One damning number ...

[dsturdy5]

When it comes to narratives, we should be well educated. UConn attendance at the Fiesta Bowl, the APR, JC is a raving loon on and off the court, etc, etc, etc. A narrative is whatever the media wants it to be. Then it gets out into the general populace who take it and run with it. It morphs 10000x over and ends up looking worse in the long run than the original.

I always go back to spygate with the Patriots. People still bring it up, people still get it wrong, and it gets worse every time because a lot of the misconceptions come out through the media, particularly former players who have an agenda. Ever hear Marshall Faulk talk about it on NFL Network? He is about half a step away from saying that the Patriots followed the Rams around all season and bugged their locker room starting in training camp.

When a few fight back against a popular, powerful narrative, it falls on a fraction of the ears that have heard propaganda from the beginning, making barely a dent.

 

[Duncan Idaho]

The nation referenced their info from the Courant. We were screwed by our own. I stopped with Connor after that. AD got too big for Hathaway.

 

[Carl Spackler]

The nation referenced their info from the Courant. We were screwed by our own. I stopped with Connor after that. AD got too big for Hathaway.

Duncan, I'm not sure if anybody crusaded like I did back then for fans to buy up tickets and talked about what the BCS was all about - but I did it on this website. To this day, call it whatever you want, but I feel partly responsible for the whole mess. Had I known at the time, that the local sports writers paid as close attention as they do to stuff around here - and had any idea how little they knew about college football, I would have crusaded differently.

My preferred news sources come through the younger writers, and through the New Haven county region of CT. They always have. The sooner that a media following out of Hartford, that is informed, and not adversarial to the university athletic department - and that includes beat writers, commentators, and the like - that understand the value and importance of college football, in the pecking order of sports, and the media role in it, (and that does not mean compromising journalistic integrity) - the better.

The university can only change things they can control, there is no control over that.

 

[UConn9604]

Oh, I don't know about that. The contracts and all that were in place, and the people that run the bowls, and make the selections - if the selections had to be made - didn't give a rat's about ticket sales and attendance, the game was already paid for, and the money contracted and banked. I believe the poster who wrote that it was simple as the people in charge wanting to see Andrew Luck on the field of the Orange Bowl. Who were they going to want to see from UCONN? The managers of the Orange Bowl when it was part of the BCS in 2010 - for the Jan. 1, 2011 game - probably didn't know a single player on the roster from the UCONN fall 2010 season.

Which is sad, because we had an All American RB that year, our second in three years, who finished 36 yards behind the national leader in rushing yards. Alas.

 

[whaler11]

Duncan, I'm not sure if anybody crusaded like I did back then for fans to buy up tickets and talked about what the BCS was all about - but I did it on this website. To this day, call it whatever you want, but I feel partly responsible for the whole mess. Had I known at the time, that the local sports writers paid as close attention as they do to stuff around here - and had any idea how little they knew about college football, I would have crusaded differently.

My preferred news sources come through the younger writers, and through the New Haven county region of CT. They always have. The sooner that a media following out of Hartford, that is informed, and not adversarial to the university athletic department - and that includes beat writers, commentators, and the like - that understand the value and importance of college football, in the pecking order of sports, and the media role in it, (and that does not mean compromising journalistic integrity) - the better.

The university can only change things they can control, there is no control over that.

A first ballot election to the Spackler post Hall of Fame.

 

[uconnfan68]

In the linked LostLetterman article:

"Case Against: Traveling from Storrs, CT, to Glendale, AZ, is not easy. But that barely cloaks the embarrassment of UConn losing $1.8 million on its Fiesta Bowl appearance when the school sold just 2,771 out of 17,500 allotted tickets. And the Huskies’ football program has gone into a nosedive in recent seasons, winning a combined 13 games in the last three seasons. Connecticut isn’t ready to bankroll the expenses — or generate fan interest — that comes with big-time college football."

Maybe this was the worst ever. It certainly was a very challenging game for our fan base. And, I'd say we mostly took the "smart" buy & didn't purchase through our school. In BCS planets, that Bowl attendance & their money was ALL important. If we bought 75% of our tickets on StubHub at 40% of the Bowl sponsor price, we've not played the Game.

To me, this is one bullet point - like Robert Griffin's comment about how loud a Rentschler night game got. But I suspect that these type comments are our albatross for the conventional wisdom. This is why someone in Starkville or Pullman can say that we are not worthy.

I blame Jeff Hathaway (as usual).

Our push back: we are only 15 years at this level. Our fan base is not that snapshot. We can grow far beyond BC or Cuse. Our AD is excellence. There is not a snapshot in business. You buy a stock based on its Growth (discounted by the appropriate risk/return rate). It's just stupid to look at wealthy CT and NE - with NY potential - and think that this Program is not far more valuable than 25 of the 65. I think, though, that there are a handful who just don't care. But OUR narrative needs to change. And that began when PP left. The good news started & I agree with the statement that Diaco is transformative. That started with, what I believe, is an extraordinary coaching staff. I say this watching us, RU, Cuse & BC form staffs. (I'm impressed)

That's the State of our Program. Got to show up on the field.

