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Demand excellence

Controversy. It's what college athletics, especially football, are all about.

The Arizona Daily Wildcat has been both praised and criticized this week for controversial, hard-hitting columns, ones that said Mark McDonald should quit, the UA should fire head coach Dick Tomey and Manuia Savea should be suspended and/or kicked off the team.

Whether these claims were right or wrong, this section captured the pulse of the student body. Some of our competitors saw these and said, "Wow." I'm not trying to put down the other Tucson newspapers, who have a much bigger reading audience than the Wildcat, but as students, we have high expectations and make it clear.

You only get so many years in college, so everybody wants to see their team in a Rose Bowl or a Final Four while they are at school. After graduation, you still root for your alma mater, but not as passionately as you did while you were in school.

This season, the university had extremely high hopes for the football team, but things didn't go as planned. Was there too much hype? I don't think so.

The UA is not exactly a football-mad school. It isn't really mad about anything, except, at times, basketball. This isn't Columbus, Ohio, Tallahassee, Fla., or South Bend, Ind., where life and death hangs in the balance during football season. And it certainly isn't Barcelona or Madrid, where the media and fans have ridiculous expectations, so much to the point where their soccer teams change coaches and players almost every year because the pressure is unbearable.

Tucson is, and will always be, an easy-going town. Occasionally, it will whip into a sports frenzy that lasts a couple of hours, but generally speaking, you could walk around town and not know that there was a football or basketball game going on.

So, forgive the sports section for saying the football team had a bad game against Oregon. Forgive us for putting the fact that the women's soccer team had no offensive attack and lost 6-0 before a quote that said the team did "awesome."

If you want an example, look no further than UA basketball coaches. Lute Olson and Joan Bonvicini don't pull any punches and will speak their mind if their team is playing poorly. They also will discipline their players accordingly and privately.

As students, we have the right to be demanding. As the school newspaper, we have a right to be demanding, and that doesn't always mean rah-rah.