This times a millionyou could have just said this and skipped the holier-than-thou fan part
the AAC was the conference we had to go to. The Big East was not an option. I never was opposed to the AAC as a bridge to a P5 invitation.
If you loud football fans were as loyal and filled the Rent, you wouldn’t have this straw man argument.
Of course the counter argument to this is maybe the basketball fan base should’ve been more loyal and showed up for the team when they struggled in the Ollie era, rather than forcing a nostalgia move and the expenses incurred to support it…
Neither argument is fair (and to be clear, I think the move has proven to be correct). Win and more fans show up, lose and less do, regardless of the team.
Case in point, this football season opened with some excitement and more than 30k were distributed for the opener, with the highest number actually in the stadium in close to a decade. Football had 14k season ticket holders in 2023, the most since 2017 (~16k in 2017). (For the curious, Men's Basketball has 8k season ticket holders counting students and the band at Gampel and nearly 11k at XL (5 thousand and 9 thousand for just the sold portion)).