Members of the OSU Greek community have heard criticism from every angle about the mass exodus that happens at the Homecoming football game after halftime. But this year, someone put forth a new attack against Greeks.
“#okstate should sell second half tickets to the Homecoming game to fill all the seats left empty by the greeks who leave after 30 minutes,” Kyle Porter (aka Pistols Firing) tweeted during the game. Mix that with 2,000 Greeks whose emotions are running high and you’ve got an instant fire on a day where the temperature in Boone Pickens Stadium was over 90 degrees.
His first mistake is incorrectly stating that we left after 30 minutes. For a guy who writes a primarily sports-themed blog, he should know that the first half of a football game takes at least two hours.
On Oct. 26, Porter fueled the fire when he published a blog post claiming to know the “real reason Greeks leave homecoming early.” In that post, Porter takes tweets from three Greek men and tries to show how they are “irrational.” He puts forth several arguments that are invalid, wrong and ignorant, and I’m going to tear them apart right here.
First he denounces the hard work Greeks put into their house decs and Homecoming in general, saying that being tired from pomping is no excuse. I’d love to see him attempt an All Night Pomp. He calls the decs “tissue paper and chicken wire,” clearly not taking into account the welding, engineering and design aspects that make those decs such massive undertakings. Until he’s attempted pomping, he has no room to say you can’t be tired from it.
Porter highlighted a tweet from Sigma Alpha Epsilon member Grant Heckenkemper about the roughly 80,000 people that attended the Walkaround Friday night before the football game. Porter tried to refute the tweet as being an “inane argument,” but Heckenkemper has a point. Take away the house decs and the money and time Greeks put into them and what do you have? Empty streets. 80,000 people aren’t going to show up a day early for a football game to walk around the empty streets of Greek row for nothing.
The Greek community also generates income for the university and the city of Stillwater with their homecoming activities. They buy supplies for the building of their decs in Stillwater. Those 80,000 people mentioned earlier, who come to see the immaculately arranged tissue paper, book hotel rooms to stay overnight, and then go eat meals in Stillwater restaurants or buy food from local vendors set up during Walkarounds. They buy t-shirts and pictures with Pistol Pete, and then the next day they wake up and spend even more money on the football game festivities. You can’t tell me that this season’s struggling football team brought in all that revenue by themselves.
Porter’s main argument is that Greeks don’t stay the full length of the game because we don’t usually go to football games. Now, it’s not statistically feasible for me to find out exactly how many Greeks and non-Greeks have student tickets and then calculate the percentages to prove him wrong. I can say that out of the more than 2,000 Greek members at OSU, I believe the majority have student tickets. There’s no way you can say that about the roughly 23,000 non-Greek students.
Junior member of Gamma Phi Beta Amanda Brown sums it up with her invitation to Porter: “Join our homecoming process next year. Finish all your hours, make A’s on all your tests; if you did as much as we did, I bet you $1,000 you’d leave at halftime too. So come on and join, we always need an extra hand since we make this happen every year for your enjoyment.”
Ultimately, Porter’s blog post and tweet are examples of his ignorance and arrogance. This guy clearly isn’t a member of the Greek community. He has no place criticizing people who put forth more work than any other group on campus during this time. He doesn’t get what it’s like to get pomp glue in your hair and scratches from the chicken wire on your face (yeah that happened to me last year) and then not place in the dec competition. I could handle being called out by another Greek member, but not by someone who has never experienced the Greek side of Homecoming.
Shots fired right back at ya, @pistolsguy.
