Opinion: UMass Football? It’s Time to Do Something

In case you missed it — and it was hard to miss because it was all over ESPN and the internet — UMass was down 45-0 to Northern Illinois in their game last week, kicked a field goal to cut into that lead midway through the fourth quarter, and then spectators were treated to … fireworks.

That’s right, fireworks.

This display amounted to terrible optics and a scene that will, and should, hang over this program for a long time now. And if we’re being optimistic (which is very hard to be with this program), maybe this imagery will inspire some action.

Something is certainly needed.

UMass football has become more than an embarrassment to the university, its students, and its huge alumni base. The school has a seemingly permanent place in ESPN’s ‘bottom 10’ rankings, an inglorious list of the 10 worst programs in college football’s highest tier — the Football Bowl Subdivision, or FBS.

And this year, it looks like the school could be the ‘bottom 1.’ It is the only winless team in the FBS at 0-10, with one of those losses coming to Division 2 Bryant, and it has scored just 105 points while giving up 376. It ranks dead last in ESPN’s College Football Power Index at 136.

Meanwhile, the school is a member of the Mid-American Conference (MAC), one of the most anonymous in the country, and plays the likes of Buffalo, Akron, Central Michigan, and Bowling Green. These are not regional rivalries, and they are not going to draw fans to Warren McGuirk Alumni Stadium. Indeed, a very small crowd was on hand to see those fireworks in person.

The futility on the football field stands in stark contrast to progress UMass Amherst has made in many other realms, from its business and engineering programs to the biosciences and IT. And the university is finding that it’s much more difficult to achieve success on the gridiron than in the classroom, having cycled through several coaches and moving from the MAC to status as an independent, and then going back to the MAC, where it lives in virtual obscurity — until it decides to send up fireworks when it cuts the opponent’s lead to 42 points.

The program needs to either move back down a division and play some of its regional rivals, like New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Harvard, and maybe Boston College, or make a serious financial commitment to this endeavor to play ‘big-time’ college football.

Like we said, maybe this display will inspire some real progress, something actually worthy of fireworks.