the matchup. Statistical milestones (such as Michael Ononibaku's pursuit of the GU sack record) and big game performances (such as anything Luke McArdle ever did) should be saluted.

Working along with the football-themed page I proposed previously in this series, Hoya Blue should provide a one-stop shop for links to feature articles on GUHoyas.com and in The Hoya, The Voice, and The Independent about Georgetown football and its players. Students should know, for instance, that Charlie Houghton was recently named Patriot League player of the week. They should read Harlan Goode's series on the team's Lafayette game week. They should appreciate the accomplishments and courage of David Fajgenbaum.

They should appreciate the team's on-field performance as well. Fortunately, both GU's projected 2007 starting QB and RB have four-syllable names (Matt Bass-ue-ner and Char-lie Hough-ton) that are made for chanting. With the majority of Georgetown's skill position players here for at least another year, there will be more than enough time to get to know the future stars of Georgetown football…provided Hoya Blue and the student section are willing to put in a little effort.