Earlier this week, SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt featured East Texas A&M University on the “Bad Beats” segment. The football sting was familiar enough: a 16–6 lead in the third quarter that slipped away to Lamar on a sequence of costly errors.
What went national, though, wasn’t just the (admittedly frustrating for Lions fans) football. It was the frame. The hosts joked about the shot of our stadium — “I'm wondering if we just paid a dad for this film” — and the Quick Track across the street. The punchline, essentially: Division I football… next to a gas station.
The joke lands differently here
Yes, there’s a gas station in the shot. Around here, that’s not an embarrassment; it’s an anchor. It’s where people fuel up on the way to work, where students grab a drink before kickoff, where neighbors cross paths on game night. It’s part of the story of a place that supports its team without pretending to be something it isn’t.
“Around here, the stadium and the store grew up together.”
The picture from 1950
There’s a photograph from 1950, the year Memorial Stadium was completed — a brand-new field at the edge of an open, nearly pastoral Commerce. No canopy of lights beyond the end zone. No storefronts. Just a slab of Texas sky and a promise.
(That same year, ESPN didn’t exist. Lamar hadn’t yet played a down of modern football. Scott Van Pelt’s alma mater, the University of Maryland, was still running the split-T and dreaming of a national title it wouldn’t win for another three years.)
Seventy-five years later, that open field is a city — not a punchline. The built environment around East Texas A&M is a sign of life: students, families, small businesses, weekends that still feel like weekends. The presence of commerce (lowercase “c”) around Commerce (capital “C”) is what you hope for when a university roots a town and the town roots back.
What growth looks like
If ESPN really wants to celebrate the breadth of college football, then places like ours ought to count. The lights aren’t Manhattan-TV bright, but the pride is. Families invest in their kids’ futures with tuition payments and long drives and loud cheering, not NIL deals or media packages.
So yes, Lamar played “next to a gas station.” They also played beside a university that’s been educating Texans since 1889 and a program that fought its way into Division I on grit more than glamour.
The last word
Local doesn’t mean lesser. It means real. And around here, the lights are plenty bright for us.
