http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... c5f8d.html
I think y'all might find this article interesting by Blackstone. As a student, I'd hate to admit that he is completely right about our fans/student fans. I've been to countless sporting events taking pictures for the Daily Campus and it's always an embarrassment when the stadium/coliseum is less than 1/4 full AND ON NATIONAL TELEVISION....Here it is:
UNIVERSITY PARK – At a casual function not too long ago that brought together some SMU boosters and coaches, a booster asked a coach about the nonconference schedule that was being put together.
The booster wanted to know what school he could get excited about seeing.
The coach laid out the schedule. Then the coach suggested to the booster that he should be excited to see SMU play, against whomever.
The anecdote popped to mind Friday while watching SMU president Gerald Turner discuss the challenges for whoever succeeds the gentleman seated to his left, Mustangs athletic director Jim Copeland.
Copeland was announcing that he planned to retire at this school year's end.
Turner mentioned the need to do for basketball what had been done for football under Copeland's 12-year watch – improve the facilities. It was not a revelation. Anyone and everyone who has been around SMU athletics know as much.
What was interesting was that Turner noted why it seemed to be such a long, hard slog – my words, not his – to build a much-needed basketball practice gymnasium and have ancient Moody Coliseum brought into the 21st century.
"We don't have the fan support and donor support to do everything at once," he explained. "They have to be done sequentially."
SMU isn't FSU.
SMU isn't even TCU, which is not a knock on Fort Worth's flagship private university.
The regional rivalry won't allow SMU folks to admit it, but they would love to be the Horned Frogs right now. TCU appears to be home to a perennial football bowl team despite not having football facilities as nice as SMU's. Its men's basketball program, although experiencing tough sledding this season, made the NIT only a year ago and has a new facility in which to practice. Its successful baseball program has new digs, too.
And what TCU has that SMU doesn't is fan support through thick and through thin, which is most critical.
Football at TCU's Amon G. Carter Stadium drew an average of 31,254 fans last season, according to the NCAA. SMU's fantastic Gerald J. Ford Stadium attracted an average of 18,630 for what turned out to be a scrappy 5-6 team that upset TCU.
Basketball at TCU last year drew only 4,344 per game, but that was still more than the 3,345 that supported men's basketball at Moody.
So it doesn't matter who succeeds Copeland. Whoever it is will still have, first and foremost, the unenviable task of trying to wake SMU's moribund fans (if they can be called that), be they alums or, even more disconcerting, classmates of the university's athletes. (There may not be a campus in America with a less-supportive student fan base than that on the Hilltop. They're an embarrassment.)
Copeland's departure will be yet another litmus test for all this. After all, SMU fans, whose bark belies their bulk, have grumbled that they haven't turned out in recent years because they came not to like the athletic director. Their greatest football player of the second half of the last century, Eric Dickerson, not long ago blamed the football team's woes squarely on Copeland and his coaching hires and said he wouldn't cut the athletic department a check because it wouldn't help.
Well, Copeland's last day on the job will be May 31. That means the Mustang Club can expect Dickerson's first check to arrive on June 1.
That's the biggest problem for SMU athletics. It isn't the administration. It isn't the AD. It's excuses. Everybody's got them. The coaches say they can't recruit everyone because of academic restraints. There is some truth to that, but the Hilltop ain't quite Harvard Yard, either, and Copeland got some of those restraints relaxed.
Alums say don't come out because they don't like the AD or the coach. Tell that to Texas fans, who came out when they didn't like Longhorns AD DeLoss Dodds just to fly banners expressing as much.
What SMU needs more than a hotshot new AD who can shake hands and kiss babies like a presidential candidate is a reality check.
The Southwest Conference is long gone, and it isn't coming back. The truth is that the only reason a private school of a few thousand students was running with the big dogs in the biggest of sports, year in and year out back in the day, was because it cheated.
SMU now is where SMU always should have been, and people who went there or go there need to acknowledge that. That doesn't mean the school doesn't deserve support anymore. It means it needs it now, the legitimate kind, if you indeed want to see winning football, a new basketball facility and all the pride that comes with it. A new AD won't be able to do it alone like some magician.
