Something felt different on Saturday at McGuirk Alumni Stadium.
Those feelings went past the basics of the game: No. 21 Missouri visiting the Massachusetts football team in the first leg of a home-and-home that feels absurd on its face. It was UMass’ (1-6) first time hosting a SEC school in eight years, and the first time ever where such a game was played on-campus. The 60 minutes went as expected, with an angry Tigers (5-1, 1-1 SEC) squad avenging their first loss of the season with a 45-3 shellacking of the Minutemen.
Rather, the atmosphere on Saturday felt new and different. Missouri brought an energy and passion to UMass’ home field that I had never seen before in my three years here. Every first down felt more meaningful, every big play felt bigger and both sets of fans’ reactions showed a newfound interest in college football that you don’t often get from Amherst.
“You could feel that there were more people,” Minutemen head coach Don Brown said.
For a school that has been in college football’s top division for 12 years now, Saturday was one of the first times where I felt like UMass football belonged.
The energy was evident when I arrived at McGuirk roughly 90 minutes before kickoff. After stepping out of my car, I was greeted with a Tigers bumper sticker on a car from New Hampshire parked in front of me. That was my first encounter with a fanbase that soon filled the seats on McGuirk’s visiting sideline, bringing as much of the SEC experience as they could to western Massachusetts. Going from playing in front of 97,000 fans to 16,000 is a big wake-up call: Missouri fans did their best to make their players feel at home.
“I thought it was an awesome showing from the [Missouri] fanbase to be here,” Tigers head coach Eliah Drinkwitz said. “They have an undying passion…in our football team and they believe in our team and we appreciate that belief.”
Meanwhile, the Minutemen made a noticeable effort to enhance their gameday experience for their new visitors. You can’t do much to change a stadium’s atmosphere mid-season, but a new digital stat overlay, a new system where fans could submit pictures to be shown on the video board and a partially successful maroon-out theme were some of the ways that UMass tried to look as good as possible.
Minutemen fans didn’t have a ton to cheer for as the game went on, but the team’s major moments brought big roars from the home sideline. In particular, a fourth-and-one late in the first half for UMass led to a fake punt called by the staff. Senior John Burton took the snap and handed the ball off to safety Te’Rai Powell, who galloped through an opening and down the right side of the field for a 39-yard gain. It wasn’t Death Valley, but Powell’s run led to some of the loudest cheers that I’ve ever heard out of the stadium that fans have recently christened “The Junkyard.”
The external environment worked out well for the Minutemen on Saturday too. Sure, the school couldn’t do much about its visiting locker room, which was predictably slammed on by national college football fans when it was featured on College GameDay. However, the weather couldn’t have been better, with the sun shining and temperatures in the mid-60s by kickoff. Some Missouri fans appreciated the fall foliage that serves as the stadium’s backdrop on game days.
UMass might have been dominated on the field, but Saturday showed that the spirit of the football program remains strong. Not selling out the stadium was disappointing, but Minutemen supporters still showed up and embraced the unique circumstances that led to a huge home game for their program. More importantly, fans seemed tuned in to the game until garbage time (with the exception of the student section, but that’s its own problem). When good football arrives in Amherst, support will follow.
Some people will use today’s on-field result to justify taking away these sorts of games. They’ll push the narrative that power-conference schools, or the SEC and the Big Ten in particular, should abandon trips to non-power schools in favor of either more buy games or more contests against college football’s Goliaths.
Don’t get caught up in that belief. These games do wonders for the college football ecosystem as a whole.
For one day, a non-power school that gets consistently overlooked and put down by the suits and ties running college football today can plant their flag in front of a national audience. Their efforts may succeed or fail, and today in Amherst we saw the latter. For many UMass fans, the on-field product didn’t matter as much as usual though. Big-time college football had arrived in Amherst, and with it came a gameday experience that will be tough to replicate.
Dean Wendel can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @DeanWende1.
