I remember visiting my divorced father on weekends. He’d be cradled in his recliner, eyes fixed on two smallish televisions on at once, each tuned to a different football game – college on Saturdays, pro on Sundays, natch. No remote control. No wall-covering screen. No high definition.
He’d cajole me into making him a ham sandwich, and football would drone in the background all day long. It was the sound of my childhood.
This season as I write in this space about the Texas State Bobcats’ rise to the BCS (Big-Time Football!) level, I’m reminded of those days of yore. You can watch the Bobcat games without being in the stadium, but it takes a little inside info. One recent Saturday I viewed the Bobcats on my iPad and the Texas Longhorn game on my MacBook Pro (thanks to the Longhorn Network, I had to use a “borrowed” user ID to watch that stream). It was a balancing act that made me feel both old school and high tech. No recliner for me, yet I was surely feeling my roots.
But it’s also a sign the Bobcats are wising up as they’re moving on up. I grew up going to Texas Longhorn games with my dad, and when I couldn’t do that, I’d listen to the radio while tossing a miniature football in the air for good luck. I still have the little football, but these days we have come to expect to see every game our favorite team plays. For Bobcat fans that means watching a lot of the contests on live stream as provided by the university for a fee. Sometimes Twitter pals have had to tip me off to the right source for an out-of-town feed. Somehow I’ve seen every game this season.
That includes last week’s crushing of lowly Idaho at Bobcat Stadium. I’ve got a five-year-old whose Montessori school claimed much of last Saturday for its international festival. Fortunately the Idaho game was on actual regular TV. I DVR’d it and the UT-OU contest. I have yet to force myself to watch Oklahoma disembowel the Longhorns, but I stayed up late to enjoy the Bobcats in action.
Shaun Rutherford bounced back from a dismal day against New Mexico with fancy footwork and on-target passes in a 38-7 scalloping of the Idaho Spuds, ur, Vandals in the Bobcats’ first-ever WAC win. He ran in one score and threw another for 31 yards to Andy Erickson, who has come on as an able replacement for injured Isaiah Battle. Erickson also humped it on kick returns with the longest of 36 yards helping earn him WAC special teams player of the week. Cornerback Craig Mager was named the top WAC defender of the week on the strength of eight tackles and one broken-up pass as the Bobcats held the Vandals scoreless in the second half. Both Marcus Curry and Terrence Franks looked solid carrying the ball, and the Bobcats amassed 519 yards of total offense.
But make no mistake about it, Idaho is a pitiful excuse for a football team in a state where the high school studs run as fast as they can to Boise State. The 3-3 Bobcats know the way to San Jose State, where they’ll next face a much tougher opponent. They’ll just have to slog through a bye week before getting on the plane for an Oct. 27 matchup. In the interim, San Jose will test the Texas waters in the Alamodome against UTSA and its shiny new football program this weekend. More on that one and what it says about the Bobcats’ prospects in this space next week.
Now I have to find a way to watch the next Bobcat game without making the San Jose trip myself or resorting to a return to radio days.
This article appears in October 12 • 2012.