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[QUOTE="Scooch, post: 949041, member: 628"]
People really overthink this stuff.  Like, a lot.

I agree that our hoops amazingness has some negative impact on football attendance.  If people have to choose how to spend their discretionary income they're much more likely to buy tickets to see the perennial top 10 hoops team that has had plausible national title aspirations for most of the past 25 years vs. a football program that hasn't been so much as ranked in over a decade.

But that being said, we're talking about needing to add about 5,000 people per game to get back to the levels we were at in the salad days of the 1990s.  I know times have changed, but there's still plenty of population to maintain the 25K/game we get for hoops while returning to the 45K/game we used to get for football.

I think scoring 40 points a game would be helpful, but it's a small component.  If we win a lot, especially EARLY in the season, then people will turn out.  Look at attendance in the late 80s/90s and you see the same pattern: early games would draw relatively weakly (aside from the occasional big-time opponent), and then the last 2-3 games in late October/November would draw very well, even against unsexy teams like BC and Pitt.  These days we start weak and end weaker because we're slogging into late October with 5+ losses.  Some of you were incredulous that the Pitt game drew so poorly, but no one gives a  about us playing to [I]qualify[/I] for a bowl.  If we were 8-2 instead of 5-5 then we'd have had another 10K there, easy.
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