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"Shotgun Draw!"
Dealing with 'The Demoralizer' and Fixing the Fledgling Football
Fan Base in Hoya Blue's New Era (Part 5, Section 3)

By John Hawkes

“Ohmygod! It's 14-0…we're actually winning!”

It's 12:45 in the afternoon, and the girl on her cell phone who just pulled up to my left has clearly been drinking for several hours.

I'm standing on the grassy hill in the north end zone of Scott Stadium in Charlottesville on a sunny mid-November afternoon, watching an ACC contest between Virginia and Miami that is meaningful only in both teams' quest to secure bowl eligibility. I'm currently in the midst of what surely must be the most nightmarish of scenarios for an ex-Hoya Blue member—a rapidly expanding Sea of Orange.

And for a brief second, I'm propping up the girl on her cell phone who has called a friend to report the good news that the Cavaliers have built a two touchdown lead early in the second quarter—although she has no idea how.

She hangs up her cell phone, leaves her leaning pole behind, and stumbles and sways her way down the last few yards of the hill. It's at this point I notice her footwear—a pair of knee-high boots complete with long heels. A grass stain on her side gives away the obvious—she probably could have used somebody to lean on further up the hill.

Our cowgirl isn't the only late-arriver at the stadium this afternoon; on the contrary, a steady stream of students will arrive on the hill throughout the first half of the game. Many near me seem to share the same attitude—Ohmygod! It's 14-0…we're actually winning!—but not many seem to share much interest in the game itself.

In fact, the most transfixing action of the first half isn't on the field, but in the lower right corner of the hill. A season's worth of wear and tear and the morning's condensation have created a large patch of mud at the foot of the main thoroughfare down the slope. A group of students has gathered to watch their classmates attempt to traverse the slalom course, risking life, limb, and a mud-stained backside. They're rewarded handsomely for their patience, as nearly a dozen students—wearing flip flops, high heels, and a seersucker suit among other things—eat it onto the mud patch before I stop counting.

Quite an interesting slice of student football culture.

While I don't leave Scott Stadium on this Saturday impressed with the footwork or footwear of Virginia undergrads, there's quite a bit to admire about their football culture on the whole.

Though the hill/mudslide remains half-empty right up until kickoff, I arrived 60 minutes before the game to find a Sea of Orange already well-formed in the traditional student section in the stands adjacent to the north end zone. One enterprising student repeatedly taunted a group of younger Miami fans loitering near her section with a handwritten whiteboard reading “HURRICANES BLOW”.

Orange is a garish, repulsive color that nonetheless stands out and makes for an impressive crowd scene. A stadium filled with 50,000 fans in the color of traffic cones reminds me why at least visually a “Sea of Gray” is such a desirable goal for Georgetown games at the Verizon Center. In at least one way, Scott Stadium reminded me of the student section at the Verizon Center: lots of UVA students own Troll doll wigs.

Quite a few own fancy ties as well. While I personally find the idea of wearing a dress shirt and tie to a football game to be absurd, I have to admit a grudging respect for any individual willing to make this semi-fashion sacrifice. What's more, I credit Virginia students for developing such an idiosyncratic fan tradition that continues to be well-respected.

Even if UVA students (at least the ones that surrounded me) aren't the most mindful of the action on the field, they are fanatical about fan participation. The “student section” at UVA is at its best when it works in tandem with Scott Stadium's sound guy, who provides the songs—mostly standards like “Zombie Nation” and the opening riff of “Crazy Train”—that inspire both students and the Cavalier defense. If this is fandom at the touch of a button, at least on this afternoon the sound guy was pressing all the right buttons. At every appropriate moment—from third downs to one of the many occasions Miami was backed up against the north end zone—the UVA crowd was at its absolute loudest.

In the end, the most impressive thing I saw at the game happened off the field, and involved a somewhat dangerous entrance.

No, I didn't see a five-person pile-up at the mud patch.

