When is enough?
Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure to sit with a couple of Texans to watch the Longhorns beat up on the Eagles from Rice. The score at the half was 41-0. The Eagles managed to somewhat tame the Longhorns in the second half, and even scored one single touchdown. But should a team with the talent and money of the University of Texas really take on a small school of geniuses?
Texas was out for revenge after losing to Arkansas by 10 points, conveniently moving them out of the top 10, and then they achieved their goal.
UT has the largest undergrad population in the country (37,000), while Rice has fewer undergrads than DU (2,800). The chance of receiving a degree after a football player spend six year at UT is only 50%, while 90% of the high school football players in the state of Texas don’t even have the grades to get into Rice.
So many UT fans drove down from Austin to Houston to watch the game that the game had to be moved from the stadium at Rice to Reliant Stadium, where the Houston Texans play. The Longhorns had more fans than the home team. So this is obviously an unfair match, but was 41-0 in the first 30 minutes necessary?
Looking around the league, we see that this behavior is not isolated. That same weekend saw Purdue destroy Arizona 59-7 and Washington beat Idaho 45-14.
To look north of the border, the University of Toronto lost to Queens University 72-0 one week, and then lost to McMaster University 80-0.
At what point do coaches realize that they are comfortably in the lead and stop running up the score? In the Maccabi games, a sporting event billed as the Jewish Olympics, there is a rule that competitors must take an oath called the “Rachmanus” rule. “Rachmanus” literally means compassion; it may be time for some coaches to start showing some compassion toward other teams.
Athletes go out on the field or the court or dive into the pool with intentions of performing at their best, but at what point is it a clear victory.
The fault lies more with the association for organizing such games. Games should be scheduled to pair similarly ranked teams together to allow for exciting games and to get the best out of the athletes on either side of the field.
