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LAS VEGAS — Take a few minutes and think of how some sports become almost synonymous with certain universities.
For Southern California, football represents the institution at large in the minds of college fans. Duke basketball does the exact same thing. Some schools, like Cal State Northridge, would be relatively unknown, if not for the exploits their baseball teams.
In short, sports have become something to which fans identify campuses and institutions with.
Utah State has always been a basketball school. Through thick-and-thin times in the school’s other athletic programs (primarily football), the Aggies were always able to pack the Spectrum with fans who found the institution to be synonymous with the team and vice versa.
And, when Utah native Stew Morrill became coach, the team further leveraged its fame, earning six conference championships. Indeed, Utah State was a basketball school. That is, until Utah State football began to win.
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Sure, every school has rabid fans for severely deficient programs (think how no Detroit Lions games were blacked out when the team went 0-16), but Utah State fans used to look at football as an appetizer that helped sustain them until basketball started.
Now, that isn’t the case.
Sure, winning helps, and the Aggies have won more in the last two seasons than they had in recent history, but Utah State football’s rise has created an interesting dilemma amongst the institution as a whole: Are the Aggies a football school or a basketball school?
Again, football rules the roost. Teams with great basketball programs and terrible football programs can be good athletic departments. They can have quality staff members, win conference awards and graduate large amounts of their student-athletes. Still, it’s nearly impossible to be a great athletic department without a winning football team.
In Morrill’s first 13 seasons at Utah State, the Aggies averaged 25 wins a year, which is a nice accomplishment. However, in that same time, the Aggies averaged only four wins a year in football, including the abysmal Brent Guy era (9-38). When the Aggies fired Guy after the 3-9 2008 season, Utah State was sitting on the outside-looking-in as college sports prepared for a tremendous change in landscapes.
Indeed, the minute the University of Texas decided to spurn the then-Pac-10 Conference, the dominoes began to fall. First, Utah left the Mountain West Conference for the Pac-12, meaning BYU and TCU bolted from the Mountain West Conference. Then, the Mountain West decided to bolster its membership by taking in several Western Athletic Conference teams. Finally, the WAC announced it would no longer offer football after the 2012 season.
The Aggies were in danger of becoming football nomads, like former WAC foe Idaho. However, two seasons of winning football, where the Aggies made back-to-back bowl appearances, convinced the Mountain West to grant the Aggies membership in the conference, giving football a second chance and basketball a breath of life.
Sports is a what-have-you-done for me lately business, and recently the Aggies’ football team has given fans some bragging rights. Since the 2011 and 2012 seasons, Utah State football has made three consecutive bowl games, with two consecutive victories. Since that time, Utah State basketball has had three consecutive winning seasons, no NCAA tournament appearances and a 73-39 loss to San Diego State in the second round of the Mountain West tournament to its credit.
If an objective observer looked at the records, it would be easy to see football has recently done more for the image and perception of Utah State than basketball. That creates the interesting dilemma: What is a bigger deal in Logan, football or basketball?
The taste left in fans’ mouths after the loss to San Diego State certainly creates a negative perception around the program, especially with Morrill’s doubts over whether his team will play in a postseason tournament of any kind this season. Sure, Utah State finished with a winning record (18-14), but it’s the manner in how the season ended that surely leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of a fan.
Morrill undoubtedly deserves incredible amounts of credit for what he and his assistant coaches have done since he took over the Utah State program in 1999. Yet, is all of that being washed away by football’s recent achievements? And, who would have ever thought that Utah State football would play in a conference championship game in a year that Utah State basketball didn’t?
Basketball and football always jockey for position among boosters and message-board fans, but it’s time to objectively look at which program is doing more to promote the overall brand of the university. And, without NCAA tournament runs or conference titles, basketball just isn’t right now.
Sure, there was a late season rush with the Aggies beating Colorado State in a classic Mountain West tournament comeback, but when fans realize that the Aggies went 0-7 against the Big Three (San Diego State, New Mexico, UNLV), it can cause some concern about the immediate future of the program’s dominance in Logan, especially with football beating all three.
Indeed, it begs the question: Is Logan a football town or a basketball town?