But I did see a first in my years as a college football fan—a mascot parachuting onto the 50-yard line, set to a musical score and an animated battle scene on the stadium Jumbotron.

I left Scott Stadium having blown fifty dollars on an excruciatingly boring college football game (Ohmygod! UVA actually won 17-7!) but gained two important insights into what makes for a good student football culture.

From my experience with cowgirls and soiled seersucker suits in the north end zone, I learned how tradition can inform and improve football culture.

When the orange-haired UVA undergrads packed the sections in the corner of Scott Stadium an hour before kickoff, and when they slalomed, stumbled, and splatted down the hill in the north end zone, they were upholding a tradition that gives students a special place to sit at each football game, year after year.

When that entire student section—many wearing shirts and ties—locked arms after each touchdown to sing the “Good Old Song” and chant “Wah-Hoo-Wah,” they were participating in a tradition that makes their school truly unique among its rivals.

And that cowgirl on the cell phone? She was probably just a little unsteady headed down that slope because she'd participated in the Fourth-Year Fifth, a yearly tradition at UVA in which Seniors consume a prescribed amount of alcohol before heading down to the final home football game of the season.

Whether they're historic, melodic, or alcoholic, traditions make football culture better because they send a message that football games are a regular and important part of the campus community.

Georgetown has a great set of traditions that can be an asset to our football culture. Our Fight Song is, for my money, the best in college athletics, and has the added advantages of mentioning actual football opponents and not being sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”. We have a crowd chant that is so unique you need to know two different languages to translate it. And we have a student spirit organization in Hoya Blue that is unmatched amongst our Patriot League rivals.

What we don't have is a parachuting mascot (I suspect this has something to do with cost and fear of disrupting the flight pattern into Reagan National Airport with a giant bulldog).

The second insight I gained from my trip to UVA came from the parachuting Cavalier and my ex-roommate Jon from Georgetown. Jon, who is in Charlottesville getting his Ph.D., told me shows like the Amazing Flying Mascot were commonplace at UVA athletic events. The previous weekend, Jon told me, he'd seen almost the exact same Jumbotron show at UVA's first basketball game in the new John Paul Jones Arena—although instead of squashing an Ibis, the digital Cavalier fought a sword battle against the Arizona Wildcat. For the grand finale of that show, the UVA mascot rapelled from the roof of the arena onto center court amidst a pyrotechnics show.

Whether or not the sports teams at UVA are any good, Jon told me shortly after the Cavalier touched down at the 50-yard line, the school always seems to go the extra mile with its promotions.

That thought stuck with me the following evening. I was back in my normal habitat—a Sea of Gray. But instead of a 55,000 seat football stadium, I was seated in a 2,500 capacity practice gymnasium for Georgetown's basketball game against Old Dominion. The previous night, I'd watched an NCAA Men's Soccer Tournament game in a 7,000 capacity stadium on UVA's campus that features a newly-installed state-of-the-art video replay board. Back on the Hilltop, for the second consecutive time that I'd attended an on-campus event, the scoreboard malfunctioned during the first half.

There are a number of advantages a school like UVA has when it comes to promoting a sports culture that Georgetown simply never will. The Hoyas will never play in a 55,000 seat on campus football stadium; most Hoya fans I would imagine will be happy just to see the MSF reach completion (including the installation of a video display on the scoreboard). I will never walk to Georgetown's future MSF down a winding street past families flying their school colors and tailgating on their front lawns; the small-city, big-college dynamic of Charlottesville (or State College, or Gainesville, or a whole list of other schools and cities) is impossible to recreate in Washington, DC. There will almost certainly never be a Sugar Daddy for the MSF (or perhaps Georgetown athletics in general) like Paul Tudor Jones II, the $35 million donor who named UVA's John Paul Jones Arena after his father.

