another chicken or egg question?

[Charleston Pony]

Does winning improve attendance or does good attendance improve your chances of winning?

Everyone knows I've complained for years about our inability to attract a crowd to SMU athletic events. I'm of the belief that is one of our major drawbacks to building a successful program (right in there with the high cost of tuition and inability to fund athlete friendly majors, which makes it impossible to compete for partial qualifiers, JUCOs, transfers, etc...)

As I watch this SMU team get hammered by OSU, I can't help but think what a nice luxury it would be to be able to schedule La-Monroe, Ark St, La-Lafayette, etc... as non conference games to give our guys some experience against teams they can compete with. A couple of Sept wins might do wonders for the morale and confidence of this group...but we are facing I-A extinction if we don't average 15k and there's simply no way SMU would have the required attendance playing schools who have no fan following of their own. If we had 30,000 loyal fans, this death penalty rebuilding process would be much farther along.

Don't look now, but Tulsa buried Ark St last night and is undoubtedly starting to believe they can compete in the WAC. I had counted on that game for a win this year. I'm now starting to think those 3 wins I predicted are going to be hard to come by. I hope our team proves me wrong this coming Saturday against Nevada. Hope to see some of you at the UTEP game.

[This message has been edited by Charleston Pony (edited 09-21-2003).]

[SMUstang]

Good post CP. Don't know what the answer is but I noticed the Tulsa score too and had the same thoughts. Perhaps a game with North Texas would serve both purposes but there's a good chance we'd get our ears pinned back by them too.

In a way I'm sorry I bought a "Red Pack" but the other two games in the Red Pack may be our only two wins this season. Frankly, I don't care to go see another losing performance like last night.

Come on 2005, you can't get here soon enough.



[This message has been edited by SMUstang (edited 09-21-2003).]