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You really don't think people can be real fans unless they follow recruiting?
Of course they can be real fans, but the more intense the interest, the more people want to follow all aspects of the team. You can be a fan of soccer without following David Beckham's romance with a Spice girl, but the more you are a fan, the more related topics interest you. Recruiting is definitely closely related to on-field performance.
When I said, "You don't have real fans until they're following recruiting," I didn't mean that all real fans follow recruiting. I meant that a significant fraction of real fans will follow recruiting, so if a program doesn't have people who follow recruiting, it doesn't have real fans. And if it doesn't feed the enthusiasm of the real fans who are interested in recruiting, they will lose enthusiasm; and their loss of enthusiasm will rub off on their neighbors. One of the best marketing steps UConn athletics could take is to generate more year-round conversation and media reports about recruiting. Make people think they should be interested in UConn football year round.
Your first sentence is totally unresponsive. I understand from a fan's viewpoint why you would like to treat it as the same, but the fact is that following recruiting requires far more blind faith than following the offseason in pro sports because in recruiting all the information is coming from those associated with 17 and 18 year old boys.
And your observations are non-responsive to mine; it seems we are talking past each other.
To reiterate, I made two points:
- "UConn needs to get to the point where thousands of people in the state are following UConn football recruiting and the newspapers feel they have to give regular updates." As I argued to Jimmy above, you need a core of hard-core fans who are interested in the program year-round to generate enthusiasm for the program.
- "I see no reason why fan interest should be harmful to the college kids." There is nothing intrinsic about our following recruiting that harms college kids. They themselves put out plenty of information on Twitter, or to local media or to analysts for the recruiting sites. If people and media here pass info along to the fans and that promotes interest in UConn football, it does no harm to the kids and benefits us.
