I grew up in Johnson City, TN, a mid-sized Southern town in the Appalachia segment of the Bible Belt. The church I grew up attending actually taught that the NFL played on Sundays in an attempt to distract believers from worship and hinder church attendance. One byproduct of this line of thinking is that college football, despite the level of play being generally worse than that of the NFL, is infinitely more popular. The University of Tennessee Volunteers are the athletic kings of my hometown, and everything stops on Saturdays for them. Peyton Manning visits a country club near my parents' house for a charity auction every summer, and each time he does I get 700 pictures in my email inbox from my dad of the guy wearing a goofy visor and polo shirt signing autographs for awestruck 55 year old fat guys. The local media follows Jason Witten around as if they were some sort of redneck TMZ-lite. No one cares about the Colts or the Cowboys, but everyone cares that these were Tennessee Volunteers that made it big in the NFL.
Not surprisingly, college football became my favorite sport from a very young age. Growing up, my dad wasn't as fond of the roughly two hour drive to Knoxville to fight crowds as I was, so as a compromise he bought season tickets to East Tennessee State University's fledgling I-AA program, which constituted a 7 minute drive from our house in south Johnson City. To be fair, they played indoors in an ill-conceived disaster of a football facility affectionately called the "Mini-Dome", which despite being a total failure in every way to an adult observer, was perfect for a seven year old kid to learn the ins and outs of football without my dad having to worry about weather or crowds.
I owe a lot to this program. When I was twelve, in 1996, the Bucs (yes, that's right, the geniuses from my hometown decided to name the football team located in their landlocked mountain town after pirates) went on a little bit of a tear and actually made the I-AA playoffs. In fact, they went 10-3, losing only to the national champion Marshall Thundering Herd, who jumped to I-A the following year; Montana, the national runner-up and 1 seed in the playoffs, and their money game, East Carolina. While that doesn't sound like a whole lot now, that Marshall team played in Johnson City that year at the Mini-Dome. And they had a 6'5" wide receiver no one knew. Yet.
Randy Moss. Age 19. On Astroturf. Before he won the Biletnikoff Award, was a first-round draft pick, was the catalyst for the highest scoring offense in NFL history, ran over a meter maid with his car, coined the phrase "straight cash, homey", faked mooned Green Bay Packers fans on national TV, nearly drove Joe Buck into cardiac arrest, became the most logical member of the Oakland Raiders ever cast, then set the NFL single season TD reception record as a member of the 2007 Patriots. One of the five greatest receivers ever to play the game of football and someone criminally underrated because of his pedigree and stupid off-field antics. The most dominant offensive player on two of the five best offenses in NFL history. In my town. Did I mention it was on Astroturf?
When TV analysts comment about prospects, they talk about "the eye-test". Basically, that means that a prospect looks fantastic regardless of past performance and you can see him accomplishing the same feats again against better competition. No one, and I mean no one, will ever pass the eye-test the way Randy Moss did that day against ETSU. I watched Kobe score 31 in the second half of an NBA game while on vacation in Orlando during the lockout season of 1999 and predicted the eventual three-peat as a precocious 14 year old. But Randy Moss, now that was SOMETHING.
Fast forward to the fall of 1999. My dad suddenly decided he was OK with going on road trips with me and suggested one Friday night we go to Furman the following morning to watch ETSU take them on. After all, it was only a two hour drive from Johnson City and Furman was pretty good in the SoCon, the conference ETSU played in. Of course, the Tennessee Vols were defending national champions at this time and it was a similar drive, but I won't hold that against Dad. He was much more into ETSU football than UT, and he was driving. So we go to Greenville, SC, and my college search ended before it even began. Furman became the standard I held every other college to when I visited, and I was too young and sheltered to appreciate urban college settings, so Furman was where I eventually ended up. The game itself was whatever, but it's odd how dumb things like that shape your life.
In 2003, the ETSU football program ended due to budget cuts. Interest had always been minimal thanks to the shadow of the great program in Knoxville, and rather than continue to compete with such a juggernaut of a program, the leadership of the school elected to shut it down. As I went on to get my business degree I started wondering what it would have been like if the program had been run properly. Thursday night non-conference games, $5 general admission, unrestricted parking, gimmick giveaways worth attending for, increased concession prices, and an effort to time games so that they didn't conflict with UT Vols games would have saved the program over the long term. They did none of that, which indirectly helped Appalachian State, located one hour from Johnson City in Boone, NC, become the quasi-famous I-AA juggernaut that beat Michigan in 2006 as part of a three-peat national title run. As a degree holder from ETSU (I finished my MBA there last fall) that level of modest prestige and fame would be nice. While it is highly unlikely that the program would have ever reached such heights, not even trying to do so is pretty disheartening.
I went to the last game they played in the Mini-Dome against The Citadel, and the handful of people there were very distraught about this avenue of entertainment being taken from them so unceremoniously. A lot of them undoubtedly were able to attend college because of that program. That program lives on in the NFL through the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, Mike Smith, as well as through Dallas Cowboys safety Gerald Sensabaugh, who transferred to UNC to finish his college career. While I'm not one of the 50 people still clamoring for ETSU football to return, as people didn't go to the games when it was there, the product on the field wasn't very good, and the school has adjusted to attract students that aren't concerned about football, it was a pretty special part of my growing up.
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