Time to embrace the Bulls Football Bandwagon

Quite a few of the Bull Run editors had busy weekends. It left me trying to man Twitter and the gamethread, while keeping up with the write up, and I had to take my kids to a Birthday party when the 4th quarter started, so there was that.

What caught my eyes on twitter was an unusual voice of joy about Buffalo football.

Bucky Gleason.

Now Bucky has been one of the programs loudest critics, and I’d argue that from his former perch at the Buffalo News he did substantial damage to UB football by constantly whinging on about the program.

Like the transition of the stars through the heavens you could figure out what time of year it was based on whatever narrative Bucky was pushing in his column and on twitter.

Any bit of bad news, for any UB program, translated to ‘If they just dropped to FCS, they would be amazing.’

UB Dropping Baseball, Soccer, Men’s Swimming and Rowing

Heck sometimes it didn’t need to be bad news

UB Hires Alnutt

I’ve had fun over the years tearing these down. Heck, there were times Matt had a quasi-intervention around the water cooler to get me to tone it down (And I thank you for it Matt).

So this past weekend, while manning twitter, it was odd to see Bucky practically selling UB tickets. He was rightfully called out by a lot of people, including me, here are the highlights:

While this was going on there was one tweet, back at me, which really forced me to take a step back and look.

My initial reaction is what any red-blooded American feels when chastised on Twitter... Unjustified rage and annoyance.

But I quickly cooled down and saw the point.

Bandwagon fans are too quickly dismissed by the diehards.

We have sat through and suffered so much, and most of us never wavered on supporting the team. We’ve called out coaches, we’ve criticized the decisions of administrators, but we’ve never backed down off our support for the team.

So we are tough on bandwagon fans, perhaps justifiably so. And it does not get much more bandwagon than Gleason waving a Blue and White flag around during football season.

But let’s face it, we need a bigger fan base and let’s hope that the bandwagon fandom acts as something of a gateway drug to Buffalo sports fans.

Yes, the next time we struggle a bit (hopefully many years from now) most of them will peel off but if we get a small percent to stick around and join the persistent fandom it will be worth it.

And like it or not, and I don’t, Gleason’s opinions hold sway for some people in Western New York. If he were to, say, promote the MoBull pass to his twitter followers, he could maybe help put more people in the stands.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Buffalo should be a two football team town. It’s a big enough metro and the Bulls and Bills product don’t compete directly with each other in any meaningful way.

If UB could pick up 5,000 more fans from the million-plus people in the metro area, they would instantly have a better game day experience. Yes the stadium is awful, but if you put more than 20,000 butts in seats, the atmosphere will improve a lot.

So here is your chance Bucky: UB is 4-0 and bringing in a very good Army team this weekend. The Black Knights took #5 Oklahoma to overtime and shut down a very potent Hawaii offense.

This will be a challenge and a great game for Buffalo. If the Bulls win, they may even start to push into the top-25. If you sell the game hard this week, I’m willing to call a ceasefire, and you will prove you really do want the program to succeed.

Prove to me that I’ve been too hard on you, please.

Let’s see some tweets with links to the UB Bulls MoBull pass page, let’s see you tell all your followers that they should be at UB’s game.

Most of all let’s see you say that you’re glad UB didn’t drop to FCS, that this season proved that despite the challenges, UB can be successful in the FBS.

I’m ready to move on to a world where you support UB and my Bucky retweets come from a place of admiration, not annoyance.