Not to mention the other school got a subsidy from its league. But you can't count on an informed media anymore. They just write whatever some tells them.

 

[Carl Spackler]

<<<A first ballot election to the Spackler post Hall of Fame.>>>>

Kiss my hack writer.

 

[whaler11]

<<<A first ballot election to the Spackler post Hall of Fame.>>>>

Kiss my hack writer.

If I'm a hack aren't you somewhat responsible? Shouldn't you be posting in a way that motivates me to move beyond hackiness?

Half the time I think you are playing a character for reasons that are beyond comprehension. But then posts like that last one actually make me question your sanity.

 

[DoctorWho85]

I'm not paranoid. It was pretty obvious no one outside of the Big East liked the Big East having an auto BCS bid. In the minds of ESPiN, which means in the minds of the majority of BCS school fans, the Big East was just living off of teams that no longer were in the conference (Miami, VTech, BC, etc...) and haven't done anything in the BCS era even though the conference's BCS bowl record was significantly better than ACC's. The fact that Cincinnati got beat by VTech then crushed by Tebow's Florida team didn't help when UConn went with an 8-4 record. That is why I think a lot of college "analysis" pointed to bowl tickets sold by the school to point out that not only UConn shouldn't have played in the Fiesta bowl, but that Big East shouldn't have had an auto bid to begin with. Even now a lot of these talking heads point to that UConn team as the reason why there's a playoff to begin with. Does this make me paranoid? I don't think so. Or maybe I'm just lying to myself and should join the likes of conspiracy kitty.

 

[BoatShow]

"Why is this still a thing?"- drunk @BoatShow

 

[Confident Carl]

Everytime this is brought up I wonder why VaTech gets a pass with the ticket sales argument.

So Clemson get's their axx kicked in the 2011 Orange Bowl by WVA and you never here about it. How come everyone else gets a pass?

 

[Waquoit]

This issue is just another example of UConn never catching a break during the entire process. If the Orange Bowl had last pick and we ended up there, we would have sold out the allotment, had a huge crowd at the game and just might have won. Our future would have been secured.

 

[dsturdy5]

I'm not paranoid. It was pretty obvious no one outside of the Big East liked the Big East having an auto BCS bid. In the minds of ESPiN, which means in the minds of the majority of BCS school fans, the Big East was just living off of teams that no longer were in the conference (Miami, VTech, BC, etc...) and haven't done anything in the BCS era even though the conference's BCS bowl record was significantly better than ACC's. The fact that Cincinnati got beat by VTech then crushed by Tebow's Florida team didn't help when UConn went with an 8-4 record. That is why I think a lot of college "analysis" pointed to bowl tickets sold by the school to point out that not only UConn shouldn't have played in the Fiesta bowl, but that Big East shouldn't have had an auto bid to begin with. Even now a lot of these talking heads point to that UConn team as the reason why there's a playoff to begin with. Does this make me paranoid? I don't think so. Or maybe I'm just lying to myself and should join the likes of conspiracy kitty.

I remember seeing an interview with one of Michael Vick's teammates from Atlanta during his rookie training camp. The basic gist of the interview was "He didn't do it in a real football conference. He did it in the Big East. Let's see if he can do it against real players from real leagues." That was in, what, 2001? The U was the U, Va Tech was playing in BCS games, Cuse and BCU were top 25-ish teams. If the BE wasn't getting respect back then, what did you expect going forward?

 

[pj]

This was not primarily PR, because PR can't stop the press from running with the story it wants.

Look, if you were there you know that there were at least 10,000 hard core UConn fans, wearing blue, at the game. The vast majority of them bought tickets through the secondary market. What Hathaway needed to do, which he could have done, is sell 1 or 2 thousand tickets at full price to the diehard supporters who wouldn't mind overpaying to help UConn, and then sell the rest for half or two thirds of face given the travel costs. UConn could have lost the exact same amount of money, but announced higher sales, just by discounting.

That having been said, people here also need to accept that we -- the core fanbase -- bear a good part of the responsibility. The trip was ungodly expensive, I get it. But more of us needed to go, and more of us who went needed to suck up the extra cost and buy the tickets from the school to shape the narrative. Rather than just complain about why the narrative was unfair.

It was our first BCS appearance. Nobody knew how the system worked. It's hard to persuade fans to spend extra hundreds or thousands of dollars to help the school when they have no experience with the harms that can come from not spending it.

 

[Chief00]

UConn should have subsidized transportation -since they had multi million dollar bill anyways - get the fans there!

 

[huskymedic]

I guess the thread should at least include the paragraph that preceded the "Case Against":

"Case For: The Huskies’ men’s basketball team has won a mind-boggling four national championships in the last 15 years. Their female counterparts are an even bigger powerhouse, as are the school’s perennially great soccer teams. The football team has also been deceptively successful in its 15 years in the FBS, earning shares of the Big East title in 2007 and 2010 - the latter resulting in a trip to the Fiesta Bowl."