I guess here's another long one.
Somebody said they didn't deserve the space, not that they have too much. That is the entirety of the cause for everything that followed and I think you are the one going to extremes. If I said I hate cauliflower, I am not in anyway comparing that to what is happening in the Middle East. Lets keep this within the confines of a football message board.
Again, you never said give the quad over, but it has been said. Multiple times. I am not sure why you are so focused on what you said, especially since I was not initially responding to you in the first place. The only reason I brought it up is again, because I was trying to explain that the students do indeed "deserve" a seat at the Dome given all they contribute to the betterment of the entire campus, including the athletic department and football team, and taking into it, the reality that many of them may be doing so involuntarily and may not want to incur that cost to attend SU and be overrun by outside parties that do (kinda like me saying I should have the right to use your backyard on weekends for my parties, but you don't deserve to be invited. Your mortgage pays for the house too and taxes go to paying for the police, and you cover all the utilities too, but the back yard is fair game because I brought my own beer).
I am saying that the alumni have lots of options and STILL support the school despite that, and the majority of students come from that same environment (the megalopolis) where all the options afforded them before they got to SU likely contributes to a student population that just isn't that into college football, (how many times has this been said on the recruiting page?) but as you can discern from "my straw man" (it's not a straw man as I am only saying that students pay for athletics beyond ticket sales which was in response to you saying the full cost of tuition does not go to the AD - your straw man argument in fact) they still cover the cost of the AD anywhere from 10% t0 25% of the total budget. You're right to say the university seems to want a big time program, and I am for it and glad it is investing the money in it... the students' money. It really doesn't matter what the local fanbase wants, in large part because we both agree that in the moneymaking athletics world, its the TV dollars that matter. The eyes that we claim drive our value so much are the ones in the megalopolis where the students and alumni are, so you are right to say Syracuse isn't in the megalopolis, but in your argument, you are weakening the value of the local fanbase. BTW they want to be in that population or they would not have invested so much in remote academic facilities in NYC and Washington DC (like so many other schools).
If we were a state school, I assume we'd be more like SUNY Albany or SUNY Buffalo. Not sure why you chose Binghamton except that it better reinforces your argument, but then you again mention other state schools propped up by state taxes in UMass and UConn that better fit the mold of single main campus. Both of those schools suffer from the same student apathy, and they do little to correct that because they don't need to (they don't rely on the popularity of the AD to bolster enrollment or income). Both have only recently started to invest in their programs and UConn in particular (2000) because of it's state budget problems. That is likely something that currently holds them back from inclusion in the Big12 (where the TV money, and not local support would benefit their budget issues).
Football history at SU is that of a rich oil baron investing in SU as a tax shelter and anti-trust defense (Archbold was CEO of Standard Oil until it was trust busted. His involvement and contributions to the university were in part because he wanted to give back for all he had taken, similar to the tobacco Duke family from NJ that founded Duke University in NC to give back to the poor sharecroppers they built their fortunes on). That is why he built the largest concrete stadium in 1907, and the lack of investment is why it stood until 1978, so again, there was little investment in football for the majority of the program's history. That said, the program is 135 years old at the D1 level. As I said, it existed before.
