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Message: [QUOTE="billsin01, post: 621310, member: 837"] This ^^ And, while I'm late to the party on this whole argument, I'll add a couple thoughts: -- It's never going to be a huge event and 20K is probably a pipedream in almost any scenario due to all the reasons people mentioned. HOWEVA (should be read in your best Stephen A Smith voice) -- The university puts the absolute minimum amount of effort into making this any sort of an event. You can talk about how there's expense and effort involved in simply staging a spring game but what program doesn't do that? It's generally a really poor effort. -- I don't want to hear IPF as an excuse for pinching pennies anywhere. As I've said before, if you want to play with the big boys you've got to spend with them on most things as well. I got hammered for suggesting I would have been fine with the university deciding to de-emphasize football and move the hoops team to the Catholic 7, but my point was simply that to compete at a high level, this program is going to have to spend like it's never spent before -- coaching salaries (they are only going up from here), travel costs, constant facilities upgrades (IPF isn't some sort of end game on that spending), etc. More TV money in is great, but it also simply means more money will be going out as well. The university can try to be smart with money, but investing heavily in football is now a way of life. -- That said, there are efforts that wouldn't necessarily break the bank that would probably at least put more people in the seats -- working with local youth sports and youth recreation groups; reaching out to various communities to see if there is any interest in chartering buses to bring whole groups; tying it in with some sort of general spring-time festival with the city of syracuse. I don't know, there are a ton of avenues to, simply put, try to make this feel more like an event and a celebration of the end (or near end) of the long, miserable, sloppy, freezing late-winter months. -- What was that other thing I was thinking of ... oh yeah ... wait for it ... how about some info on the team during the course of spring practice? I'm not asking for game plans or even open practices, per se, but how about getting some info about position battles and individual improvements and feeding a few stories to the writers in the past couple weeks? I've said this before -- and by the way, I think this coaching staff will engage much more than the previous staff -- but I'll say it again: you can't tell a community to ignore a team for however long it takes you to conduct 14 practices and then say, "Hey don't forget about our spring game!!!" -- Game format -- let's be honest, the spring game does little to nothing in terms of providing any real insight into the team itself. I covered three UMD spring games and the offensive and defensive stars of each game did absolutely nothing in their careers (akil patterson had 3 sacks one year and walkon Andrew Smith was the MVP two years in a row at LB). So how about adopting a fan friendly format and simply making it a fun competition? Enjoy it instead of worrying about hiding all your secrets or whatever else prevails upon coaches to encourage the most boring game possible. [/QUOTE]

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