1986: Enough of this Gap – time for Shocker football to fold

No point letting autumn slip away from us without participating in the most traditional and bloodthirsty fall sport of them all - Wichita State football bashing.

It is happening right now in the offices of Henry Levitt Arena. Every year at this time, WSU athletic department people do their post-season football evaluating. They go over the films, identify weaknesses, throw their coffee cups at the screen, then try to figure out what to do with the program.

Some free advice: Punt it.

After the Shockers’ last home game of the season, a 17-10 loss to Illinois State that took place on a beautiful day and was viewed by 4,233 people in 30,000-seat Cessna Stadium - the audience consisting of a few fans, some idle ticket takers, and relatives of players - head coach Ron Chismar met the media wearing his familiar post-game, hang-dog expression, and spoke of the gap between being competitive and winning.

He held up his hand, spread his thumb and forefinger, and said WSU was just that far from being able to hold its own against Illinois State, to being able to beat Illinois State.

He said his goal is to go out after the season and get a good mix of junior college transfers and high school kids to shore up the squad, and maybe then, finally, the Shockers will reach the point where he can close his fingers.

That far.

The Gap.

Of course, he was right, but as gaps go, this one is a beast. It has existed at WSU for more than 20 years, roughly since the early 1960s. It has outlasted the Space Gap, the Missile Gap, the Credibility Gap, the Generation Gap and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. To Shocker fans it’s more infamous than the 18-minute gap in the Nixon tapes.

Sometimes The Gap is wide, sometimes it is narrow, and sometimes, when WSU has a rare winning season, it fools everybody into believing that it is gone entirely, only to reappear in a year or two, grinning as wide as ever.

The Gap has swallowed WSU football coaches whole, drained the university’s financial resources, and sucked the enthusiasm out of the community.

WSU went 3-8 this year, lost $700,000, and saw attendance drop 15 percent. Alumni are indifferent to the program, students and faculty don’t want it, the city doesn’t support it.

Why keep it?

Image, we are told. Makes the university look like a real university, or something. But you wonder what kind of image WSU presents to the world when the football program has to get dolled up every so often, pay a visit to an Arizona State or a Florida State, lose, pick up its paycheck, slink back to town, then try to find a way to respect itself in the morning.

“Visibility,” we are told. Athletics are the “window of the university,” we are told.

Basketball, yes. Football, you should pull the shade when stuff like that goes on.

This year the Shockers were independents for the first time and faced a schedule guaranteed to make The Gap chortle with anticipation. Three games - Iowa State, Florida State, and Arizona State - offered certain disaster. On top of that there were road trips to Toledo, Tulane and Tulsa, and a home game against Cincinnati.

Chismar is a good coach and a fine human being, and you wonder how long he’ll put up with this sort of self-flagellation.

Even in the face of that schedule, he at least made some headway against The Gap. There is no question that this year’s 3-8 team was better than last year’s 3-8 team. Given this rate of progress, next year’s 3-8 team probably will be even better than this year’s 3-8 team.

Thanks to Chismar and his staff, the Shockers now can block, tackle, line up onsides and find their classrooms. This is real improvement. They played well against Cincinnati, won at Tulane, and had their moments against the better teams on their schedule. But they also lost to teams they should have beaten. Then there was Morehead State.

Every year there is a Morehead State.

Enough.

After the Illinois State game, one of the Shocker players, Anthony Hardy, thought back over the season and said, “Seems like we’re always just one player, or one play away from winning.”

Always.

It is called The Gap, and the time has come to let the program fall into it and disappear.

This story was originally published December 10, 2015 at 12:45 PM with the headline "1986: Enough of this Gap – time for Shocker football to fold."