When the Ball State football team opened its season against Eastern Michigan on Thursday, it was the first time in a couple years that students packed Scheumann Stadium with confidence in their team.
Ball State may not be the best team in the country. It may not even be the best team in the MAC, but it is the best team this university has had in the last four years.
On Friday, Tom Davis of the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne published a column that called out the Ball State student body and Muncie residents for not coming out in full support of the football team.
Davis believes that we don't deserve the team that has been built up for us and that the attendance numbers after Thursday's game proves this. So, the question is this: Is Davis right?
Let's face it, not many people come to Ball State as Ball State fans. They come here with hoodies and T-shirts proudly supporting bigger teams like the Hoosiers, the Buckeyes or the Fighting Irish. It's up to the upperclassmen, to a degree, to change this.
This is what Davis doesn't understand. These upperclassmen have not had much to cheer about in the past couple of years. Davis says it's not fair to use the 2008 regular season, in which the Cardinals went 12-0, as an example of fan support, and he's absolutely correct. It's not fair. That season was like nothing Ball State had seen before or has seen since.
During the two years following that perfect season, under former coach Stan Parrish, the Cardinals showed the world just how far a football program could fall by painfully grinding its way to a 6-18 record. And then there came a shining hope, in the form of coach Pete Lembo, who in his first season brought the Cardinals to a surprising 6-6 season.
Now, no one should expect Lembo to turn this program into an Alabama-like team over the course of one season, but it's a start.
On the other hand, no one should expect the Ball State students to flood the stands like they do in Alabama because of one surprising season. No one likes going to watch their team get their butts handed to them, something that students were forced to endure during those two years under Parrish.
The fact is, compared to Parrish's second year, the numbers are looking pretty good.
A peak crowd of 12,725 people viewed the opening game this year. The student section was loud - -¡-¡for most of the game anyway.
Davis bemoans the fact that students began to leave the game in the third quarter, but let's face it, it's not like the outcome of the game was very much in question. By the time students started to leave near the end of the third quarter Ball State was leading the Eagles 34-13.
Now, Davis states that the final score of 37-26 was "a resounding ... beatdown."
Why, then, is it surprising that the students felt like going somewhere else? He shouldn't blame the students for losing interest in an already decided game that lasted four hours on a Thursday night.
Ball State has suffered through two years of horrible football and one year that gave a hint at what the future could be. The fact of the matter is that it takes time to build up a fan base. It takes time and a winning tradition.
Davis is not correct when he says that we do not deserve this team.
It's not a question of whether or not we deserve this team. It's whether or not we should trust them with the expectations we've placed on them, and if we as fans can handle the disappointment if those expectations aren't met.
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