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[QUOTE="Cusefan95, post: 5460528, member: 173"]
Agreed - because this goes deeper than winning and losing.  Coach P was still the coach when Shaw told fans that wanted a new coach to get a life and Jake reminded everyone that Syracuse is a one horse town.  That let everyone locally know the attitude on the hill - you will get what you get, and if it’s a crap sandwich you’ll eat it and like it.  That’s probably survivable if the team returned to 9 win seasons - instead it was GRob.  A fan base that was already feeling alienated by the Syracuse administration was given every reason to just walk away.

People that were in their 20s and 30s stopped following Syracuse football - so there’s a generation that has no attachment to Syracuse football now that the school needs to win over.  The one positive is that enough time has passed and the people the school needs to win over weren’t around in the 90s - so they are just apathetic not antagonistic towards Syracuse football.

I suspect that Syracuse basketball didn’t lose fans because they kept winning - but Shaw and Jake successfully transformed the relationship with fans from a communal bond to an economic transactions.  As long as the team wins, the fans would continue the arrangement (and I think JB helped maintain whatever shreds of community bond were left).  But the window for a JB-less team to turn things around and become a consistent top 25 program before the fan bases collapses is probably very short.  It might be just this year.

I don’t think the school has ever really come to terms with how badly they screwed up in PR towards the end of Coach Ps tenure.  I don’t think  the emotional attachment fans have to the school and teams is anywhere close to how fans felt in the 80s/90s.
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