Grip on Sports: Come on Vandals, get back to Sky

Thursday: Are we blessed around here or what? We have four college football teams, all playing a different level of the game, all with varying degrees of fan support, but none on the outskirts of the game. That isn’t the way it is everywhere.

Down the river in Oregon, the Portland State Vikings may just be the most dysfunctional college football team in America. How bad is it? According to official documents, PSU sold only – wait for it –  809 tickets to its home game last Saturday. Just 809 tickets to a FCS football game?  Are you kidding?

The Vikings are in the Big Sky, the same conference with Eastern Washington, which routinely sells 10 times the tickets as PSU did last week.

The only local program that hasn’t experienced some modicum of success lately is Idaho, and, consequently, the Vandals’ games aren’t all that well attended. But there is a way to fix that, a way we’ve been advocating for years.

Quit being the prodigal sons of college football, wandering the nation in search of the right conference home. Just bite the bullet and accept the truth. The school’s football team doesn’t belong in the Sun Belt. It belongs in the Big Sky.

There is a built-in rival 90 miles up the road. There are traditional foes waiting in Missoula, Bozeman and Pocatello. The Big Sky, in reality, is home.

Friday: You know what happens this weekend? Summer ends, in a metaphysical way. See, this is the last weekend of baseball. The last gasp of summer’s game.

Of course, it won’t be that big a deal. Saturday the nation’s eyes will not be tuned to Joe DiMaggio’s successors, they will be tuned in to Knute Rockne’s descendants. And Sunday will be, as always, about the NFL.

Football reigns supreme these days. But it wasn’t always that way. Did you know, as late as 1980, almost 50 million people tuned it to watch Game 6 of the Phillies’ World Series win over the Royals? It was a record at the time – and still is.

These days the World Series struggles to attract 12 or 13 million viewers. That’s about a quarter of the viewers who once made up the audience. The airwaves are dominated by pro football, no matter how many injuries, assaults or public relations gaffes occur.

Baseball, as a TV sport, is in danger of falling behind the NBA and into third in the pantheon of America’s sports ranks. This is hard to stomach.