The University of Massachusetts’ athletic department really wants you to like its football team. It really does.

It wants you the students, you the alumni and you the members of the surrounding communities to unite and create a rabid following for a team that has won two of the last five Atlantic 10 titles and a National Championship in 1998.

Those in charge of bringing fame and recognition to the program want you to make tailgating for Saturday home games a staple of fall in western New England, and they want you to make it a daylong event and actually stay through the completion of the game.

They want you to buy maroon hats and sweatshirts, flags and mini-footballs, and they want you to show pride and team spirit, because when they have homecoming bonfires, they want you to show up.

They also want to jump to where the prestige is, where the interest is. They want to move to Division I-A, play a few games at the home of the Super Bowl champions, and leave behind the “minor leagues” of I-AA, the Atlantic 10 and the 6,000-seat high school stadium covered in snow and frozen mud. They want to go big time.

So what then, in the name of the 22,000 fans that flock to Tubby Raymond Field every time the Fightin’ Blue Hens are at home, or the 23,000-plus who tell you to “dress warm and bring earplugs” when coming to see the Montana Grizzlies, are these fine folks doing in completely and utterly under-publicizing the UMass team?

Last time I checked, there was no rabid community following for the team. That wicked cool Adrian Zullo jersey from two years ago is still the marquee football item in the campus UStore. And the only student support at McGuirk on Saturdays is myself, whoever is calling the game on WMUA and that random kid in my anthropology class whom I still don’t believe actually goes.

With the pipe dream that is the potential move to I-A set to be revisited in five years, the time has come for the athletic department to put a genuine effort into drumming up some support for this team, for it just might take that long.

The Minutemen concluded spring drills and played their spring game on Saturday, but if you didn’t know where to look, you might never have known.

There was no announcement made, release publicized or promotion created to draw more than close friends and family to this annual event. If it wasn’t for this very publication printing an account of what happened, this 20,000-plus student campus wouldn’t have even known it existed, for that matter.

Meanwhile, the University of Miami requires pre-ordering of spring game tickets up to six months in advance.

Go figure.

Mike Marzelli is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].