WHEN THE air turns cool and the leaves turn colors, University sports fans gear up for that timeless rite of autumn: the annual debate over whether to fire the football coach. For the past three weeks, supporters and opponents of head coach Al Groh have waged a war of words stretching from Beta Bridge to the Cavalier Daily as the team lost its season opener to Wyoming and won close games against Duke and North Carolina. And while a raucous public debate is always good for the University, I've got just four words for those naive Wahoos who still get upset when our team loses: Get used to it.
As I watched the Cavaliers eke out a two point victory over a youthful Tar Heel team on Saturday, I was reminded yet again that Virginia is not a football school. And by that, I do not mean that Virginia is a basketball school, in the way that many universities will excel in either football or basketball but not both. Rather, as I have discovered over a lifetime of watching the Cavaliers, Virginia is doomed to perpetual mediocrity in both sports, with every respectable season offset by a bad one and every improbable victory matched by a pitiful loss to some woeful opponent. For every trip to the Continental Tire Bowl, a postseason will come and go with no appearance by the Cavalier football team.
The "Groh Must Go" crowd is right to question whether our $1.7 million coach is earning his money, but to the extent that they would remake Virginia as a football school, both sides of this debate miss the point. The University is not special in spite of its football team but, in part, because it has refused to sell its soul for success in any sport.. Virginia has never been a football school and I hope that it never is.
Being a football school means being known less for your academic achievements than for the athletic achievements of that small part of the student body that takes the field on Saturday afternoons. Being a football school means surrendering your campus to the fans and the national media every weekend and being a football school means elation or dejection, every weekend, depending on the score. Being a football school means dropping your academic standards to admit first rate athletes of second rate intelligence and, worst of all, being a football school means recruiting players of dubious character and treating them like royalty through all manner of misbehavior.
One need look no farther than Blacksburg to see the perils of being a football school. In 2002, a standout quarterback named Marcus Vick enrolled at Virginia Tech. Over the course of his college career, Vick was busted for nine traffic violations and one drug violation and pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was suspended from the team three times and was seen stomping on an opposing player during a 2006 Gator Bowl so vicious that its referee would later describe the Virginia Tech players as "completely out of control." Only then was he dismissed for "the cumulative effect of legal infractions and unsportsmanlike play."
The notoriety that players like Vick bring their schools is all too often undone by discipline problems off the field, yet football schools are slow to dismiss their misfits for fear of weakening the team. The result, aside from bad publicity, is to undermine the institutional character of a university by creating a class of students from whom nothing is expected except athletic success. The Marcus Vicks of the world may be talented football players, but I'd rather watch them defeat our team on Saturday than suffer their presence on Grounds Monday through Friday.
The University's pro-Groh and anti-Groh factions differ in their opinions of our head coach, but they both presume that a top quality football program is something Virginia should aspire to and that's where I differ. I like being unable to recognize the football players when I walk around Grounds. I like the quirky "Good Ol' Song" and the proud tradition, now nearly dead, of wearing coats and ties on game day. I like beating Virginia Tech every five years and Florida State every ten years, because big wins are much more fun when they happen sparingly. But most of all, I like knowing that even when the football team loses, we need not hang our heads in shame because our status as a first rate university does not depend on the success of our football team.
My grandfather, who graduated from the University in 1934, flatly disapproved of football and would reduce his annual contributions in proportion to the success of the team. I wouldn't go that far, but I would submit to the parties debating Groh's merits that our football team is exactly as it should be: good enough to watch and bad enough to forget about once the game is over.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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