At Georgetown, we just don't have the money or resources to throw at plane flights and parachutes for our mascot. Football culture—really, any sports culture at Georgetown—isn't bought. It's earned—through the hard work of our student-athletes and coaching staffs to build winning programs, through the dedication of our Athletic Department staff, from Athletic Director Bernard Muir down to a Sports Promotions intern, and most importantly through the creativity and effort of Hoya Blue and its volunteers.

If there's one thing I'd want Hoya Blue or anybody involved with promoting football on campus to remember from this series, it's that creativity and honest effort—not money, facilities, or the team's record—are the most important factors in building a sports culture at Georgetown.

Possession #3: AFTER THE GAME

FIRST DOWN: The HOYAS-Lafayette RECAP

In terms of prestige, I suppose the highest position I've ever held in Hoya Blue is my current one.

Going on my third year since graduating from Georgetown, I can only charitably be called a “member” of Hoya Blue. However, my work has appeared on the Hoya Blue webpage since last basketball season, when the club suggested they post my game recaps as a way to add content to their site.

I've been writing game recaps of Georgetown basketball games for about five years now. I've gone through several tweaks and changes in format, and my writing style has evolved over time. However, from the first season of loosely-organized thoughts to the current three-part format I use, I've consistently gotten more feedback about one section than any other:

Non-game observations.

Non-game observations are just that—things I notice that don't pertain directly to the action on the court. They usually include a number of bullet points about Hoya Blue's promotions or how the student section performed on a given night, what kind of music was played in the Verizon Center before the game, or what I saw, heard, ate, or ran into on the way to and from the game.

One of the most common reactions I received from readers early in my “career” as a recapper was that I made them feel as if they had actually been at the game. Interestingly, this comment was usually uttered in relation to my non-game observations. This fact has led me to conclude over time that what ultimately makes a game memorable is just as often the experience of being at the game and part of the game atmosphere than the anything that actually happens during the game itself.

Accordingly, it should follow that if we're looking to develop a student football culture around the experience of attending football games, the “non-game” experiences are important to promote in addition to the product on the field.

I've already suggested that Hoya Blue develop a section of its webpage devoted to Georgetown football. Here I'd like to formally suggest an addition I hinted at previously: Hoya Blue should include some form of game recap after every home football game during the season as part of the content on its webpage.

So what should these game recaps cover?

A traditional game recap approach is probably not warranted here. A three hour football game with constant stoppages of play is significantly more difficult to chronicle in the succinct fashion that a good recap would require than a two hour basketball game with quick possession changes and scoring runs.

This is not to say that “traditional” material should be ignored. The best example I could offer here would be a modified version of the “Player Evaluations” section of my own basketball recaps. Ideally, the goal would not be to evaluate, but rather to highlight.

If Charlie Houghton runs for over 100 yards, the student fans of Georgetown should know about it.

If Matt Bassuener throws for a couple of touchdown passes, give him some publicity.

If Brent Craft has a Hester-like performance at wide receiver, he should be treated like the hero that he is on the Hoya Blue football page.

Using a player-focused model for the “traditional” part of the recap improves name recognition amongst the student body, and provides a number of positive reasons to cheer for the Hoyas the next time out at the MSF.

For the purposes of a football recap, however, “non-game” observations should be the focus. If the “traditional” side of a recap will improve name recognition of football players, the “non-game” observations will provide a sort of name recognition amongst the student body for the idea of going to football games.

A “non-game” observation can be any of the items I've previously suggested as content for a Hoya Blue football webpage—including game photos and summaries of Hoya Blue promotions at that game. Additionally, naming a “Student Fan of the Game” would be a good source of buzz within the club's die-hard fan circles.

A good guideline would be the following: What did Hoya Blue or the student section do at the game that was unique? What made the game exciting for fans? How could you tell that everyone was having a good time? If you had to convince a fellow student to come to the next game, what would you tell them about your experience at the last one?

Any recap should always end with information about Hoya Blue's next game. Building a football culture is largely about building momentum—Hoya Blue should always be looking to build on the atmosphere at its football promotions and create a bigger and better student section for the next round of photos and non-game observations.

