Edge and Alan are back to recap the Buffalo victory and get you set for this weekend’s Army contest. They touch on the attendance at the home opener and how BSU can improve the fan experience. They recap the last week’s action across the landscape and make their weekly picks. Bet ’em heavy and thank them all the way to the bank. OTPcast all up in your facial! Plus the premier of a brand new intro.
Couple of different ways to hear this puppy. Viewing OTP in a feedreader? Then visit the site or download the mp3 below. As always, you can check out OTP on ITunes by clicking here. Enjoy…
Download the OTPcast: OTPCast2011-09-21
Filed under: BallStateFootball, OTPPodcast |
Over The Pylon 
Excellent discussion on the eternal quest to improve our fanbase, and both of you had some very thought-provoking observations. The segment led me to bring up a few additional points:
1. Edge’s point on the fickleness of the local community is accurate. That said, it’s a fickleness that’s gone way beyond any sense of reasonableness or proportion. If Muncie is going to fold its arms and stay home every time we fail to go undefeated, that’s utterly ridiculous. We weren’t 0-8, we were 1-1 coming off a loss to a Top 20 team *two weeks after beating IU*. If the shelf life of a win like that among the local-yokels is one goddamned week, then that’s on Muncie, not on the university. BSU deserves its fair share of blame, but let’s please note that the ECI area has to step up and take responsibility at some level, too.
2. The stadium location point- I’m with Alan that I don’t think it’s a big deal (it’s a whopping two blocks off campus), but agree that even a short distance doesn’t help if you don’t have something to draw students out there consistently. I really don’t think students have been the problem lately, though.
3. The tailgating time limit is a massive problem, more than anyone wants to admit, along with the car searches, the stale marketing approaches, etc. Why are we throwing obstacles in front of fans to attend our games when we’re so desperate for them? It makes absolutely no sense. Think about the programs whose fanbases we drool over and want to emulate. The fan bases in those programs view game day (and occasionally day-before-game) tailgating as an absolute *birthright.* And all of those schools give that to their fans. If even a high-level BCS program told their fans to only come for three hours on game day, but not before they let the local PD do a quick unannounced search of their cars on the way in, well, I’m guessing their fan bases wouldn’t be so damn big, either. Treat your fans well and they’ll treat you well in return.
4. Worthen. His record on athletics was mixed at best. While he was a supporter of hoops and helped get the arena built, he also had *zero* interest in football (the 21-game losing streak was mostly on his watch, remember), he hired the disastrous Andi Seger as AD (who low-balled Ray McCallum right out of town on the heels of our last MAC hoops title, again on Worthen’s watch… and when I say low-balled, I mean five-figure base salary lowball, not the Whitlock definition of the term where you get offered a school-record contract of nearly a half-million dollars per but get outbid by San Diego State.) Worthen also was adamantly against tailgating (he spent the entirety of the 90’s trying to erase BSU’s “party school” rep, he viewed tailgating as “party school” stuff) and it wasn’t until the last couple years of his tenure that fans could tailgate at BSU football games (I remember trying to tailgate at the homecoming game in ’92, only to be shooed in the stadium by security, since it wasn’t allowed at the time).
And I should hasten to add that Worthen didn’t convert to tailgating because he liked it, but because the NCAA passed attendance rules for schools to be I-A, and he was told bluntly by several university marketing officers that BSU had no prayer of maintaining that status in football unless they allowed tailgating.
One other point that often goes unmentioned: BSU pissed off a number of local businesses/companies in the 80s and 90s when the school had a ridiculous advertising ban at the athletic venues that wasn’t lifted until the early 00’s. I know for a fact that our current athletic dept. has had several potential local corporate sponsors and donors tell them to pound sand in recent years, because BSU essentially did the same 15-20 years ago when they approached the university about advertising at the stadium or arena and were shot down.
Papa Lou with the thunder as usual. It seems to me easy to fix but perhaps I’m missing something.