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mtrout wrote:I overhear SMU students ridiculing the football team more than supporting it.

So nothing has changed on that front since the early 2000s

03Mustang wrote:

mtrout wrote:I overhear SMU students ridiculing the football team more than supporting it.

So nothing has changed on that front since the early 2000s

Or in the entire post death penalty era I suspect

one 0 win season and 8 1-win seasons since 1989
now rebuilding...again
how not to build a fan base

Nacho wrote:one 0 win season and 8 1-win seasons since 1989
now rebuilding...again
how not to build a fan base

that said I do think that sonny is the first coach we have had since 1989 who truly understands how to build a team.

Apples to Oranges... Chad had to put together a team with basically after DP a year due to the tiki loser. Sonny has to build a team from a bad bowl performance. He at least had something. At the moment, his class is decent but I suspect the top 1-3 will get snatched before signing day, which result in around CM's normal classes.

van put together possibly our worst d since 1989. truly pathetic. chad's only concern was the offense. no real thought of the future. he was on his way out from day one.

I have felt this way for some time now. SMU has its priorities wrong. Over the past 10 years, between tiki and the chadster, I think our HCs were the highest paid g5 HC every single year, and usually paid more than most P5 HCs. The problem is all that money was directed towards one individual with little consideration towards marketing. SMU has many positives, all well known, but its one negative is enormous. If you don’t address attendance, you can’t win championships. It dispirits the fans, the coaches, the players, provides zero home field advantage and most importantly, impacts recruiting, thus defeating the ‘if you win they will come philosophy’.

Look at SMU vs NTSU. Over the past 10 years, we have spent $1M+ more per year on our HC’s salary, yet the results of both schools have been about the same. I would argue that while our coaches were better, they were not worth the extra cost, which could have been better utilized in promoting attendance.

From a scheduling perspective, SMU should have 1 home game per year that generates 25k+ fans regardless of marketing. Seems fair to the season ticketholders and shouldn’t be too difficult as TCU is a home opponent every other year. You are left with 5 additional games where you need to bump up attendance by 10,000 per game. With a budget of $100k to 200k per game (depending on what you want to pay your HC) I think that is doable.

Utilize our nationally renowned Cox Mkt department and sell the Boulevard, the only positive of our gameday experience, but luckily for us, a big positive.

To sit back and think attendance will fix itself, it simply won’t.

I still think a simple and cost effective strategy is to have players, coaches sell out season tickets in the local neighborhood. It works for high school so why not for college. It creates a relationship between the team and the community (put a face to a name). We have 33k people sitting in HP/UP. Seems crazy we can’t generate interest in our towns next to the school.

Marketing is a part of it but we get nothing free from the local media. If you want scraps of information about SMU sports you better live in Dallas but that is all you are going to get, scraps. If you live in Austin there is no shortage of stories about ut, nothing about SMU. If you live in Dallas there is no shortage of stories about ut. Why would the casual fan even know there is an SMU game when it is buried behind stories about the big 12 when there isn't even a big 12 team in Dallas?

Univ of Miami is constantly in the local media there. I know, they have had a LOT of success but even in down years the media covers them constantly. It is a similar school with a similar market and similar big state universities. For some reason the Dallas sports media doesn't really seem to give a flying f*** about the hometown team so why would the casual fan in Dallas care?

chicken or egg?