Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you.
Uconn was relegated the lowest option because that was the site of the NC game. The other bowls tried to pick the teams that would give the highest return. Uconn was the weakest BC
The Big East conference didn't do this. on top of the Black Sheep rep the conference leadership let develop in the football media nationally over the course of 20 years.
I have no idea what the AAC conference arrangments are regarding the football bowl season, and ticket sales and all that. I don't actually know if it's ever been published as to what the playoff system si going to entail either - are there guaranteed/contractual ticket sales for teams that make it? I'm pretty sure the other conference contract bowls have kept the same model.
Whatever - UCONN has people in place that understand these things now - unlike when Hathaway was running things, so I'm not concerned. I'm more concerned again, about the game in 2 weeks, and taking the steps to get to the post season, as it should be for us fans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
<<<A first ballot election to the Spackler post Hall of Fame.>>>>
Kiss my hack writer.
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?Everytime this is brought up I wonder why VaTech gets a pass with the ticket sales argument.
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.
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.