I spent a good portion of the ride home last night thinking about this.
Go back a bit more than two decades (those of us who are old enough) and think about when Skippy was announced, the crowds that we had prior to that point for (on campus) football games at Memorial. From there, if someone were to say that Skip would bring us to the 1-AA playoffs (and beat the eventual champion twice in the year they won), leave, we would upgrade, after a rough start finish .500, followed by a bowl worthy season, a minor bowl, a couple of rebuilding years and then three more bowl games, with the Fiesta as the last of the three. After that, a very questionable hire drives the program into the ground with two underperforming, sub .500 seasons followed by a couple of years where more often than not we look like one of the bottom five 1-A (now FBS) teams in the country (both occurring after our conference was destroyed).
After hearing that story, if someone asked what attendance would be for home games against mediocre opponents I would wager heavily that most guesses would have four digits and none would exceed Memorial's then capacity. There are many things that warrant criticism, including some of the tendencies of the fan base but the reality is the foundation of a great fan base is here.
There was an earlier thread about the Carolina Panther's attendance issues and a comment about them having been an expansion team. The reality is that we were also an expansion team, there really is no other way to classify it. What infuriates me is that an expansion team normally needs to cultivate a fan base yet we did nothing of this. I still firmly believe that we could (with time, although a bit more than a decade has been wasted, promotion and a quality product) build a fan base capable of regularly filling an 80,000 seat stadium. This is the best asset that the football program and the entirety of the athletic department has.