The Cowboys hope out of sight doesn’t mean out of mind.

McNeese State’s football team will be gone for the next five weekends due to a poorly put-together schedule.

No block parties, no tailgating and no chance to build on the momentum of three home wins.

Nice work, Southland Conference.

While it’s not all the league’s fault, as McNeese set its nonconference slate, the league didn’t do the Cowboys any favors either. Random or not, the Cowboys, and more importantly their fans, are getting hosed.

McNeese won’t play back in Lake Charles until six Saturdays from now, when it hosts Texas A&M-Commerce on Nov. 2. That is two days before the start of the college basketball season if you would like some perspective.

The Cowboys will play four games during that stretch, three against teams that have been in the national rankings at some point this season. The stretch will go a long way in deciding the fate of this team and possibly the direction of the program.

It hardly seems right that with so much on the line that the league could not find a way to tinker with the schedule so that the Cowboys were home at least once during the next month.

The Cowboys will not play an October home game for what is believed to be the first time in program history.

McNeese even played a game in Cowboy Stadium a month after Hurricane Rita leveled the town in September of 2005. Not this season.

“With a month of road games, we have to come together,” said linebacker Marques White, who admitted he has never played a season with a stretch like this in it.

The Cowboys, 3-2 and leading the Southland with a 1-0 record, will begin this strange journey in Utah on Saturday night against No. 25 Weber State. From there it’s three consecutive road conference games with a bye week wrapped inside.

They will play the two teams picked to compete for the league title during October, Incarnate Word and Nicholls State. If you aren’t upset enough as a Cowboys fan, McNeese is the one team that will play both schools on the road this fall.

That’s a double whammy.

“We are going to talk about the road-warrior mentality,” said McNeese head coach Gary Goff. “You can’t ignore it. You have to embrace it.

“We can’t be salty about it. It is what it is. It’s not going to change.”

Maybe not, but the league should have found a way to mix things up better. Granted, time was limited thanks to Stephen F. Austin’s late return to the SLC, but this is a bad look, especially when you consider McNeese is the attendance top dog in the league.

The Cowboys are fifth in total attendance nationally on the Football Championship Subdivision level. They lead the league with an 11,838 average.

The lone game they didn’t reach at least 10,000 was, ironically, when SFA came to town.

This is from a fan base that has suffered through four consecutive losing seasons and an 0-10 campaign on the field a year ago. Their reward for being the constant attendance leader in the league and staying loyal through the wreckage of recent years is a monthlong vacation from their home field.

Meanwhile, Incarnate Word gets seven home games to McNeese’s five, and the average crowd so far for Cardinals home games this season of 1,845.

I get fairness and all, and I hear the rest of the league saying McNeese gets all the breaks in basketball so quit your whining. But it’s not that. This is about smart business and leaving your most valuable asset on the home sidelines during the sports spotlight month is not smart business at all.

Just imagine if Michigan or Alabama were sent on the road for a full month by their leagues. Those fans would be in an uproar.

The Southland is coming out of its darkest days and looking to shed new light on its brand. You can’t do that by having the Cowboys ride off into the road sunset just when the league race is heating up.

Small crowds make it hard to take the conference seriously.

At the very least the league should have forced Northwestern State to come back to Lake Charles this season after last year’s cancellation that called off McNeese’s homecoming and likely the largest crowd of that season.

Maybe it is too much to ask McNeese to be treated differently after basically saving the conference a few years back by electing to stay when others bolted, but they sure shouldn’t be treated wrongly.

Cowboys fans you deserve better, in fact, you have earned better.

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Jim Gazzolo is a freelance writer who covers McNeese State athletics for the American Press. Email him at jimgazzolo@yahoo.com