Binghamton University’s women’s volleyball team won the American East Conference championship over the weekend, and the men’s basketball team won, well, a game. So where does this put us on the radar of Division I athletics? We’re not even a blip. The America East is a conference in the same way that Rosie O’Donnell is a sex symbol.
The real question is how we make a name for ourselves on the national level. The answer? We invest our time, budget and spirit into a sport much ignored by other universities: competitive eating.
Competitive eating could open new doors for Bearcat athletics. As the only university with a competitive eating team we would win the national title every year. We’re already, according to several news sources, in the top five morbidly obese cities in the nation, so let’s turn that to our advantage. Hopefully, having a nationally acclaimed sports team wouldn’t take administrators’ focus away from our academics.
Our beloved fatties, those World of Warcraft players ignored by high school coaches since adolescence, would become our bastion of hope, our high-held heroes. The University would generate millions from official bib sales and competitive gaming mouse pads featuring our star eaters — by the way, competitive gaming should be our next venture, we could win that, too.
But there are two major concerns. One: if our competitive eaters are the best in the country, how do we keep them from seek the riches and fame they’d be sure to find by taking their talents into the world of Major League Eating? We don’t want to fall into the same trap college basketball has: the one and done. Lucky for us, one and done is not something the competitive eater understands; they’re more into the one, and a lot more, and still not done (it’s an eating joke). First crisis averted.
Two: our greater fear should be the creation of a second competitive eating team by any other university. Until that day, we would be guaranteed first place. After that day, we would only come in second. Of course, we could still say we’re No. 2, at least until there’s a third team. As competitive eating catches on, as it certainly will, our national standing will start to fall, until it ends where it always does, dead last.
That’s when we invest in competitive gaming.