SECOND DOWN: Take Your Cues from the Coach

I'm told that men's soccer coach Brian Wiese is magic, and that he wears a magic hat.

I haven't verified either claim scientifically, but I do know from experience that he wields a razor-sharp sense of observation and humor.

While researching my previous series for Generation Burton, “It's Been a Summer,” I spent time with Peter Keszler, the head of Hoya Blue's soccer operations. Probably the most productive five minutes I spent with Peter, and perhaps in the entire time I've been researching columns for this website, were during a conversation with Coach Wiese prior to a men's soccer game against St. John's in September.

Coach Wiese was making conversation with Pete, myself, and a third Hoya Blue volunteer as we set up for the day's promotions, which included a pre-game barbecue. The question arose—how many people did Hoya Blue expect to have at the game today? Coach Wiese deadpanned what is now one of my favorite lines on the subject of sports culture at Georgetown, simplifying the problem with getting big student fan attendance on this particular afternoon into four words:

Sunday, study, sleep, NFL.

(Incidentally, if you change the day of the week and “NFL” to “CFB” it's a pretty handy description of the difficulty Georgetown football faces.)

So Brian Wiese is possibly magic, but undeniably realistic. The adjective that most sticks out from the conversation we had with the coach however…is grateful. Coach Wiese mentioned on several occasions how happy he was with the support his team had been getting from the Hoya Hooligans so far in the season, and encouraged Hoya Blue to do everything they could (short of swearing) to keep it up for the rest of the year. Even as he broke the news to us about the “velvet rope” that had been set up behind the opponent's bench because of complaints from the previous game's opponent (Syracuse), I could tell that he was amused by the whole situation and secretly happy to have the type of fan support that could so rattle a league rival.

Much of Hoya Blue's promotional efforts during the men's soccer season were shaped by the relationship between Pete Keszler, Coach Wiese, and the members of the soccer team. Such a relationship, whether it consists of meetings at which actual planning occurs or just informal feedback, is significant for building a promotional strategy behind a given sport in a couple of ways.

The first was neatly summed up by Pete when I asked him why soccer promotions had fared so much better than football this season. Identifying the soccer coaching staff as one of the key factors, Pete told me: “Coach Wiese was committed to getting a good home environment and will be helping over the next years to make it even better.”

Having that commitment from the coaching staff gives Pete or whoever eventually succeeds him as Hoya Blue's soccer guru the assurance that their efforts are being put to good use.

The second positive influence a relationship with a coach can have on promotional efforts is more motivational than practical.

During his speech at last year's Hoya Hoop Club Banquet, John Thompson III recognized Hoya Blue's Executive Board (who were in attendance) for their efforts during the basketball season, and led a standing ovation from the members and guests in the ballroom (he made a similar gesture during this year's New Student Orientation Pep Rally).

After the Banquet, no less than three members of Hoya Blue's Executive Board posted recaps of the event on the Hoyatalk message board, each referencing Coach Thompson's thank you to the club. In fact, one member posted a link to a video of the Banquet and specifically noted the time at which the thank you occurred.

Two quotes from that thread stood out to me. The first was from a Hoya Blue Executive who said the Banquet: “motivated me even more to work hard to keep getting people out to games and to keep trying to drum up more and more support for the program.” The second was a much simpler but nonetheless revealing sentiment from another Hoya Blue member whose response to JT3 honoring Hoya Blue was to say: “I am very glad we have such a great coach.”

Having a coach like John Thompson III constantly giving them positive reinforcement gives Hoya Blue the assurance that their promotional efforts are appreciated.

Knowing that their promotional efforts are both being put to good use and appreciated by the targets of the promotion, it follows, would seem to make Hoya Blue more likely to go the extra mile to try and build up a culture of support behind a given sport.

In his discussion about the home environment he and Coach Wiese were working to build at soccer games, Pete Keszler commented that “football hasn't tried to create that environment.”

