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[QUOTE="Chip, post: 727789, member: 19"]
SU football suffers from a few key things.  1.  The decline since McNabb left (heavy emphasis on the GRob years).  2.  The conference we were left with and stuck with after 2004.   3.  The success of the hoops team.  It's hard to get enough people to rally around SU football when SU hoops is basically in elite status (consistent Top 10, largest crowds in the sport).  SU football is consistently nowhere near the Top 25, and even a full Dome, albeit very loud and difficult to play in, is an average sized crowd for this sport.
 
Then throw in that the Penn State rivalry ended in 1990.  You know how many new fans we have since then?  Just go look at the first game thread.  The 2 games in 2008/2009 didn't do us any favors to get that old feeling back, even though it seems the results were similar to how many years of that rivalry went for us.
 
SU has been given a lifeline to win back its football popularity.  The ACC can only help.  It resolves one of the 3 issues I mentioned above.  Hopefully the infusion of associated revenue $ will help with the team's performance.  It's easy to look at last year and say we're on our way back.  I think/hope we are.  But we had heavy losses of production from that team.  Replicate last year and the future looks much brighter.
 
The crowd size issue can't necessarily be solved.  But you can get around it.  Oregon only draws 50k, and it's considered the most difficult place to play in the country.  The Dome can get to a status at or near that.
 
A win this weekend would be a nice step in the right direction for everything.  And it's a winnable game.
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