The release this weekend of the movie “We Are Marshall” about the tough road back for the Marshall University football team after a 1970 airplane crash that killed 36 players has gotten scant attention in Wichita, Kans., I learned Wednesday.

That’s a bit surprising since Wichita State’s football team also was victimized by a tragic airplane crash only five weeks earlier in the 1970 season.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising.

“When you lose that many young people in a tragedy, it’s not a regular conversation,” Carmen Hytche, Wichita State’s director of special events, told me. “But I’ve seen the advertisements for the Marshall movie and I would expect there would be some conversations.”

On Oct. 2, 1970, two planes filled with Wichita State players and school administrators left Wichita for a trip to a game at Utah State. After a refueling stop in Denver, one of the planes arrived safely in Logan, Utah.

The other slammed into a Colorado mountain, killing 31 of the 39 people aboard, including 14 players, the head coach and the athletic director.

A patchwork team of crash survivors, previously redshirted players and freshmen returned to the playing field three weeks later and was beaten 62-0 by No. 9-ranked Arkansas in Little Rock Oct. 24.

Historians such as Hytche, who oversees annual memorial ceremonies every Oct. 2 at WSU, refer to Wichita State’s final games of 1970 as “the Second Season.”

The tragic event was overshadowed, later that year, by the Nov. 14 crash of the Marshall team plane in which 75 people died.

Sadly, both events were on the second page of a lengthy list of plane crashes that have claimed sports figures that was published by the Associated Press after the Oct. 11 fatal crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle.

That list included football coach Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, boxer Rocky Marciano, golfers Tony Lema and Payne Stewart, basketball players from Evanston and Oklahoma State, 16 football players from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo in 1960 and, in 1968, Lamar track coach Ty Terrell and six of his runners.

My research reminded me of another reason why folks in Wichita might not be keen on conversations about air crashes. Turns out that area of Kansas is home to aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and Lear Jet.

Wichita State played its football games at Cessna Stadium and the university is home to the National Aviation Research Center.

Wichita State dropped football in 1986. The program was 90 years old and fairly undistinguished as a longtime member of the Missouri Valley Conference. But it has some well-known alums.

That’s where Beaumonter Miller Farr played before the Denver Broncos drafted him No. 1 in 1964. Former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson was an assistant coach there for a year and current Cowboys coach Bill Parcells played there.