Remember when you were younger, still living with your family, and you had to help with chores? I bet you had one you just despised, be it dishes, laundry, sweeping, mopping or some other one. You would just keep being assigned it, and you could never get it right. You were always told you didn’t do a good enough job, making you resent it.

This is a feeling that everyone has, and a feeling that applies to anything anybody does. If a person is under constant fire about a task they are doing, it is almost certain their task will get worse. This is something everybody knows, and yet students still talk serious trash about our football team often in front of the players. 

People often wonder why the football team is so bad, and I think I have the answers. It falls to three things. Number one is how the student body treats the football team, number two is how the coaches treat the players and number three is the failure of the coaches. 

I have personally seen people, and in the past I regrettably participated in, talk about how worthless the football team is. Just last week, a few people in my Communications class were talking about how NMU wasted a few million dollars re-turfing the Superior Dome for a useless team, and how the whole program should be shut down.

Until another student spoke up, a hockey player, the group was unaware of a member of the football team was sitting a few seats away. His head was down, with his arms covering his head, assumedly blocking the words from the complaining students. 

Until that moment, I never really truly considered the feelings of the football players when it came to complaining about the program. Being openly told that the reason why you go to NMU, the reason you balance the insane training schedule and classes, is pointless must feel horrible.

If I was told that or overheard it, I sure as hell wouldn’t be performing my best. After all, it is a performance to do your best for you team, yourself and the fans cheering you on. However, when you have no fans, whats the point of pushing yourself for them? I am sure most people would feel the pressure to reel back the effort, especially when your team is being verbally punished by its supposed supporters after every game. 

I remember last year how two classmates would waddle in with faces stark pale, and plop down for our English Restoration class. They would be lethargic, sickly and stressed. I would ask them why and the answer would always be the same, the coaches were punishing the team for a bad game.

The team hasn’t had a winning game in nearly 800 days. With that many loses in a row, is punishing the team really the answer? The coaches doing that is literally beating his workhorses to death. If a technique doesn’t get the desired result, doing it the same way for a different result is insane. 

Majorly, the issue falls on the coaches. A good captain knows their crew, and how to sail even in a rough storm. That is why the blame falls to them when the ship sinks.

We have great players on our football team, at the very least we have good players, and it is a travesty they are not being led to a win. It is frustrating to see them punished game after game, receiving little to no care from anyone. Not the fans, not the coaches and not the department who oversees the coaches.

As an NMU student, I would love to see our Wildcats be the team I know they can be: to sail to victory. But with bad captains, they will sink — even with a perfect crew.