Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t heard the news, the Delaware State University football team will be forced to forfeit a game this coming season and possibly be rendered ineligible for the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference championship because of a major scheduling snafu.
The Hornets will not only face the University of Delaware for the first time in regular season play September 19th, but they have a date in Ann Arbor with the Wolverines of Michigan on October 17th. However, that was the day they were scheduled to play Norfolk State University, and the Spartans (well within their rights) refused to move the game to their bye week, which would’ve meant 10 straight weeks of games. For any football team, high school, college or pro, that’s a lot to ask. So in order to keep the dates, the Hornets surrendered their game with North Carolina A&T and will start the 2009 campaign 0-1 overall and in conference play.
Needless to say as a Delaware State alum, this is embarrassing. With the University suffering some serious tragedies in the past 20 months as well as the inability to find a President (Allen Sessoms is now terrorizing the University of the District of Columbia), the football team, arguably the school’s biggest athletic program, suffers because of an administrative error, adding to the reputation that DSU has of being ignorant and blind to authority and regimen, especially in an HBCU conference.
While I will agree that MEAC commissioner Dennis Thomas could certainly have found a way for DSU to keep the game and appease Norfolk and all others, the blame rests with Delaware State because the board of trustees and administration lacks respect for HBCUs and the tradition of these schools as a whole (see the Sessoms era as a reference point). One could say that DSU’s attempts to move away from everything HBCU-related is being prompted by state legislature, but the state of Delaware really isn’t moved one way or the other. Right now, it’s just a couple of folks (*ahem* Clay Smith and John Land) who doggedly believe that DSU has no place among the HBCU family and should try and compete with PWIs with larger endowments and better athletic programs.
I remember taking a trip to the University of Maryland-College Park when the Hornets men’s basketball team, fresh off its first NCAA tournament appearance, traveled to the Comcast Center to play the Terps. We were fortunate enough to get there early and we toured a bit of the campus, including the football stadium and the Comcast Center. I thought about the millions – no, BILLIONS of dollars that went into all of the facilities and recruiting and such, and I said out loud “our admin must be smoking that white, not just the green.” Everyone laughed, but for me, it was ridiculous to think that we should be trying to compete with schools who’s budget for lacrosse is probably bigger than the whole DSU athletic program budget as a whole. While I’m not saying we can’t compete on a national level, and I would like to see all Black Colleges do so, let’s be real with ourselves. Let’s build our programs up before we start making plans to stomp with the big dogs.
This scheduling drama only serves to prove that Delaware State has a long way to go before the expectations of the folks in charge are met, if they are even met at all.
