A Year to Remember

No, not that year. I'm not talking about the year that ended with seven straight post-season wins. I'm talking instead about the year that ended last night in the dome, with Cincinnati scoring 52 points against the Orange, and handing them their tenth loss of the season. That's the second time in three years the Orange have lost ten games, and incidentally, those were the only two times in over a hundred seasons of football, that the Orange lost ten games.

But let's put that season in the proper perspective. We didn't just lose a lot of games; we lost a lot of games by a lot of points, and managed to do that playing in the Big East, which may have had some success this year, but still isn't the SEC, or the Big Ten. We had seven losses where we were outscored by 20 points or more.

And it was also how we managed to lose those ten games. Emphatically; decisively; ridiculously; not even close. Our rushing offense was 118th out of 119 teams. And for those readers who don't fully understand the nuances of statistics, that means in all of Division 1-A, there was only a single team who was more inept than us at moving the ball on the ground. Our sacks allowed were 118th, again out of the same 119 teams in Division I-A. And our own sack production was 118th, yes, out of 119. We had nine sacks all season. Nine. Somewhere there is another pathetic team that had fewer than nine sacks for the season, but there are games each week where some team's defense has more than nine sacks in one game. That happens every week. I saw the Giants rack up a dozen sacks against the Eagles this year, in one game. But finding an Orange sack in the dome was about as common as a solar eclipse. Now, I had been under the impression that Robinson was a defensive coach. And maybe he was better at defense than offense, because we ranked 110th in total defense, clearly better than the 115th we registered in total offense. But it's hard to lavish praise on the defensive coaching, when we allowed five teams this year to run up over 500 yards in total offense. And, only twice during the entire year did we hold a team to under 400 yards of offense.

Last night's announced attendance was just over 30,000. That's probably the smallest attendance for a football game since the dome opened. But it's also probably double the number of fans who were actually in their seats. See, when they announce the game attendance, they count all the season ticket holders. So I was counted among the 30,000, twice, once for each ticket. The tickets are still here, of course. I tried, but could not even manage to give them away. So if I'm right about the true numbers, the crowd was smaller than almost every basketball game. And for basketball, in case anyone is unaware of this, they don't open the entire dome. Full house is 33,000. Full house for football is 50,000. How many of the 30,000 announced will renew their season tickets next year? And why have I kept buying tickets for these past three miserable years?

OK that's it. I'm done for now. It's on to hoops season. Which resumes on Wednesday night, with the Orange now 3-1. This is a team with promise, but a young team, and a team that needs to play hard every night, not many nights off this year. And a team that needs to figure out how to play the 2-3 zone. And a team that needs to protect the ball better, to cut down on turnovers. But from what I've seen, if they do that, it's a team that could play late in March. Go Orange.