"I really wish I was less of a thinking man, and more a fool who's not afraid of rejection"
     -- Billy Joel, "Sleeping With The Television On"

Watching a couple of very active threads the other day on the message board gave me a strange feeling, something I don't normally expect to feel when reading about football or any other sporting event on a message board. I expect the usual discussions about Xs and Os, some smack-talking from our opponents of the week/month (although FSU fans have been extremely gracious both here and on Seminole Territory), some mention of the awards of the day won by Corey Moore, Michael Vick, Coach Beamer or anyone else associated with the VT football program, and maybe a few random loose subjects.

What I didn't expect was what I saw Tuesday morning and early afternoon. The arguments of the day appeared to be: (a) BoardHost over at TheSabre pulling all Hokies' passwords, contingent on a vote by the Hoo contingent as to whether we would be allowed to stay; and (b) Tech professor Dr. Marshall Fishwick's view, as expressed at the tail end of a Roanoke Times story, that big-time football had no place at a major university like Tech. More disturbing, though, than these two actions themselves (which are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things) was the reaction of some on the HCMB to this. Reading these threads, one overwhelming thought popped into my mind:

Why did I think this? Let's examine the two cases individually.

During this football season, I've visited TheSabre's message board periodically -- maybe once a week if the urge struck me, or if I was pointed over there by a post on the HCMB directing me to the latest "Hoo smoking crack over at the butterknife" or something similar. What I've found over there has been apparently about 60% Hoos and 35% Hokies, with the remaining 5% being others or unidentifiable. I have a password over there, but I've posted maybe 5 times at best.

Some people enjoy hanging out with the other side and trading points. I don't begrudge them that -- I've spent a good share of time over at Seminole Territory, though this is the first time I've ever really enjoyed sticking around at an opponent's board (kudos to JD for the smack-free atmosphere). TheSabre was a bit farther gone than that, though. Some Hokies seemed to live over there; other individuals who may or may not be "real" VT fans loved to respond to every small (or large) poke the Hoos made at us by ripping into that particular Hoo with a vengeance. And finally, you had the flamers, those who buzz around every college football message board under various disguises, playing off the Hoos' general irritation with us to further fan the flames of riot on TheSabre.

BoardHost responded. Some vocal elements of his customer base were screaming for a change, and he saw no easier way to deal with things than to muzzle Hokies until he could get an accurate measurement of the feelings of his board. As it appears to have turned out, most of the Hoos over there would prefer to have us to kick around, as long as we behave appropriately. This made sense to me once I thought about it -- of course, it didn't really affect me personally. BH's situation, IMHO, was this: watch his board degenerate into something similar to what we saw on the Syracuse boards both before and after 62-0, with subsequent loss of traffic and advertising revenue, or take temporary drastic action. TheSabre is a business aimed at Hoos, just like HC for us. BH has to keep his customer base happy just like Will does.

Why were the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and "I'm going to rush right over there and tell them how I feel" necessary, though?

Tech professor Dr. Marshall Fishwick was characterized in a Monday article in the Roanoke Times's New River Valley Current as saying that "big-time football has no place at a major university," to quote the RT writer. His fear was that football could become "the master of the university," and "[t]he role of the university is to educate, not entertain" (both those quotes are directly from Fishwick).

As several message board posters have stated, this view isn't exactly unique by any stretch of the imagination in higher education, wrong-headed though it may be to our way of thinking. I'll leave the effect of an 11-0 team on the student body to my friends in the Sociology department, but licensing income is up, alumni donations are expected to be way up, and there's not enough money in the entire 540 area code to buy the kind of publicity our out-of-the-way school in rural southwestern Virginia is receiving nationwide. I think I'll stop preaching to the choir on this point, though.

But again, why was it necessary to post Dr. Fishwick's e-mail address, publicly available from VT though it may be, right there on the board and to encourage everyone stopping by to tell Dr. Fishwick how they felt?

It seems like we still feel we have to justify ourselves to everyone walking down the street, as it were. But it just isn't necessary now, and may even be counter-productive.

With the Hoos, if you grew up in this state, you've been subjected to Hoo propaganda thinly disguised as media coverage since birth. I will admit it straight out -- with parents who are ODU alumni and therefore non-committal on major college sports, and going to a snotty private elementary school in Richmond's West End, I got started out as a UVa fan. I saw the maroon-and-orange light in high school, but I won't bore you with the details. What remained in my sub-conscious, though, was the fact that UVa had been pounded into my head for years as "the premier public university in the nation," with attitude to match. I'm 20 years old, and during the past 5 years, the pro-Hoo bias has started to erode away in the state media. I can only imagine what those who've been stuck listening to this for years have dealt with.

What's left of that old mentality, though, is that when Hoos go on the attack, we feel we have to defend ourselves, out of some sort of instinctive fear of the bad old days of Tech coverage returning to page D6 in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. We get defensive, the Hoos love it, because us acting like we have to claw our way up to respectability just makes them think we're somewhere down in the gutter. Don't give them that satisfaction.

As for Dr. Fishwick, what is the point of flooding his inbox with e-mail, to which posting his e-mail address on HCMB would undoubtedly lead? We're not going to change his mind -- if he's willing to make such a statement publicly after an 11-0 season, under the administration of a university president who is enthusiastically in support of athletics as long as the academic side of the campus has its standards set just as high, he's pretty set in his ways. All that a mailbox flood does is makes him defensive and gets him more publicity for his views as fast as a reporter calls to check back with him.

ABC Sports producer Marc Connolly said it a few weeks ago -- VT fans need to learn how to handle success, because right now, we don't handle it very well at all. At this point, it seems like we as fans are trying to make everybody out there as aware of our success as we possibly can, and scream foul when a few people bash on us, when we don't have to! Are we really so afraid of people turning on us that we have to mail-flood any writer who says one negative thing about our program, or that we have to react to every jealous Hoo on TheSabre and complain when BoardHost has to call time-out and regroup? We're getting the respect we've craved for so long, but acting like children only tells the remaining skeptics that they were right, and alienates those who are finally beginning to notice that there's a pretty good football team down here.

We need to get over this. Legendary Boston Bruins defenseman Bobby Orr didn't celebrate after he scored a goal -- he just simply put his head down and skated back to the bench, acting like he'd been there before. We Hokies would be wise to do the same.