Today is our blog's second anniversary. Whether you've been here since the beginning*, or you just started reading a week or a month or six months ago, we all want to thank you for your support and feedback. Even though it was a pretty lousy year overall for USF athletics, we're not going anywhere. We hope you'll stick with us and help us continue to grow our community.
I like issuing a quixotic challenge in these anniversary posts, so here's this year's challenge, and it goes back to the reason I started Voodoo Five in the first place: Let's try and stamp out our knee-jerk tendencies.
My account on The Bulls Pen hit the 10-year mark last week (good Lord, that's scary to think about). I don't post there much anymore because if I feel like saying something, I can just write it out and put it here. But on the rare occasions when I do post over there, I still have one of my favorite quotes in the history of that forum as my signature. It was issued by someone named "no.bull bulls", and it reads:
"I dont know if some of you realize this, but Athletics is not like going to McDonald's. You can't go up to a drive thru window and order a championship and get it in 5 minutes."
You see this a lot in fan bases of any sport, but with our fan base's relative youth and the near-constant upward trend that our football program was on for such a long time, I think it's more prevalent than usual in USF fans.
You probably realize this if you're reading our site, but here's the kind of thing I mean. Recruits aren't busts if they don't get on the field or court as true freshmen. Winning championships is hard, and while there are certain sports where USF has built-in advantages, that's still not a guarantee. Losing one game is never the end of the world, or the program. You don't need to start FireStanHeath.com when freaking Dean Smith couldn't have won consistently in the situation USF basketball was in between 2005-2011. Sometimes players or coaches just don't turn into what you think they will, and it's not necessarily anyone's fault.
(NOTE: I have been guilty of many of these things as well.)
It's OK to get excited after big wins, or upset after tough losses. God knows we had lots of practice with that during football season. That's part of being a fan. It's OK to have expectations. It's OK to be critical. But everything fits into a bigger picture, one that might not be clear until long after that game is over. You all know that we're no fans of our athletics leadership, but it's all based on the big picture and the evidence that's accumulated over a long period of time. It's not like we watched the Pittsburgh football game and decided that everyone had to get fired because USF got stopped on fourth down in their own territory.
Last year's goal was accomplished in a warped way -- we were worried that USF fans were coasting, but the football team cratered so badly that the passion from the core group of USF fans actually increased. Now let's take that passion and use it wisely.
* I still like that I contemplated Skip Holtz being "a liar and a dick" within 30 words of beginning this blog, even though he clearly was not and is not either of those things. I must have been really riled up that day.