I have no way of evaluating whether or not this is true. I simply don't know, for instance, whether anyone from Hoya Blue approached Coach Kelly or any of his players this season about partnering up on promotional strategies. I don't know whether football lends itself as conveniently to such a relationship as soccer. I'm not sure whether Pete Keszler's family relationship to a member of the soccer team was a decisive factor in how willing the team was to work with him.

But whether or not anyone associated with the football team has tried to build a relationship with Hoya Blue to this point, I do think the club should take the initiative this off-season and begin that process.

If Hoya Blue appoints a Head of Football Operations, one of their first duties should be to meet with Coach Kelly to discuss how Hoya Blue can work before, during, and after the season to help sell the football program to students on campus. This may initially take the form of an information session as much as anything; one of the biggest obstacles to building support for the football team, as we've already seen, is that most of the players are relatively anonymous figures on campus, their accomplishments largely unrecognized. The football coaching staff—in fact, even the players themselves—can be an invaluable resource for Hoya Blue by giving them clues as to which players are going to have breakout seasons, which kinds of cheers are most effective to a player on the field, or what football players themselves would like to see done on campus to promote the sport they love.

Building a relationship with the coaching staff may also open doors for Hoya Blue within the Athletic Department or the Gridiron Club, who can both be assets if Hoya Blue is looking to expand their promotional efforts to include tailgating or formal pre-game events for a large section of student fans.

Most importantly though, having a productive relationship with Coach Kelly—who by every account appears to have a long-term commitment to building a winning tradition for Georgetown football—will serve as a reinforcement for Hoya Blue that their football efforts are both helpful and appreciated.

THIRD DOWN: Don't Lose Momentum

The above passage is from the first Generation Burton column I wrote over two years ago. I wrote that passage at what I felt was a crucial turning point for student basketball culture.

If you asked Georgetown fans what the biggest turning point has been in the fortunes of our basketball program over the past few years, I suspect more people would point to the hiring of John Thompson III than the firing of Craig Esherick. With good reason—from his offensive system to his charismatic personality, JT3 has been the driving force behind Georgetown's revival as a major player on the college basketball scene.

But when it comes to student basketball culture, I still look back on the evening of March 16, 2004 as the turning point.

To put it bluntly—most students had stopped caring about Georgetown basketball by the end of the 2003-2004 season. Student attendance at the MCI Center had fallen dramatically over the course of the season, the fan environment had become increasingly hostile towards the team and coaches, and neither of the previous two facts were helped by the decline into obsolescence of Hoya Blue. Student basketball culture had almost no momentum behind it—the basketball team ended the year with nine consecutive losses and posted its first losing regular season since the 1972-1973 campaign, and students and alumni alike had grown increasingly disillusioned with the perceived intransigence of Esherick and Athletic Director Joe Lang in the face of the program's troubles.

The night Esherick was fired, as I recount in my first column, for the first time in a long while gave students across the campus a reason to care about (or at least notice) the men's basketball team. The personnel move also signaled that Georgetown was willing to pursue a new direction with its program, a fact that over the next year was paralleled with the rise of a grass roots campaign of Georgetown student fans who arrived at games early, cheered louder and involved more student fans than anyone could have imagined in recent years, promoted Hoya basketball around campus with their own time and resources, and ultimately formed the core group of a newly-reformed Hoya Blue organization after John Thompson III's first season.

I bring up this story to illustrate—coaching changes and winning seasons can make the difference in a successful sports program, but a successful sports culture (and that's what we're going for here with football) is created through the efforts of a group such as Hoya Blue or the unaffiliated students from the 2004-2005 season who eventually became Hoya Blue to build up momentum through promotions and general spirit.

Whenever someone says—“Well, students will start coming when the team starts winning!”—I wonder how they would account for the Hoya Hooligans, who have built a soccer culture at Georgetown almost from scratch in two short years despite the men's soccer team having had their worst season in almost 20 years in 2006.

