Wednesday, October 22, 2008
One of the strangest moments of the Mark Mangino era came on a Tuesday in September two years ago.
A little perspective first. Mangino is anything but a poet and definitely not a Poet Laureate. He answers most questions with short statements, doesn’t “deal with hypotheticals” and times his weekly press conferences so he arrives at noon sharp and escapes exactly 20 minutes later.
But on that Tuesday, he turned into a regular Alfred Lord Tennyson. Mangino talked about KU fans, souls who had toiled and wrought through the worst, and how they filled the stadium, when four years earlier so few of them came that assistant coaches joked that they couldn’t tell if a game was going on. He talked about the team bus rides to the stadium and how it now took a long time to make the half-mile drive from the practice facility because the town bloomed with life on game day.
For Mangino, it was beautiful, like he was announcing the arrival of Kansas football. He might’ve been a year ahead of schedule, but he was right.
Kansas is building a legitimate football tradition, one with fans who tailgate for hours beforehand and then show up on time to games. One with players who might not have the same talent as the boys from Texas or Oklahoma but fight harder to gain an edge.
Unfortunately, as the fans piled into the stadium to watch good football, a certain obnoxious kickoff chant caught on and became part of that tradition.
It’s a shame. Real football schools don’t resort to shouting lines from “The Waterboy” at every kickoff.
If fans want to be taken seriously, they need to stop worshipping Rob Schneider. Good football schools don’t need gimmicks.
Of course, Kansas hasn’t always been good.
In 2001, the Terry Allen era was at its worst. Kansas gave up 244 points in five losses to K-State, produced one more NFL player than you or I did and let renegade players like Mario Kinsey run wild.
To top it off, Al Bohl, the man who would later sell Jayhawk merchandise at a personal garage sale and claim Roy Williams held him like a dove in his hand before crushing him, was overseeing the mess as the athletic director.
I would’ve wanted to rip someone’s head off, too. So students did. Sort of.
The trashiest chant in the history of this school started with a murmur that year. From the band. At least, that’s the legend according to students at the time.
Kellis Robinett, a KU graduate and former Kansan sports editor, was a freshman during the 2001 season. One game, he’s not sure which one it was, he heard an almost whisper-like sound coming from the band. He asked other fans about it and found out what they were saying.
Soon, the chant caught on among the hard-core fans in the student section, and a few started shouting it late in games. By then, Kansas was usually down 63-0, and you had few options. You could go home. You could stay bored. Or you could say the chant.
It was about entertainment, forgetting the inferior product on the field and about sticking it to Allen, Kinsey and the dove. Students needed it. Now they don’t.
KU football matters. There are no more blowouts. The team has lost at Memorial Stadium just twice since 2005.
If the Jayhawks come close to the Big 12 North title the next couple of years, Kansas can stake a claim to be part of at least the B-list of college football powers. And college football powers don’t associate with F-list actors.
Notre Dame fans scream “Go Irish.” Alabama has “Roll Tide Roll.” Michigan yells “Let’s Go Blue.” The Rob Schneider special wouldn’t fit.
So why should it fit here?
— Dent is a Overland Park senior in journalism. He is a Kansan managing editor.
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