It's difficult being a fan of the gridders these days.
With all of the controversy surrounding the team, students with friends at other Big Ten schools are scared to answer telephone calls on not just Saturdays, but every day of the week.
All of the preseason hype and Bowl Championship Series bowl game potential has transformed into making it on the list of ESPN.com's Bottom 10 college football teams week after week and hoping to make it to that bowl with the weird blue field.
But not everyone has given up on the Spartans this season. The campus is still home to some diehard fans.
Every year since I arrived in East Lansing almost four years ago, I've been both fortunate and unfortunate enough, if that makes any sense, to know possibly the biggest supporter of our football team.
He was my next door neighbor for two years in the basement of Phillips Hall and my roommate there last year. We now share an apartment with two of our other friends off campus.
At the beginning of each year, upon our first encounter, the first words out of his mouth have always been "We're going all the way, Jay. Nobody can (expletive) with us. Undefeated baaaaabbyyyy!"
Whether it was after our back-to-back losses to Wisconsin and Purdue our freshman year or our blowout loss to Cal earlier this fall, his next statement was still full of optimism.
"If we win out, we can still get to a BCS bowl or the Rose Bowl," he'd say, still full of complete confidence in the team.
The week of each home game, he would don his Duckett/Rogers jersey and Spartan hat, ready to go to Spartan Stadium and cheer probably louder than anybody else.
When we barely made it to a bowl game last season, he said we were just going to beat the hell out of whoever we played and have that much more momentum going into this season.
My roommate is loyal to the teams he's loved basically all his life. He's from Indiana, but he loves all of Chicago's teams. And, coincidentally enough, they all suck. And they have sucked for some time now. Ninety-four years without a World Series title? Come on and join the Braves bandwagon, Ro. At least my team gets to the playoffs before they choke.
I even know people who are still pulling for Marcus Taylor, who made perhaps the dumbest choice he could have made by turning pro last summer. Last week, he was even cut by an NBDL team. At the rate he's going, he'll soon be taking Yao Ming's place on the Chinese National team.
To me, fans like these are great for all sports.
They make it fun to go to games where their team is getting run off of the floor or field, and they're still shouting words of encouragement knowing there's no way the team can come back.
Our team could still fight its way into a lesser known bowl game. The Music City Bowl looks kind of attractive. If they do, it'll be all smiles in Spartan country. It also could be a good showing of how much heart those guys have for their new coach, whomever it may be. No matter what happens, I know my roommate will still be a huge supporter.
He did make one statement that I never thought I'd hear him say about football after our loss to Wisconsin.
"At least basketball season starts soon."
Jason Carmel Davis, a State News general assignment reporter, can be reached at davisj44@msu.edu.