I will always be a believer in Hoya Blue's ability to be the driving force behind student sports culture on campus. But to fulfill this rather ambitious role, they have to constantly be on their game, and mindful to keep building momentum at every opportunity.

And this is where we get to football.

The following is the list of Georgetown football home games during the 2006 season, and the Hoya Blue promotions at each:

Sept. 2: Holy Cross – none (weather)
Sept. 9: Stony Brook – none (freshman book event)
Oct. 7: Lehigh – pre-game party
Oct. 14: Bucknell – none (Midnight Madness)
Nov. 4: Marist – post-game party

Even if you count the Homecoming tailgate prior to the Marist game, this leaves only two occasions on the season in which Hoya Blue conducted an event or promotion designed to draw students to a Hoya football game. As it was, this meant that each football event was separated by an interval of about a month.

It's probably harsh to blame Hoya Blue for the lack of promotions for football this season. The club hardly controls the weather that cancelled a planned barbecue for the Holy Cross game; in fact, Hoya Blue gamely held its pre-game party for Lehigh despite a cold, rainy morning. The University is more to blame for eliminating a quarter of the available student fans on the afternoon of the Stony Brook game and cutting into the core demographic for a Hoya Blue tailgate. Finally, I've received feedback from members of Hoya Blue since this column series debuted explaining that running an event for the Bucknell game on the morning after Midnight Madness, one of Hoya Blue's biggest events of the fall season, was simply outside of their means.

I'm willing to give Hoya Blue the benefit of the doubt—they've certainly earned it, for as much as I've personally observed the amount of planning, effort, and finances it takes to run each of their promotions.

But this still doesn't change the fact that only running two events in five chances this football season was a blow to student football culture.

For as long as I've been going to Georgetown football games, the student section has been stuck in a rut. Attendance is healthy at the first home game of the season, boosted by curiosity seekers in the freshman class. But fan support begins to dwindle by halftime of the first game, and each game sees fewer and fewer student fans show up. Only Homecoming, with its pre game tailgate and reinforcements from recent alumni classes, provides a blip on the radar of fan support. By the time Midnight Madness rolls around in mid-October, only a handful of die-hards are still making it out to the MSF (or Harbin Field, or Kehoe Field…)

If there's one thing Hoya Blue deserves a tremendous amount of credit for, it's increasing the overall number of student fans who attend football games over the past two seasons. Their hard work and commitment have been vital here.

But we still haven't gotten out of that rut. This season, attendance peaked in the first half of the Holy Cross game, slowly declined until bottoming out at the Bucknell game, only to rebound at the Homecoming contest against Marist. The Bucknell student attendance brought back memories of pre-Hoya Blue revival days, when often only a single row of die-hards would congregate on the top of the Harbin Field bleachers.

If we're ever to build a true football culture at Georgetown that lasts throughout the season—that is, to get out of the attendance rut—we have to work at building momentum through Hoya Blue promotions from the first game to the last, without exception.

Are five costly Hoya Blue-run pre-game tailgates in the Southwest Quad the answer? Probably not.

Will it be easy to run a Hoya Blue event at a football game should it fall thirteen hours after Midnight Madness? Based on what I hear from the people in charge of doing so, it's doubtful.

Will Hoya Blue run into bad weather, low turnout, cost overruns, and an occasional broken grill? I suspect they might run into all of these in a single year.

Even if the task of running a promotional event for 5 of 6 football games a year is difficult, time-consuming, and a net loser of money…it is still worth the effort. Hoya Blue, after all, is a club founded on sports promotions, and it excels the most when its volunteers are out in the field (or, in this case, grilling next to a field) running events and building momentum for the sports season.

To put it simply—something…anything…is better than nothing.

