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Message: [QUOTE="General20, post: 1477572, member: 724"] This is a great post. I think there are two fundamental issues. The first and most important is the grassroots issue you brought up. Read just about any study about sports and you'll see that the biggest predictor by far for adult interest in sports is whether or not you played as a child. Fewer kids in this area play football, thus fewer adults are interested in football. There is no quick fix for this problem. If I was running SU I'd give a certain number of free tickets out to kids every game and do things to make the game experience more kid friendly, and hope that in a generation things change. Until then we are always going to be behind the eight-ball. The second is that Syracuse does not draw many fans from outside Syracuse. Part of this is just the fact that Syracuse is a private school, and people who don't live in Syracuse and did not go there have no connection or rooting interest. If I was running SU I'd take the money spent advertising in New York City and transfer it all to surrounding cities like Rochester, Birmingham, Utica, etc. Advertising dollars will go a lot farther in those cities and might actually bring people to the games. For the record, I don't think advertising in New York was a mistake. I imagine it helped get us into the ACC. I just think its done its job and thus should be stopped. This is also why I'd love to see a new stadium built in the Inner Harbor. Destiny does a phenomenal job bringing people from out of town in to shop - 60% of the dollars spent there come from out of town. Syracuse can use some of that appeal to its advantage. Schedule bus trips to destiny where the wives go shopping and the husbands watch football, something like that. Schedule free concerts at the new arena during tailgating to entice more people to buy tickets (just like The Fair does, it works!). I think they could draw a lot of people from out of town that they don't now, and once you go to a game or two you start becoming emotionally involved. There are also two factors that can't be changed. First, lets face it, part of this is just that football is better to watch on television than it is in person. Attendance numbers are down across the board for football games. My rule of thumb is, football is better on television. Basketball is 50/50. Baseball is better in person. If you look at attendance numbers for the pros and major colleges, football attendance is down, basketball attendance is steady, and baseball attendance is up. For TV, football viewing is up, basketball viewing is up in the pros (this is mostly to do with LeBron James) and down in college, and baseball viewing is down. It makes complete sense. People are buying into the better products. Second, Syracuse is predicted to be terrible this year, and that is going to hurt attendance numbers. I don't buy the economy playing a factor. Football tickets are dirt cheap. Plus the Syracuse economy is improving and ticket sales are lower than ever. Syracuse added 2,800 jobs in the past year, if the economy was really a driving force in ticket sales there would be slightly more people at games this year instead of slightly less. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?