EagleTalk.net

Rick In a round about way, you are sort of helping me make my point. Despite the success that Southern Miss has had, they still average less than 30k for games. It's better than it used to be sure, but at the same time, when you consider the modest success USM has had over the years, they should have a much better attendence than they do..... My point is it's tough all over....

Building fan support thur involvement is the way to build your program. An example USM looked at when they finally woke up were Army and South Carolina. Both schools have not been very successful in the past few years in football. When USM was doing their study, SC had went 0-11 in a previous year and averaged more than 78k for an 0-11 team. Army seldom has very good teams, but consistantly average over 30k. The people going to those games are not going to see the team win, they are going for something else. That's what will prevent big fall-offs after tough losses.

For years Southern Miss struggled to maintain good attendence when someone name Collier or Favre were not playing. As resently as 1997, Southern Miss averaged less than 24k a game. During that season USM was 9-3 with a win over Illinios. The only three losses that year were to Florida, Alabama and Tennessee. The previous year they were 8-3 with a win over Georgia. Winning was not the issue, but attendence still lagged far below what it should have been. What all started changing in about 1999, is that the University Stopped promoting the game, and started promoting Game Day. They finally had some people in sports marketing that saw that there is a hell of a lot more to a college football experiece than just the 3 hours of gametime. When USM realized this, that's when attendece starting to trend upwards and it's still trending upwards. Consider on Saturday they were hosting I-AA McNeese, three weeks after the worst hurricane in history took a direct hit on Mississippi. The campus in Hattiesburg was damaged 65miles inland. The University took $100M in damages from the storm, but the game was played and more than 28k showed up, despite the fact that a large portion of USM's supports live on the MS Gulf Coast, and many are now homeless. Grow gameday, win a few games here and there, that is how you will be successful.