The 2007 home football schedule is not kind to Hoya Blue. Again next year, Georgetown will only play five games at the Multi-Sport Facility. Twice during the season, there will be periods of four Saturdays during which the Hoyas only play a single home game. If you take out next year's Homecoming game (Sept. 29, 2007 against Cornell), there will be a gap of over a month between each of the first three football games Hoya Blue is able to promote on its own (Sept. 8th vs. Lafayette, October 13th vs. Fordham, and November 3rd vs. Davidson).

In order to maintain the momentum from what will hopefully be a solid opening day showing against Lafayette and a traditionally robust Homecoming crowd for Cornell, Hoya Blue has to come through with strong promotional efforts and faithfully executed events throughout the 2007 season. They simply cannot afford another Bucknell game, where football is consigned to an “afterthought” in a listserv email, buried beneath Midnight Madness promotions.

Here, the work of a Hoya Blue Head of Football Operations can be crucial. On my way to Midnight Madness this year, I passed flyers promoting the Georgetown-West Virginia men's soccer game the following afternoon. I recall one of the Hoya Blue members I was with expressed surprise that Peter Keszler had expended the effort to hang flyers promoting the game. I'd also received a message through the Hoya Hooligans that morning asking me to come to the “really big game for the team.”

Pete probably wasn't as intimately involved in Hoya Blue's Midnight Madness preparations as the board members who would have been in charge of a football tailgate. He also had something of a vested interest in getting people to come to the soccer game, as his job evaluation depends solely on how well he does promoting soccer.

And that's precisely the point. If promoting a football event the same weekend as Midnight Madness is too much of a strain on Hoya Blue's Executive Board, then they shouldn't be forced to make that choice. Pete's effort for the West Virginia game proved that a singularly motivated volunteer with a defined area of responsibility can overcome a lot of obstacles to promoting a good event.

My point here isn't to deny that there are a number of obstacles to promoting 5 or 6 football events a year. I believe Hoya Blue's Executives when they tell me that, and I believe them when they say that they always try their hardest to run the best events and promotions they can for football games.

I simply believe very strongly that Hoya Blue has the capacity to overcome these obstacles, and to build some real momentum for the football program at Georgetown. It may take some creativity, it may take some sacrifice, and Hoya Blue may take some lumps along the way. But it is absolutely worth the effort to build that momentum behind football promotions. Because if Craig Esherick's final year should have taught us anything about Hoya Blue, it's that a losing record can hurt attendance numbers, but apathy is an even bigger killer of sports culture.

FOURTH DOWN: ROAD TRIP!

Every playbook has a Hail Mary—a go-for-broke play to be broken out only in emergency situations. The Hail Mary typically devotes all available receivers and backs to a single, all-or-nothing pattern aimed at producing at minimum a big gain, but most often a game-altering touchdown.

Hail Mary patterns often look great on paper; they're fun to visualize and even act out on the playground. In a game situation however, the Hail Mary more often than not meets with failure, whether an interception, a batted down pass, or a quarterback sack. Yet those rare occasions when a heaved pass lands true in the arms of a receiver are remembered as the stuff of legends.

Some twenty-two years to the day after “55 Flood Tip” gave the Boston College Eagles a 47-45 victory over the Miami Hurricanes on the final play of their 1984 contest, BC Quarterback Doug Flutie did color commentary for an ESPN telecast of a Miami-Boston College game. Though the game itself provided a sufficient amount of intrigue on its own—Boston College was playing for a potential spot in the ACC Championship game, while Miami needed a win to become bowl eligible in what was likely to be Coach Larry Coker's final game at the school—ESPN's coverage centered around the commemoration of the “Hail Flutie” game. Barely a segment of the game went by without another replay of the famous play, as Flutie in the booth and then receiver Gerard Phelan via telephone dissected every element of their physical and emotional state of mind during the ten or so seconds it took to change college football history.

If I happen to be in the presence of Hoya Blue members in March 2028, I suspect they'll still remember their bus trip to Dayton, Ohio for the First and Second Round of the NCAA Tournament in 2006. The crowning event of Hoya Blue's basketball promotional effort last season, the Dayton trip has been widely cited by the students who attended as a transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime experience; in fact, multiple Hoya Blue members have described the day of Georgetown's Second Round victory over Ohio State as the greatest day of their lives.

