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Starting about the 20:30-minute mark of this video the panel (you know the names) start discussing UConn football. You can make fun of them, you can hate them, you can dismiss them, but it's tough to dispute their main point. UConn football is essentially irrelevant in the mind of your garden-variety Connecticut sports fan who lives and breathes Yankees or Red Sox and Pats or Giants and, to a lesser extent, UConn hoops (both). 'Nobody cares' about 23:00 or so'. (Continued after vid)
Just look at the metrics on this board (third most viewed, behind the hoop teams). For about half the people who do make it to the Rent parking lot on game day, it's just different place to party, and if we don't make it to the game, no big deal. And forget about coming when the weather's bad. As much as we look back at the ND, USF, Pitt, Louisville wins with fondness, the dropoff in fan interest under P hasn't been that dramatic. It wasn't that high to start.
Sure, P deserves his share of the blame, but far from all of it. Go to a flawed hiring process where the incompetent AD operating in a power vacuum (Hogan to Herbst transition) flat out ignored the advice of a major booster and/or was pushed into hiring an uninspiring, unmarketable coach by the board of trustees president who has been coaching buddies with him since the 1970s. Add an uninquisitive media who not once has asked LMcH what his involvement was in the hire. Could you imagine the uproar if the same thing had happened in basketball?
But more than all that, there has been the lazy, arrogant "build it and they will come" marketing mentality that started with Hathaway since the Rent opened in 2003 and continues strong today. Look at unrealistic pricing of the chairbacks. There's a lot of people sitting in preferred who would gladly sit in the blues but don't think it's worth $300-plus more a year to move over and up one section. While they've taken baby steps toward making the chairbacks reasonable (breaking them down into three levels), there's never been a serious push to fill the blues. Haven't they figured out that a preferred lower level seat close to the 35 is better than a blue one at the top of the stadium? How about bumping the lower level preferreds up a little bit and bringing the high level chairbacks down more (I would pay $100 more a year for lower preferred)?
So barring some unforeseen miracle, P will be gone and that will be a good point to regroup and rebuild. Fortunately, the next coach has a school and a football facility that makes that a portion of the selling process easy. That coach will need to be an energetic, marketable guy who will travel the state far and wide to sell the program (think Saturdays at malls, Bob's stores, etc), put together an entertaining spring game experience. Look at the selling job Howard Schnellenberger did when he got to Miami. He did some crazy (probably illegal) stuff.
If you feel the need to bury Jacobs and DiMauro go crazy. But don't forget to explain why 'Nobody cares' is wrong.
Just look at the metrics on this board (third most viewed, behind the hoop teams). For about half the people who do make it to the Rent parking lot on game day, it's just different place to party, and if we don't make it to the game, no big deal. And forget about coming when the weather's bad. As much as we look back at the ND, USF, Pitt, Louisville wins with fondness, the dropoff in fan interest under P hasn't been that dramatic. It wasn't that high to start.
Sure, P deserves his share of the blame, but far from all of it. Go to a flawed hiring process where the incompetent AD operating in a power vacuum (Hogan to Herbst transition) flat out ignored the advice of a major booster and/or was pushed into hiring an uninspiring, unmarketable coach by the board of trustees president who has been coaching buddies with him since the 1970s. Add an uninquisitive media who not once has asked LMcH what his involvement was in the hire. Could you imagine the uproar if the same thing had happened in basketball?
But more than all that, there has been the lazy, arrogant "build it and they will come" marketing mentality that started with Hathaway since the Rent opened in 2003 and continues strong today. Look at unrealistic pricing of the chairbacks. There's a lot of people sitting in preferred who would gladly sit in the blues but don't think it's worth $300-plus more a year to move over and up one section. While they've taken baby steps toward making the chairbacks reasonable (breaking them down into three levels), there's never been a serious push to fill the blues. Haven't they figured out that a preferred lower level seat close to the 35 is better than a blue one at the top of the stadium? How about bumping the lower level preferreds up a little bit and bringing the high level chairbacks down more (I would pay $100 more a year for lower preferred)?
So barring some unforeseen miracle, P will be gone and that will be a good point to regroup and rebuild. Fortunately, the next coach has a school and a football facility that makes that a portion of the selling process easy. That coach will need to be an energetic, marketable guy who will travel the state far and wide to sell the program (think Saturdays at malls, Bob's stores, etc), put together an entertaining spring game experience. Look at the selling job Howard Schnellenberger did when he got to Miami. He did some crazy (probably illegal) stuff.
If you feel the need to bury Jacobs and DiMauro go crazy. But don't forget to explain why 'Nobody cares' is wrong.
