Interesting story in the St. Joe's student paper today: the school has officially adopted the Boston College football team as a sort of brother institution so that students on Hawk Hill can have a football team to root for, including the ability to go to BC home games.
Now, I figure this has something to do with a common dislike of Notre Dame. Or maybe Villanova, even though BC isn't in the Big East anymore. But still, it strikes me as a little odd. And check out the comments on the story, which range from apathy to outright dislike of that august (though not Augustinian) institution of higher learning in Chestnut Hill, Mass.
You know, the one whose basketball players either have their apartments quite dramatically broken into or get kicked off the team for indiscipline. Yes, that's basketball, but still, that stuff has given the school a reputation that its other really good teams (the football team included) haven't been able to help shake.
Nonetheless, BC is in fact Jesuit, like St. Joe's. And like Georgetown, Holy Cross, and Fordham, all of which have football, though it's I-AA football and of those three only Holy Cross is really any good.
I can't help thinking something's sort of odd about this partnership, though. Maybe more odd than the last partnership St. Joe's formed to adopt a football team -- Auburn in the late 1980s. That partnership included giving St. Joe's students free tickets to the homecoming game, according to the article I linked to above. But the deal fell apart when Auburn was accused of paying a player.
"It's easier to adopt a team than to create one," St. Joe's Student Vice President for Student Affairs Dan Harris says in that story. "The University has so many financial commitments at the present time that creating a football team would be prohibitively costly."
That's for sure. But it still feels a bit weird, at least to me.
I'd certainly like to know what you think, especially if you're at St. Joe's. Leave a comment or send me an email. Try to be nice, though?
