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Message: [QUOTE="K Otto XLIV, post: 1476604"] Is it a healthy appetite for SU football or an appetite for seeing FSU, Clemson, WV play? The problem is you can never rely on casual fans or other team's fans to fill your stadium. There is no point in having nearly 50k capacity to satisfy one game a year at 45k. If we are getting 35k for five games and 45k for one game, why have a stadium that big? Also casual fans don't deserve the freedom to always have a seat at the table. If they know they don't need to buy a ticket package for the year's big game, they will just get a single game ticket or find a cheap ticket on secondary market. The consumer has all the purchasing power when it comes to SU football. That has to change. IMO SU needs to find out how many passionate fans it has between the Buffalo-Watertown-Albany-Binghamton circumference (easy drives). If that number really is only 20k (or less) then we need to drastically reduce the capacity. You cannot expect casual fans to fill 60% of your stadium. If that number is 30k then SU needs to slightly reduce capacity and do a better job of getting its passionate fans to attend games. Then SU can work on turning the casual fans into passionate fans. Followed by trying to create casual fans from the remaining population pool. My concern with our fanbase is that either 1. we do not have enough passionate fans or 2. we are getting less than 90% of our passionate fans to show up to games. If we have 30k passionate fans and are only getting 25k to show up then something is wrong and SU needs to fix it. If your die hards aren't showing up, then you have little chance at getting the casuals in the door. I hope SU is studying this but I fear they are not. Colleges are not professional teams where they have large staffs to handle these things. Which is why a lot of this gets outsourced. But when you outsource you have to rely on someone who is out of the know to your situation. I wonder what the optimal capacity is for our program. If we have 30k die hards do we need a new 44k stadium/renovation? Can we really expect 30% of attendance to come from casual fans? People can say winning cures all. That is true but how likely is it that SU will be a consistent 9 W team? Because that is what it will take IMO to average 44k. Realistically I think 9 win seasons will be a 1 in 10 year type of thing. College football is too competitive, SU has too many restraints, and good coaches rarely stay at one spot. IMO 8-5 seasons every year won't bring more than 40k per game (outside of the one name team we play every year). On top of this we have HD TV and every game available to watch. These things didn't exist in the past. Which is why everyone is struggling with attendance. I rather see SU got to 40k and sell out every game than go to 44k and sell out 1 game a year. Having a sell out streak can create pride in the fanbase and can be used to sell recruits. IMO it is worth it to lose those 5k than you would get for one game a year. It also prevents LSU, Clemson, VA Tech, etc fans from having a large amount of people in the Dome. [/QUOTE]

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