(10-16-2013 02:13 PM)wh49er Wrote: So rather than try to improve the situation that USM is in you would rather sit in your mother's basement and cry on a message board. Seems like the logical thing to do. Although, not surprising in today's entitlement culture.
I'm not sure what the hell else I can do. I've been preaching the gospel of Southern Miss to anyone who would listen since Curley Hallman left. I told my family he'd regret going to LSU. Three years later, I was a freshman at USM and our team went up to Baton Rouge and beat Curley, and I'm quite sure he felt like he was on the wrong sideline that night.
I was a co-op student in college, and when they told me that co-ops on a work term didn't get football tickets, I bought season tickets in the east lower deck out of my own pocket. I don't know what you mean by "today's entitlement culture". It's not my culture.
I graduated in December 1999, and USM finished #11 and #13 in the polls that year. After graduation, I bought two season tickets in the west upper deck, and nine weeks out of ten I filled them both by myself. Drove up from Gulfport and later New Orleans by myself, listening to John Cox and wondering what I saw at USM that the rest of the world didn't. Drove all the way to Houston for our bowl game in 2002, by myself, with two tickets in my pocket, and then drove back right afterwards, wondering what the hell was so different about the people of Stillwater, OK compared to the people of Hattiesburg, MS.
I was embarrassed at that game, not by our team, but by the tiny speck of black that our fans made in the Reliant Stadium bleachers. But I wasn't embarrassed enough to quit. I've hung on for another 12 years now, watching teams leave our conference, being told by the authorities up in Hattiesburg that we're not good enough, that we're too poor, etc., to have the things that we had just ten years ago.
Over time, I've come to realize that we are indeed very, very poor. We lack a key resource. It's not money. It's a HUMAN resource. First, it's the resource of leaders who aren't thieves. Second, it's the resource of people, of supporters who want to have an institution of learning in their city bigger than Temple Baptist Church.
Southern Miss doesn't have those things. We once had more of them than we have now. We had Horace Fleming to lead, and Bower, and then Fedora. We had Lee Roberts and Dustin Almond, and Coach Mac and Richard Giannini. And we had AndreWhere to rouse up the crowd in the west upper deck. Now we've replaced these people with impostors. Fleming gave way to Thames. Fedora gave way to Ellis Johnson, and now Todd Monken. Giannini was replaced by Jeff Hammond.
If AndreWhere is not far behind, it's only after decades of trying. And it's not just me. There were 34,000+ plus fans at M.M. Roberts for the first game of 2012. Against FIU, it was more like 14,000. At our next home game, it will be more like 4,000.
Most of these people have just quietly put away, or thrown away, their black and gold game-day gear. "They" won: the townsfolk dead-set against anything resembling government spending (particularly if the black kids might get a piece of it), the all-weekend churchers scared of secular learning, the State "fans" who refuse to cheer for the school that the nerds from their junior high went to, and all the other small-minded South Mississippians who had excellence grab them by the lapels and ask for a seat at the table only to respond with a big "hell no".
After all of this, that's what I conclude. South Mississippi doesn't want a university. Southern Miss is too secular, too collective, too black, and too scary. Draw a bulldog on a white pillowcase and run it up the pole... I TRIED.
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Southern Miss: A Textbook Example of Excellence Squandered
