You are certainly not alone in wondering why our fanbase insists on being fractured. I don't get it either - never have. No other college fanbase in the country goes through constant bickering between football vs hoops fans; mens hoops vs womens hoops fans; etc. Being split absolutely hurts our P5 profile. If everyone who supported hoops also supported football, then there would be absolutely zero questioning of UConn's fanbase. There is no question that we are a basketball school and that is okay. There are other basketball schools who have made a niche inside the P5 - UNC, Duke, Kentucky, Syracuse, Louisville, Kansas - and NONE of those school's fanbases have a football vs basketball split. That's probably the reason why they are in the P5 and we are stuck bickering amongst ourselves in the AAC. So very frustrating.
It is totally frustrating, but to understand it you have to understand the history of the Men's vs. Women's BB programs, and what happened when IA football was introduced.
The women' s program came out of nowhere from nowhere, and it happened almost overnight. I think they did one of the most brilliant marketing jobs ever done by any collegiate sports program. The results were absolutely astounding. I think Chris Dailey played the biggest role in the mercurial rise of the women's program. She did anything and everything to promote that program, right down to the minutest of details. That woman would make an amazing corporate CEO in any kind of business.
She had to teach classes at UCONN back in the early days of the Geno regime. Nobody was attending their games in the old field house, so she forced the students from her classes to attend the games for extra course credits. She also gave tickets away to anybody she could get to show up. She also made the players extremely accessible to the fans. She developed a bond between the team and their fanbase. Nothing like it had ever been done before.
She built that program from the ground up, fan by fan, until they started getting a few local recruits with talent, and then Geno's skill as a coach kicked in and they started winning. The wins snowballed year after year. We started winning Big East titles. Then in 1991 we improbably made a run to the Final Four and in the semifinals came close to knocking off Geno's old UVA team where he was an assistant to Debbie Ryan.
Suddenly the women's team became a hot commodity, Gampel had just opened, so they had a beautiful, brand new venue and the talent being recruited started to snowball. It probably wouldn't have happened quite the same way if UCONN wasn't already a firmly established BB school with a large following, but some of the women's fans represented a much older demographic, and they liked the touchy feely approach with the players. They were also people who had grown tired of watching top level men's CBB or the NBA because they were old school and remembered the days of BB before the 3 pt. shot when BB fundamentals were emphasized. They suddenly saw that old time era with the below the rim women's game. I think a lot of them were non-UCONN alums and they never had supported any UCONN athletics programs prior to their interest in the women's program.
Then, having developed one of the largest women's BB fanbases, they go to No. 1 in 1995 and win the title with a perfect record. And the next thing that happened is probably a big reason why the men's and women's fanbases remain split to this day...the infamous bumper stickers:
"UConn - Where Men are Men and Women Are Champions."
Whomever dreamed up that one should be drawn and quartered. Calhoun became upstaged by this johnny come lately phenomenon, and he didn't take too kindly to it. Thus an ongoing feud was born between JC and Geno.
I used to participate in a small UCONN fan forum which was for BB discussion, men's and women's. We used to have some really nasty flame wars between the two factions. It could get really ugly. The men's only fans resented the women's program for what one poster claimed, taking attention away from the men's program. The women's only fans liked to take their own shots at the men's program. Of course some of us who were UConn grads supported both programs. I used to argue that an alumnus ought to support any team the university puts out on a field. Some folks didn't see it that way.
Gradually the old timers who support the women's program only will be gone, but I'm afraid they will have instilled their loyalty to the program in future generations. I think this divide is always going to exist, and it's detrimental to both sports and the school in general.
Now with football added to the mix since 2002, many of those same fans, mostly from the men's side, view it as nothing but a further useless distraction that takes away from the both BB programs. They mock the bowl games we've gone to as largely inconsequential. They only want what's good for the men's BB program.
I don't really know the answer. Maybe Benedict needs to invite all three factions to some kind of event where you explain to everybody that whether or not you give a dang about football, that's where the money is and that's what's going to get us to the promised land of P5 membership. At that point, the women's fans will shrug their shoulders and say so what, we could play in a conference on Pluto and still dominate the women's BB universe, the men's fans will want to return to the new Big East for nostalgic reasons, and the rest of us will scratch our heads wondering why nobody in either of those two factions get it.
Without P5 membership, both of those factions will experience a rather bleak future, watching both programs becoming increasingly irrelevant over time, because at some point the money just won't be there to recruit the high level talent necessary to compete with the P5's. Maybe Benedict can figure out a way to drive that point home and get everybody on the same page. We'll see.