[NU Sports] NU at Wrigley

[Dennis W. Brandt]

<Denis,

That's "Dennis."

<I challenge your simplistic assertion that the ONLY thing that guarantees 
full houses at football games are football teams contending for BT and 
national championships.

OSU doesn't fill The Shoe every game because it wins the title one year, 
then falls to sub .500 the next two seasons, then back up for one or two 
seasons, and then goes 4 - 8.  And losing at Michigan is still perceived as 
an aberration much as I would like to see it become a seasonal expectation. 
It will take a few more lean years for defeatism to congeal permanently in 
Ann Arbor.  As Capt. Picard would say, "Make it so."

<That's where Wrigley Field comes in.  People flock there, not because the 
Cubs are perennial champs, but because it has become a "bucket list" 
destination for serious sports fans.  Virtually anything sports related as 
long as it can be promoted as unique experience will sell out Wrigley Field.

The Loveable Loser Cubbies are an atypical and inexplicable phenomenon.  You 
can find more realistic baseball examples.  Folks used to flock to Oriole 
Park in Camden Yard and Jacobs Field in Cleveland when the stadiums were new 
and O's and Indians were winning games.  Now, there are lots of empty seats. 
Tickets were easy to obtain at Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia when the 
Phillies wallowed in the image of the losingest franchise in professional 
sports history.  Citizens' Bank Park enjoyed the initial new stadium boost, 
but the attendance boomed in 2007 when the Phillies put themselves among the 
elite of baseball.  Now they sell 3.5 million tickets before the first pitch 
of the season gets thrown.  Believe me, if they fall into a couple of bad 
seasons and appear to be headed downward, getting a ticket for a Phillies 
game will become easy again.  And you might want to check attendance figures 
for the once proud but now annually awful Pittsburgh Pirates.

<As far as college football is concerned, there is no strong correlation in 
the NCAA attendance data between championships and attendance.  The top 
three programs for attendance last year were Michigan (111,825), OSU 
(105,278), and PSU (104,234).  Michigan hasn't won a BT championship for six 
years.  Northwestern has more BT championships in the last twenty years (3) 
than PSU (2) . . .  Outside the BT, Texas had their first losing season in 
13 years but still sold out every game.  Georgia and Florida also had down 
years and sold out.  Notre Dame's last national championship was in 1988 but 
they continue to sell out every home game.

You're kidding with those statements.  Right?  All the programs you 
mentioned are among the most storied in the nation, ones with long 
traditions of winning, where fans view losing as unforgivable.  OSU's last 
"down" year involved four losses (one of them to us), and had they done that 
two seasons in a row, fans would have been calling for the coach's scalp. 
Penn State exemplifies what happens to a storied program when it suffers 
through several seasons struggling to reach .500.  Fans most definitely 
wanted JoePa's scalp back then, and attendance drooped.  Had that mediocrity 
continued, they would yet be struggling to put 50,000 butts on the bleachers 
even with an entire state and a gazillion alums behind them.

<Minny in another good example to disprove the "winning is the only variable 
affecting attendance" theorem.  They had another disappointing year winning 
only one home game but sold 99% of their tickets because they opened a new 
stadium.

No doubt attendance is up in part because students can get to the game more 
easily.  But let's see how the attendance holds up once the stadium's 
newness has worn off and the Gophers still can't win football games.

<There are plenty of examples on the flip side too.  Jim Harbaugh put 
Stanford back on the national map, averaged only 40K per game (80% of 
capacity), and didn't crack the top 30 in year-to-year attendance growth. 
Miami won the MAC championship last year, only averaged 15K a game (60% of 
capacity), and that was a good year (19th on the year-to-year growth list).

Thank you for illustrating my point.  Northwestern and Stanford fans have 
much in common in that neither group has any confidence that their football 
teams will go beyond occasional winning seasons and reach and maintain a 
tradition of winning.  Why?  Because neither of them ever has.  Yes, since 
'95 NU has won a Big Ten title and shared two others, but we've also been at 
or near the bottom of the conference, too.  Did Ohio State fans ever start a 
season thinking that going undefeated wasn't at least a possibility?  If NU 
and Stanford establish traditions where 11 to 13-win seasons are annual 
possibilities and anything less is at least something of a disappointment, 
both universities will finally enjoy a waiting list for season tickets.

<We all want a winning team, but I think we should set our sights higher.

Playing in Wrigley Field is a higher aspiration than winning?

<I think that Phillips and Fitz both know what they are doing.

Agreed, but what does that have to do with playing in a stadium so ill 
equipped for football that you have to alter the game's fundamental rules to 
play there?  We got publicity from playing in Wrigley all right - negative. 
You don't succeed with gimmicks.  Just win, baby.  Build a tradition and 
they will come.