Video: Tommy West Tells Memphis The Truth About Their Sorry Football Program

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The University of Memphis football program embarks upon another season of futility tonight when the Tigers play host to 20th ranked Mississippi State.

The Tigers-Bulldogs matchup is among 15 games to open the 2011 college football season and is one of only two games involving nationally ranked teams.

Larry Porter is entering his second season as the Tigers coach after posting a 1-11 record in 2010, the fourth time since 1970 that Memphis has won only one game in a season.

Porter has the unenviable task of turning around one of the most moribund football programs in the nation. Over the past 40 years, Memphis has compiled a record of 190-260-7 and has had 23 losing seasons.

Former coach Tommy West knows all too well how difficult it is to build a winning program at Memphis. He compiled a 49-61 record during his nine seasons as the Tigers coach and was fired in 2009 after a second straight losing season.

But with West as the Memphis coach, the Tigers football program enjoyed its most success. He led Memphis to their first bowl game in more than 30 years in 2003 when the Tigers played in the New Orleans Bowl and finished with a 9-4 record.

That would mark the first of five bowl game appearances for Memphis in a six year period, but the Tigers’ unrealistic fan base soon would call for West’s firing after the team lost in the 2008 St. Petersburg Bowl and finished the season 6-7.

The 2009 Tigers team was 2-7 when West was fired, but he remained the coach through the end of a 2-10 season.

Following the announcement that he’d been terminated, West held a press conference where perhaps for the first time in the school’s history everyone heard the truth about the Tigers miserable football program.

And what resulted was a typical response from the Memphis fan base and the local media, who despite all their claims to the contrary, are just as complicit in the program’s long history of failure.

Over the past 30 years, Tiger fans have bad mouthed university presidents, athletic directors, coaches and anyone else they think is responsible for the sorry state of their football program.

Yet even when West was winning and getting the Tigers to bowl games, the Liberty Bowl was at best two-thirds full. That is a true sign of an apathetic, ungrateful fan base.

For a program that just finished its most successful season in decades, in 2003 Memphis only managed an average home game attendance of 38,668 in a stadium that seats a little over 61,000.

In 2009, Memphis averaged 25,795 for six home games. During Porter’s first season as the Tigers coach in 2010, they averaged 23,918 for six home games.

Those attendance figures speak volumes about the Memphis fan base.

And to give you an idea of how unrealistic Tigers fans are, look at the comments following the article written about West being fired, my favorite of which is this:

“I assume all you who have clamored for this over the past 4 seasons will be at the game Saturday. I dare all of you to do what you rarely do, SHOW UP AND SUPPORT THE PROGRAM! But you won’t.”

And there it is.

Personally, I’d like to see the Tigers football program succeed, but their fan base makes me sick. Their jealousy of surrounding SEC schools like Ole Miss, Arkansas, Mississippi State and especially Tennessee is pathetic.

When you visit web sites and forums, Memphis football fans will defend their program with vigor. But when it comes time to actually show their support by attending games, they’re nowhere to be found.

And they can’t argue that point because the proof is in the attendance figures. Not only that, but when Tennessee or Ole Miss plays Memphis at the Liberty Bowl, better than half the fans in attendance will be pulling for the Rebels or Vols.

For all the belly-aching, all the bad mouthing and all the finger pointing, Memphis fans get what they deserve.

When the Tigers suffer yet another losing season this year, Memphis fans will blame Larry Porter, athletic director R.C. Johnson, school president Shirley Raines and anyone else they can find.

But of course, they won’t blame themselves.

So in honor of all those sorry Memphis Tigers football fans, this video of Tommy West is for you. And take my advice – listen to what the man says because he’s the only one who’s told the truth about the Tigers football program in the last 40 years.

And for the record, I’m not related to Tommy West.