If you’re a member of the University of Marshall men’s basketball team, you should be offering some weird animal sacrifices to the basketball gods today. Your improbable prayer-a ridiculous 75-foot bank shot as time expired Wednesday against SMU-was answered.

If you’re an SMU sports fan, you may be more comfortable believing that sports gods don’t exist. Because if they do, the Mustangs somehow have fallen out of these gods’ good grace.

Last fall, the football team lost twice in the last minute of a game, and the basketball team has lost twice this season on buzzer beaters.

Where is our lady luck? Are we really that ugly that she wouldn’t even flirt with us, instead continuously spiting us when we needed her most?

Wednesday’s miraculous shot got me thinking on a larger scale. To make a Biblical reference, it’s almost as if SMU is the equivalent of God’s chosen people, the Israelites. At one point we looked destined for the promised land, but we somehow fell out of these gods’ favor, and we’re stuck wandering in the wilderness.

We paid for our sins nearly 20 years ago, when the NCAA handed down its death penalty, and not much good has come since then, at least for major sports like football and men’s basketball.

I understand that the women’s basketball team won the Conference USA Tournament last season, and the men’s tennis team made the NCAA Tournament. I don’t want to diminish their accomplishments, but I think many people here would agree that varsity athletics, as a whole, seem to have fallen into some rough times lately.

We need a parting of the Red Sea, a Joshua to rise up and lead us into the land that we once seemed destined for. So who will it be? When will our day come?

Keep praying. Hopefully our wandering in the wilderness won’t last as long as it sometimes seems it will.

-Chris Dell

Sports Editor