Bet you didn’t know this, but for all the hours Syracuse athletes spend ceaselessly reviewing plays or practicing techniques or watching film, once they take the field, they’re depending almost entirely on you.

Yes, you.

So what if you’ve got no scholarship or athletic ability? So what if you’ve got less muscle definition than roadkill? So what if your vertical leap couldn’t hurdle you over a Matchbox car?

They need you, so drop your textbooks, grab a uniform and get ready.

Don’t keep the 3-11-2 SU women’s soccer team waiting any longer, because it’s been anticipating your arrival since the start of the year, when head coach April Kater, hyping your importance to the team’s success, said, ‘It just depends on how much you want to win.’

So where have you been?

Perhaps you’ve been dressing for the men’s basketball team. But if that’s the case, take note that your touch from the perimeter still needs a little refining.

‘The bottom line is, you’ve got to make some shots,’ basketball coach Jim Boeheim said last year.

‘You’ve just got to keep firing,’ forward Kueth Duany said. ‘You’ve got to find some other guys, too, especially if they’re double-teaming you. You’ve got to keep attacking the defensive end, find someone open for a three.’

But don’t sweat it, because I guarantee you’ll never, ever get cut. After all, athletes and coaches alike rely almost entirely on you, so much so that barely a sentence is uttered without referring to your graces.

These days, jocks typically depend on second-person vernacular almost like George Bush depends on Dick Cheney, who is, incidentally, W’s second person.

That said, it makes perfect sense that the Syracuse football team has found a scapegoat for this year’s 2-6 season — you.

‘You can’t win a game turning the ball over,’ tight end Joe Donnelly said in disbelief after watching you lose three fumbles and throw one interception against West Virginia.

‘After a game like this, you tend to put your head down,’ cornerback Latroy Oliver said.

Keep your head up, though, and you’ll notice that second-person references are growing.

Sure, Syracuse may see its share of U-Haulers — take moving-in day at Flint Hall, for example — but only in an athletic locker room can one understand the popularity of its homonym, ‘you’-hollers. Long abandoned is the fashionable third-person trend that swept into (and out of) sports at the end of the last decade. The second person survived because it’s always been more convenient.

What coach, after all, would pass off a defeat on a player when he or she can pass it off on you? Invariably, you will get the blame for tough times — of which Syracuse teams have seen more than their share this season.

‘So many things went wrong,’ head coach Paul Pasqualoni said, ‘I don’t even know how you explain it.’

There’s responsibility, too.

‘Do I think we’re one of the better teams out there?’ asked women’s lacrosse coach Lisa Miller last season. ‘Yes I do. But come gameday, you have to prove it.’

Yikes. So what are you going to do?

Here’s an idea: stop being the second person and return to being that good ole’ 12th man. Go back to the bleachers. Instead of getting stuffed by a couple opposing linebackers, try getting stuffed by a couple Dome dogs. Most importantly, remove yourself from the athletic world and mercifully rid us of ubiquitous, second-person references.

Maybe Syracuse teams will benefit in the long run. It can’t get any worse for you.

‘Everywhere you go,’ SU quarterback R.J. Anderson said, ‘you hear about how you lost the game.’

It would seem, with all this negativity, that you are not the answer. Indeed, the second person has proven no better than a second stringer.

Leave the Syracuse teams to play on their own. And should things turn around, players and coaches can reserve the right to say, emphatically, ‘You never believed in us anyway.’

Published on October 28, 2002 at 12:00 pm