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[QUOTE="Townie72, post: 2925882, member: 780"]
It has always seemed to me that there were four different Syracuse fan bases.

The first group is the alumni, whether local or not. SU fandom comes with the territory. It’s non-elective unless you have some sort of weird iconoclastic bent.

The second group is the CNY people, who are somehow connected to the University. Their mother went to SU, or their grandfather or their father worked there.

The third group are the locals who root for SU because it’s the local team. It’s almost as though the Syracuse on the jerseys is for the Town and not the University, which they have little connection to. CNY really has no local pro teams, so SU fills that void.

Surprisingly this doesn’t affect all CNYers. When I lived twice in Rochester there were pockets of SU support, but the local papers were unimpressed. There was always this undercurrent of we are better than Syracuse as a place.

The fourth group are random people all over who just decide Syracuse is their team. These people are no different from people in CNY who decide “I’m going to be a Duke fan”

No fan group is superior to one another.

The locals without a direct connection to the University are maybe the largest group of Carrier Dome ticket buyers.

What locals who do not root for SU miss is the cameraderie of it all. They can’t enjoy the feeling the whole place gets when the Orange are on a roll.

For the Sugar Bowl in the 1980s I went to a huge party at a very big house in Canandaigua. The crowd was almost complete composed of Cornell, Colgate, Hamilton College, etc. people all rooting for SU while guzzling white wine.
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