The University of Idaho Argonaut

This is hard for me to say.  I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but it can’t wait any longer.  All right, here it goes:  I am sorry.  I am entirely responsible for the complete and utter collapse, downfall, and all together depressing state of the Vandal Sports Union.

 As detailed in The Argonaut in October, I was lucky enough to attend the final game of the World Series.  At that time everything was pretty damn good in our little college town.  The football team was in second place in the Western Athletic Conference after narrowly losing their showdown with Boise State.  The Vandals’ fortune had turned and there was a bit of light shining at the end of the tunnel.  If Coach, nay, Messiah Dennis Erickson provided this kind of turnaround in his first season, who knows what could take place in the years to come?  The team was only two wins away from being bowl eligible for crying out loud.  What a time to be a Vandal!

Then with that one unbelievably selfish sports impulse I ruined it all.  By partaking in that amazing sports experience I single handedly destroyed the positive sports karma that was blossoming in Moscow.

Perhaps I’m too much of a sports fan but I honestly believe that the entire sports world is controlled by karma.  Poker players call it “living right.”  Being overconfident, losing without class, cheating, these are not examples of living right.  Some may argue that attending the World Series and then proceeding to brag about it endlessly, while the rest of your friends, a major portion of which are sports fans stuck in Moscow, may not have been living right.  Others may say that an even bigger sports sin may have been the fact I jumped on the St. Louis Cardinals bandwagon, a team I previously had no feelings for one way or the other.  By not living right, I was all but guaranteeing my real favorite teams would suffer.

We all remember what happened from that point on.  The “surging” football squad went on to lose every remaining game on their schedule.  Within a month of the end of the season Erickson proved nearly every sentence he had uttered since his appointment as head coach was a bold-faced lie by accepting a job with Arizona State.

The men’s basketball team is now in the midst of a 2-12 season.  That would be bad enough but let’s not forget the fact that the team, after losing to  University of Washington at the end of November, was stranded in a major snow storm and didn’t get back to the Kibbie Dome until 17 hours later.  The women’s squad is not far behind at 3-10, not to mention the fact that the sole senior on the team, Karly Felton, was sidelined for the season with a knee injury in late November.

As Idaho sports programs left and right began to bask in mediocrity, if that’s not being too polite, the fortunes of programs in or around Idaho began to skyrocket.

Boise State’s football team completed a perfect regular season and parlayed that into winning what some people are calling the greatest college bowl game ever.  They beat University of Oklahoma with a hook and lateral, a wide receiver option pass, and the Statue of Liberty play.  They now, God help us all, have what some might say, is a, gulp, legitimate claim to a share of the national championship.

In just a little over a month, our collegiate neighbors to the west, those pesky Cougars, have completed two of the greatest upsets in their school’s history by beating the Gonzaga Bulldogs, who were ranked 18th in the nation at the time, and then 7th-ranked University of Arizona, in Pullman. They hadn’t beaten a team ranked as high as Arizona in Pullman in over 20 years.

I could go on for pages and pages.  Over in the Beaver State there was the Oregon State football team ending University of Southern California’s regular season win streak at 38 games, and there’s also the Ducks in Eugene beating the previously undefeated, top-ranked UCLA Bruins basketball team.
So Sports Gods hear my lament.  I throw myself at your feet begging for mercy.  I’ll do whatever it takes.  I’ll tear up my ticket stub from the World Series, I’ll burn a John Friesz replica jersey in sacrifice, I’ll throw out every bit of sports apparel and memorabilia I own and live a life of sports poverty.  Just please save our sports department.  

If you won’t do it for me I understand, perhaps it’s too late for that.  But please, do it for the next generation of Vandal fans. Don’t let them suffer for the sins of their sports fan forefathers.