AMERICA AT LARGE:WHEN THE Fourth Estate convenes to cover a sporting event at almost any venue in America, a sign will be conspicuously posted as a reminder of professional decorum: No Cheering In The Press Box.

Occasionally the message will be reinforced with a similar announcement over the in-house PA system, though in the case of most sportswriters I’ve run across over the years neither is really necessary.

It isn’t just that journalistic standards are supposed to require impartiality among those covering the world of fun and games. Do this long enough and you acquire a heart of stone. If you do happen to catch a colleague openly rooting for one side or the other, it’s more likely because he’s laid a few bob on the outcome than that his passions have been inflamed by the fortunes of a particular team.

So sportswriters don’t ever care who wins or loses? Of course they do.

Let, for instance, a World Series participant jump out to a two games to none lead in a best-of-seven affair and I can flat-out guarantee you that 90 per cent of the assembled media will be on board, just because the promise of an early conclusion means they can all go home earlier.

On the other hand, some of us do form lifelong emotional attachments in our college days. Had the University of Kansas ever found itself contending for a national title when I was still working full-time for a newspaper, I’d probably have had to recuse myself.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, that problem never arose. KU has traditionally been a basketball powerhouse, not a football school. When the Jayhawks won the NCAA title in 1988, I was able to openly cheer from the comfort of my living room. When they won, more recently, two years ago, I was safely retired and was watching from a perch among the paying customers at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

The 2007-2008 academic year was commemorated by Jayhawk Nation in a popular T-shirt that proclaimed it “The Best Year Ever”. Not only did KU win the national title in basketball, the football team went 12-1 and beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. That wasn’t quite good enough to contend for a national title, but since several mainstays of that 2007 team, including quarterback Todd Reesing, were sophomores with two years of eligibility remaining, the prospects for the next two years had never been brighter.

When I was out in Lawrence for the Nebraska game that year I picked up another inspired KU-themed T-shirt I’ve been wearing ever since. It proclaims: “Our Coach Can Eat Your Coach!” While it remains a matter of conjecture, because nobody has ever got him near a scale, the best guess is that Kansas head coach Mark Mangino weighs something in excess of 430lb. Since that girth is spread across a 5ft 10in or so frame, The Coach resembles nothing so much as a large beach-ball decorated with a moustache.

The last KU coach to win more games than he lost was Jack Mitchell, whose tenure dates back to when future NFL Hall of Famer Gale Sayers and I lived on the same floor at JRP Hall in 1961. But then, KU football coaches are not noted for their longevity. A more common example would be Mike Gottfried, who coached a quarter-century ago, and got the football programme placed on NCAA probation despite having won just four games the year the infractions were discovered.

Mangino’s teams have won 50 games in his KU tenure, putting him just two victories away from the university’s all-time record, set by a coach named AP Kennedy 99 years ago.

Despite the rosy promise of the Orange Bowl season two years ago, the Jayhawks slipped to 8-5 and had to content themselves with a berth in the Insight Bowl, a comparatively minor post-season assignment, where they beat Minnesota 42-21. But with Reesing Co coming back for one more year and Mangino at the helm, the prospects for this fall seemed dazzling.

I’d watched the 2009 edition in three of their four non-conference games (the Mississippi State game, alas, occurred on the weekend of the Poonsawat-Dunne fight, and wasn’t televised in Dublin), and while the Jayhawks won them all, they seemed to struggle at times.

Hence it was with a sense of foreboding that I travelled to Lawrence last month for the Big 12 Conference opener against Iowa State.

Two days earlier I’d participated in a university-sponsored boxing symposium at my alma mater, and on the day of the Homecoming Game it was so cold that when Al Lopes and I took leave of our comfortable surroundings at the Bourgeois Pig to make our way to the stadium, the poet Wayne Propst thoughtfully raced next door to a thrift shop and procured an ancient, pink, baby blanket lest we freeze to death before the afternoon was over.

Lopes is a practising attorney in Lawrence. Forty-odd years earlier he and Jo Jo White had been the guards on a very good KU basketball team. Jo Jo was drafted by the Boston Celtics and went on to fame in the NBA. Lopes was drafted by the US army and went to Vietnam. He survived that experience, obviously, and the GI Bill paid his way through law school. He has suffered through watching Jayhawk football teams ever since.

Two years ago we had attended both the Orange Bowl and the Final Four together.

The Iowa State game was a near-disaster, though KU in the end squeaked by with a 41-36 win to keep their record perfect at 5-0. As we walked out of the stadium that day I told Lopes, “You know, if they keep playing like this they might not win another game”.

They haven’t. The Jayhawks have lost on each of the past five Saturdays, and this Saturday night in Austin all that stands between KU and official elimination from bowl consideration is the University of Texas, 10-0 and ranked number three in the country.

Not only that, but Mark Mangino now appears to be an endangered species as well. Apparently a couple of weeks ago the rotund coach got so worked up that he jabbed one of his players in the chest. Somebody else conveniently discovered a whole pile of unpaid parking tickets. An in-house investigation is under way.

As my friend Tom Keegan, the sports editor of the Lawrence Journal-World, noted yesterday, “When he coached his team to an Orange Bowl victory and a 12-1 record just two seasons ago, he was fiery, a western- Pennsylvania, blue-collar underdog who made it big and never forgot his roots. Now that he’s lost five in a row, he’s an abusive, obnoxious bully who doesn’t always play nice with his football players.”

The good news is the pre-season polls rate the Jayhawks the number one basketball team in the country.

Wait’ll next year!