This Week's BLR

I don’t think it’s going to surprise many of you that there’s a bit of a disheartening feeling/loss off interest for everyone around campus. This loss to Iowa State was brutal for me to watch, and I know it was for other students as well. It was a game in which it seemed all of Baylor’s problems coincided into one very, very ugly game. A game that was so difficult to watch that Fox Sports Southwest was even nice enough to get it off the air for me for about 10 minutes.

When I first started doing these reports I wrote that the entire student body was ecstatic and was very anxious to get this football season underway. All anyone could think about was RG3 and his magical touchdown pass to beat Oklahoma, the great Alamo Bowl victory comeback, or even his fantastic catch against TCU to keep that game alive. As a student body we were stuck on last season. No one, or at least not many, expected the same success that the Bears had last year, but they did expect this team to be very competitive in all of its games this year. And, for the most part, they have been. After the Louisiana-Monroe game I wrote that this team seemed to have something about them to win close games. They seemed to have the will to come out with a victory. After a hard fought West Virginia game I thought the same thing even though they lost that game. It was after the TCU game that I started having doubts. Then the Texas game happened, and then the Iowa State game happened. It’s been very difficult. The anticipation for game days has declined, and the support for the team, I’m sorry to say, has done the same. This shouldn’t be too surprising though. Everyone likes a winner and you only find out who the true fans are once you stop winning.

One positive I have heard though is that freshmen love running in the line (myself included). The things I’ve heard lead me to believe that this is the reason most freshmen actually still go to the games. They love everything about tailgating, running the line, and being a part of the Baylor Line section. All of these things are undoubtedly a blast to be a part of, but watching a win can only be so far down the list.

I’m aware of the fact that less and less people are going to stop coming to football games and running the line, despite to what I just said. That’s just how it is. The anticipation for football games isn’t what it was at the beginning of the year. There isn’t much of a buzz anymore before football games. There is, in fact, more of a buzz about basketball season than there is for football. Which, again, shouldn’t be a fact that really surprises any of you. Luckily though, the class of 2016 is the largest in Baylor history, so, as far as looks go anyway, it’s ok if people start dropping out of running the line, because our pre-game tradition should still look pretty big from the stands and from any news outlet covering us. Or at least it should look big compared to previous years’ lines late in the season.

It’s been a rough stretch for the Bears, and as a student and a writer it’s been interesting to differ my viewpoints from vast optimism to pessimism. I wrote about this following Baylor’s loss to Iowa State after reading posts and comments from this site, twitter, and then reading tweets from the players, my classmates. The story should surface on ODB shortly. Even though Baylor has been disappointing as of late, I think they can string something together. After last season the Bears started to be taken seriously by competition. Something I have yearned for for quite some time, because being a doormat is no fun for anybody. But now maybe it gives us the opportunity to pull an upset later in the season for a different reason. Not because we’re a serious contender, but because maybe somewhere down the line someone won’t take us seriously and we’ll have the opportunity to pull out a close victory. That’s tough to write, because I had high hopes for this team at the start of the year, but it’s become clear to me now that that is our only shot.