There's something about road trips for sporting events—the sense of camaraderie with your fellow fans on the bus, the excitement of going into a hostile arena or stadium and cheering for your team…the Hoya Blue Dance Party.

The most interesting promotional idea that came out of this past football season actually never came to pass. During the summer, two separate threads appeared on the Hoyatalk board gauging interest in a road trip to New York City for Georgetown's September 23rd game against Columbia.

Conceptually, much like a Hail Mary pass, the road trip idea looked great—a winnable game, an attractive city that could provide a day's worth of entertainment (and further enticement for students on the fence about traveling for a football game), and a chance to link up with a sizable Georgetown alumni effort aimed at promoting the same game.

But inevitably, there were just not enough resources and a high enough chance of proper execution to complete the Hail Mary. One Hoya Blue Executive rightly pointed out that tickets would have to be “dirt cheap” for most students to take up the bargain—Hoya Blue's previous non-basketball roadtrip idea (a lacrosse game at Navy) had stalled in the planning stages because of the potential cost—and there was simply no way to run a cost-effective bus trip to New York City. Further, there was no guarantee that once Hoya Blue had secured transportation and purchased tickets that they'd even be able to muster enough demand to fill their bus and avoid a huge financial loss.

The Columbia road trip idea was a noble one…but one that was probably a few years ahead of its time.

I think a Hoya Blue football road trip remains a Hail Mary attempt at best. But it's an option that should remain in the playbook.

As a veteran of several Hoya Blue basketball roadtrips, I believe they are not only a tremendous way for the club to support the team, but a great way to strengthen the Hoya Blue organization. I can name several friends in Hoya Blue I've met as a result of roadtrips, and I can identify several members of the club who I noticed very suddenly had become regular die-hards at the MCI Center after attending away games with Hoya Blue.

That football roadtrips initially won't be well-attended shouldn't necessarily be a deterrent to promoting away game events (provided they are reasonably palatable financially). Other than the Dayton road trip, the away basketball game I hear the most stories about was Georgetown's pre-Thanksgiving game against James Madison last season—a road trip that was put together at the last minute and attended by barely twenty students. The experience of a road trip—and this encompasses the bus ride to and from the game as much as the actual contest—is a selling point for the club in and of itself.

If Hoya Blue were so bold as to want to run a Hail Mary next season, they have a legitimate opportunity: October 6th, 2007 when the Hoyas travel to Philadelphia to take on the Penn Quakers at historic Franklin Field.

The Georgetown-Penn game offers a number of attractive benefits for Hoya Blue—an accessible city only three hours from Washington, DC offering post-game entertainment options, a difficult but legitimately watch-able opponent, a historic venue (Franklin Field is the oldest stadium in the NCAA still holding football games) with a seating capacity of 52,000—easily the largest stadium in which any current student will ever see Georgetown compete, and a date that falls immediately after the biggest momentum boost for football (Homecoming) and before the biggest momentum killer for football (Midnight Madness), making it optimal for a daring Hoya Blue promotion.

More likely, Hoya Blue roadtrips are a thing of the future. One can envision, perhaps three or four years down the road, Hoya Blue bringing a bus full of fired up undergrads to the campus of Lehigh (Bethlehem, PA) or Lafayette (Easton, PA) to watch the Hoyas compete in a critical Patriot League showdown that could potentially decide the conference championship.

A dream, you say? Not any more so than the hope that a Hail Mary pass lofted from beyond midfield might somehow find its way through the rainy Miami sky to a waiting receiver crouched behind the defense in the end zone…22 years later, Doug Flutie is still talking about his shining moment. Perhaps one day Georgetown will have a Hail Flutie moment to call their own; perhaps a group of Georgetown students will recall twenty years later how they were there on the road to see it.