Over 20,000 hotdogs were left over following Saturday’s showdown between the Pioneer football team and the UW-Oshkosh Titans. Because of less than acclimate weather and lack of interest in Pioneer football from the student body, the amount of fan support was far less than anticipated.

Athletic Director Mark Molesworth said they had been cooking hotdogs for three weeks straight in preparation for Saturday’s game. He also said that he was trying to break the Pioneer record for single-game attendance by marketing the crap out of the game.

“We actually had the wieners imported from Germany in late September and the special German ingredients take much longer to cook than our American hot dogs,” Molesworth said.  “We began the cooking of the wieners prior to the Whitewater game because we knew this game was going to be huge.”

Unfortunately for Molesworth and the football team, things did not go according to plan on Saturday.

The Pioneers lost to the Titans 63-28 and Molesworth’s crowd expectancy was less than half of what he had anticipated.

Jim Schwartz is the wiener-transporting manager for Schwartz Weiners, the company with whom the Pioneers worked with on this operation. Schwartz said this is by far the largest order of hotdogs he has ever had.

“Because of such a large quantity, we had to use our largest trucks to transport all of these hotdogs to Pioneer Stadium, and it wasn’t easy,” Schwartz said. “We’re used to orders of 500-1,000 wieners, but the UW-Platteville athletic department was very specific when they asked for 50,000.”

The athletic department did manage to sell over half of the dogs they cooked as well as give away nearly 3 tons of popcorn at the event, but because there were so many left over, Molesworth had to find a place for all the extras.

Head football coach Mike Emendorfer said that he would not see the hot dogs go to waste but use them as motivation for the football team to get back on track.

“The leftover hotdogs are a metaphor that can be used to show that we, the football team, did not exude all of our strength on Saturday and had a lot left over,” Emendorfer said. “I will leave the hotdogs laying throughout our locker room until we win another game and do not have leftover energy.”

The Pioneers will have a chance to redeem themselves and be rid of the decaying wieners in the locker room on Saturday with a game against UW-Stout at Pioneer Stadium.