Idiots Write About Sports

Spent Saturday afternoon taking in a college football game. No — not college football game. The contest I saw was a little bit lower on the Division I food chain. Instead of driving up to Berekely to join my fellow Idiot Jason in watching the Cal Bears repel their fellow UC affiliate from the southland, I instead drove to San Diego to watch the University of San Diego Toreros square off against the Crusaders of Valparaiso University in a Division I-AA clash.

No, really. I did.

You may know Valparaiso as the obscure college from Northwestern Indiana that every now and again puts a scare into big-time universities during the NCAA basketball tournament. I know it, however, as the obscure college from which my mother graduated. (Other famous Valpo alums: Pittsburgh Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon; Congressman Steve Buyer (R-IN); the voice of Pillsbury Doughboy.) So you can bet that when the Crusaders make the 2,180 mile trek out from Indiana to the West Coast, my mother is there to cheer them on to victory — and the least that I could do was drive two hours down Interstate Five to see her and my dad.

(Valpo actually makes that 2,180-mile road trip with alarming frequency. Both the Crusaders and the Toreros are in the same football conference. Before you’re wondering what two universities two time zones apart are doing scheduling conference football games with each other, realize that the Pioneer Football League also includes among its membership Butler University of Indianapolis, Drake University of Des Moines, Iowa, Dayton University of Dayton, Ohio, Morehead State of Morehead, Kentucky, Davidson University of Davidson, North Carolina, Austin Peay State University of Clarksville, Tennessee, and Florida-based Jacksonville University. If you’re wondering what those institutions of higher learning have in common, other than their presence in the continental United States, join the club. Although if memory serves, each of those schools also fields a Division I basketball team, and the NCAA has decreed that you have to particpate in a certain number of sports at the Division I level to participate in its cash-cow of a basketball tournament. So my guess is the Pioneer Football League is a conference of convenience for schools whose main athletic ambition is not to play in the Poulan Weed-Eater Bowl but to be the 15th seed that loses to Kentucky or Michigan State in the Midwest Regionals every year.)

And so there I was at Torero Stadium — recently remodeled to house the San Diego Spirit of the now-defunct WUSA — to watch a conference clash between San Diego and Valpo. Roman Catholic college against Lutheran school in the Reformation Bowl. Loser is burned at the stake for heresy.

And how’d it turn out? Let’s just say that if the Lutherans had performed this poorly during the actual Reformation, we’d all be buying indulgences right about now.

It was not a very good game. The San Diego quarterback completed 63 percent of his passes, and most of the 10 incompletions he did throw were either drops or slightly overthrown — there was no defensive pressure to speak of. To its credit, Valpo managed to score two touchdowns, which would be enough to cover the spread if you labor under the assumption that a) Vegas oddsmakers even care about Division I-AA games and b) would make Valpo a 35 1/2 point-underdog if they did.

I did enjoy a nice Gregg Easterbrook moment when the Crusaders faced a fourth-and-short situation in their own territory trailing 35-14 with a little more than eight minutes left in the fourth quarter. Valpo lined up in punt formation. “Why are you punting?” I bellowed. “Are you hoping to hold them to a three-touchdown drubbing?” My pleas fell upon deaf ears, however. Valpo punted, San Diego got the ball back, and the Toreros nearly immediately ripped off a 56-yard pass to up the score to 42-14. Thank goodness the Crusaders punted, or USD might have scored even more quickly.

I didn’t have a tremendously good time with the game itself, and not just because the final score was so lopsided. One of the things I like about college football is the atmosphere — the bands, the cheering sections, the whole campus ambience. And while USD certainly boasts a lovely campus, the atmosphere at its football games has a distinctinly intramural feel to it. Only 3,340 showed up — this was San Diego’s homecoming game, mind you. And there was no marching band in sight; for the music in between plays, someone just pushed the play button on a CD player.

And they didn’t even handle that task particularly well. Example: early in the third quarter, when the outcome of the game was still nominally in doubt, Valpo faced a fourth-and-goal situation where a touchdown would have gotten them to within shouting distance of the Toreros. So the guy in charge of the CD player decides to treat us to Van Halen’s “Right Now” — not a bad choice when it comes to goalline stands, actually when you’re talking about lyrics like:

Right now, hey
It’s your tomorrow
Right now,
C’mon,it’s everything
Right now,
Catch a magic moment, do it
Right here and now
It means everything

Except the guy in charge of the CD player only played the song after San Diego stuffed the Crusaders and Valpo turned over the ball on downs. And he didn’t have it cued up to the actual relevant portion of the song; he started it from the beginning, which is actually a fairly low-key, not-at-all fist-pumping piano intro. The intro is so long, in fact, that we never actually heard any of the lyrics before play was ready to resume. That must have happened half-a-dozen times Saturday: someone putting the ESPN Stadium Anthems CD on shuffle and playing uninspiring snippets at inopportune moments. That’s not quite the same thing as hearing a rip-roaring version of the school’s fight song; it’s not even the same thing as hearing a canned recording of “Rock ‘N Roll, Part Two” blarring through the stadium loudspeakers.

I just hope Lloyd McClendon and the Pillsbury Doughboy weren’t around to witness this travesty.

[Edited to reflect the fact that “Right Now” begins with a fairly low-key, not-at-all fist-pumping piano intro. You knew this. I knew this. So why did I write “guitar” instead?]

Heck, get a look at the Sun Belt in basketball 1-A. You've got a big-ass 'L' shape across the country. The top of the L is Idaho, the corner's in New Mexico, and then the horizontal line goes all over the Deep South.

And, of course, the (soon-to-be dissolved?) WAC, which stretches from Honolulu to Ruston, Louisiana, with stops in Reno, Boise, San Jose, Fresno, Houston, Dallas and El Paso. What -- there wasn't a school in Guam that qualified for membership?

My brother graduated from Valpo. (I attended Augustana in South Dakota; man are we Lutheran). The weekend of his graduation, we (the family and I) toured Wrigley Field. Good times.

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