Going to the Big Game

My wife and I will be joining another couple this evening for one of the great American fall rituals: college football. Our local heroes, the Fresno State (California) Bulldogs are hosting the University of Wisconsin Badgers. Bulldog Stadium will be a sea of red as 2,500 traveling Badger boosters and 42,000 Bulldog faithful, almost all clad in crimson on both sides, cheer on their teams.

This is actually an important contest as these things go. Wisconsin is ranked tenth in the country. They need to win their third straight game to enter Big 10 Conference play with momentum. What is more, if they want (as they certainly do!) to finish the season with a trip to one of the major Bowl Championship Series games, they can ill afford to lose a game to a team like Fresno State from a "mid-major" conference. Such schools rank a notch below the vaunted BCS conference squads. The BCS bowls in early January on prime time are not only financially lucrative for the athletic program and the university, they also showcase your team for the best high school players in the country, who will then be more likely recruitment targets to keep the team strong.

The fear for Wisconsin is that Fresno State is much better than the typical non-BCS conference team. They are good enough to win, particularly in front of their maniacally noisy fans. We'll try to be four of them, for that matter. Fresno State has pulled upsets of BCS schools before, thirteen times since head coach Pat Hill arrived in 1997, in fact, including their last game vs. well-regarded Rutgers. So the Badgers likely have a tougher game ahead of them than they would like for a non-conference contest. They are "expected" to win by most of the pundits and will get little credit for doing so, but a defeat would be devastating for them. If it stays close, the longer it does the greater the pressure on the visitors with a ranking to protect.

From Fresno's perspective, this is the kind of game that could vault them into serious consideration for a BCS bowl game berth themselves. The have actually beaten Wisconsin before, but not when the Badgers were ranked as highly as this. If they were to knock off Wisconsin after defeating Rutgers on the road and follow that up with wins over another of the perennially best mid-major schools, Toledo, next week and then UCLA of the great PAC-10 conference the next week, the Bulldogs would be set up to go to the first BCS bowl of their history. The financial and recruiting impact to a school like theirs would be relatively even greater than for a major conference university like Wisconsin. This is the team that has nothing to lose and everything to gain and will play with reckless abandon.

More than this, college football has a great atmosphere that professional football, for example, cannot really duplicate. The bands, cheer squads, alumni, and current students have a sense of community beyond just the football team. There is the sense that the team and game stand for something beyond themselves, an institution of higher learning whose purposes dwarf the outcome of a game. You see this on the way into a college game, as you walk past not the sterile environment of a downtown pro stadium with its adjacent parking garages and city streets, but over lawns flanked by tradition-laden ivy-covered walls or cutting edge scientific laboratories.

I can hardly wait to smell the hot dogs and hear the bands. Speaking of which, Wisconsin has one of the great school fight songs in the nation, and they use it to celebrate when they score. I'm hoping we don't hear it played too much today.