No one goes to the Playboy Mansion to pickup on the larger than life chick standing in the corner with barbeque sauce all over her face, wearing a T-shirt saying, “I pee in the shower.”

Herein lies the problem for Sacramento State athletics: They’re not coming close to equaling the competition.

A mess of barbeque sauce and the motto of “the bigger the better” might cut it in the Midwest, where competition from professional sports is scarce, but it doesn’t cut it here in Northern California.

The Sacramento region adores their little purple guys to a degree of acute nausea and rallies strongly behind the 49ers and Raiders, the A’s, Giants and Rivercats.

Casual Sac State student: “We have a football team? Sweet! But did you hear the Kings got Greg Ostertag? I think he’ll be a pretty good fit here.”

Hornet sports has never held any place in the minds of students, let alone local Sacramento residents.

Even in our football programs “glory days,” with Charles Roberts and Ricky Ray, our attendance numbers looked considerably closer to high school numbers in comparison to more prominent college programs. Many schools, such as Stanford, Cal and UCLA, are able to coexist with professional sports programs only because the school has such a strong history and their sports traditions were founded long before the existence of local professional teams.

I saw a friend of mine on campus last week, and we got to talking about the column and what I would be writing about for the first week. I asked him what he cared about relating to Sac State sports.

What followed was about eight solid seconds of awkward silence.

Then he kind of looks at me, not knowing what to say, and says in his most unsure voice, “cheerleading?”

He took a wild guess, as not to offend me. And he was right on.

The bottom line is that there is too few who actually care about our athletic program.

There is only a small group of diehard fans — aside from those affiliated directly with Hornet sports — which actually bleed green and gold. The majority of fans at Hornet events are either formerly involved directly in a program, friends and parents of the athletes, or there to support some type of philanthropy.

I’d bet that less than 2 percent of the student body at Sac State could even name our starting quarterback and that’s a generous statement.

So rather than looking forward to anything major, Sac State needs to learn to value the many moments of success we already achieve with a smaller program.

Perhaps the idea of Sac State sports ever becoming anything more than a footnote to Sacramento sports is a lost cause and it’s time we just learn to love it for what it is:

“uhhh… cheerleading?”

You can write or respond to Jimmy Spencer at [email protected]

Address to the feedback from the columnist:

It seems many are missing the point of my column, so I thought I would help clear some things up.

Even in our football programs “glory days,” with Charles Roberts and Ricky Ray, our attendance numbers looked considerably closer to high school numbers in comparison to more prominent college programs.

Here is some homework:

Attendance numbers to the more prominent colleges I looked at:

Michigan – 110,576

Penn State – 107,239

Tennessee – 106,275

The statement that our attendance numbers looked considerably closer to high schools is much more true in comparison to more prominent college programs.

High school draws a very conservative figure of about 1,000 fans to a game, while we drew 11,000 back then. That is a difference of 10,000. Now, again, in comparison, 10,000 looks much closer than 100,000.

The point of the column is that rather than looking forward to anything major, Sac State needs to learn to value the many moments of success we already achieve with a smaller program.

We are never going to be “The Florida State of the West Coast ” so lets just appreciate what we have going on here instead of complaining.

Thank you.