Duke makes me sad
- Thread starter Rags to Roses
- Start date
Duke does not use basketball as an excuse to not
win at football. So called basketball schools can
be really good at both with the proper support
and backing. Noticed the Duke students stuck
around for the whole game.
They forgot they are supposed to settle for moral victories.
IU isn’t a basketball school, at least by the criteria one would normally use.
To be considered a basketball school, you have to finish first a bunch in your conference, in recent history, win the conference tournament at least once in the 20+ year history, not routinely get trounced in the post-season.
Don’t mistake enthusiasm for results.
i like their qb. makes a lot of difference having a guy like that under center
yes duke beat Clemson last night. BVut put them where we are in the Big Ten East, and let them play those 6 Division Teams every year, and 3 additional Big Ten games afainst the likes of Wisconsin and Iowa, and let's see how well they do.
So should we be considered only a soccer school then?
Much better than IU. I think Duke win 9 games last year. They would handle Maryland, Rutgers, Illinois and Purdue.
Notice they won. Main reason for students to stick around. How many straight loses to OSU?
Men's soccer. People give NIL because they think we are still a basketball school.
We have seen how non powerhouse schools can compete with the bluebloods in football. I have always like the Mike Leach approach. You can find speed and you can find accurate QBs who aren't recruited to big boy land, just because they aren't 6'4" or they aren't great athletes. Spread the field and sling it.
I thought the score was 10-3 at the half? Maybe if the fans stuck around after the half and cheered maybe some good might happen.
You can make all the excuses you want. The students suck. They don't go sit in the balcony at basketball games either. They were just picked as the No. 2 worst student section in College football.
For a school with an undergraduate enrollment of roughly 35,000, I think our student support is very underwhelming. Granted, the program hasn’t been good for quite a long time, but it’s an inexpensive and fun way to spend six or seven Fall Saturdays supporting your school. Similarly, the basketball support isn’t what it was when I was in school, but that program has struggled, too. Pity, especially when you see kids at other schools so enthusiastically behind their teams.
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You have to give them a reason to want to be there.
The football program was good in 2019 and 2020.
The students weren't allowed to attend in 2020.
The game experience needs to be better but that is again an excuse.
Call it what you want, everyone weighs the reasons they do something. The reason that people don't go is because they aren't given a reason to. You yourself say the game experience needs to be better. So they have a team that almost always loses. A bad atmosphere. They have a host of other options available to them on a nice Saturday. College sports are entertainment, much like a movie or any other form of entertainment, the engagement has to be earned.
The program is lucky it gets the support it does.
And in 2021 (when we were all permitted back in), they showed up early, only to be disappointed again. But win or lose, most show up late and leave at the half, and they show up on numbers that are relatively small.It’s lukewarm support, at best.
Why go then and leave at halftime it's 10-3. 50,500. Why buy a ticket? The Athletic Dept. is a train wreck. We hired internally so all the people in the athletic department could not have any expectations for improvement. We gave the basketball coach a million dollar a year raise for winning one NCAA tournament game. The only good thing I saw was sending the Women's basketball team on a great trip to Greece.
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Better game experience? We should do a Savannah Bananas deal. Marketing genius and very little to do with actually playing and winning the game!
Winning is the obligation of the program, and they’ve not held up their end of the bargain. But supporting the program is the obligation of the students, and they haven’t done their part, either. They aren’t buying groceries at Kroger or food at a restaurant. They’re students at IU and that alone should be enough for them to care about and support the program. Too many of them simply don’t, and it’s been the culture for years (and is quickly becoming the student culture in basketball, too). Sucks, in my opinion, especially when you see students at other schools embrace their programs and the experiences you get as a student fan in the stands.
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It really is about the culture. Students at some school just don’t give a F about sports. The spiral started years ago when bball fell apart. I’m not sure even winning will fix the apathy of the IU student base. They like to drink, smoke the J, play on their gadgets…..sports are secondary to many. Apparently this is not the case at certain other schools.
We haven't been much to particularly celebrate in either of those sports for quite some time. When you combine that with the push from the University to get more out of state students in Bloomington and save the regional campuses for the in state kids, you don't have as much of the built in fan base. Additionally, w.r.t. basketball, we give out too many students tickets. Other schools have restricted that quite a bit more than we have. So you have students fighting over a smaller pool of tickets which generally leads to the more invested being at the games.
In basketball, make the balcony seats general admission and remove them from the student package. Make a true student section. In football, you have to win. I am 45. How many winning seasons have we had in my lifetime? If the fan support/team winning equation is similar to a marriage, the fans have been in a marriage where the husband only shows up to drop off a Hershey bar and a homemade card every other anniversary while expecting the wife (fans) are going to be Donna Reed. That isn't how the real world works.
In football, we’ve cultivated a culture that expects and accepts losing. It’s why some fans would go berserk if the no pass out policy ended, since they really couldn’t care less about the program or winning football. Its such a strange mindset.
I can say without a doubt that the university contributes to some of this student participation.
At other Big Ten programs, the have organized student sections complete with cheer practice. They are all on the same page. They coordinate shit and they have established traditions and activities that happen. always, at key points in a game (think Jump Around at Wisconsin).
Our student section and administrators couldn’t coordinate a Chinese fire drill if their life depended on it.
Basketball too. Other schools have their entire student section in the same shirts and gear. We had one guy in a gorilla outfit. That was it.
It is hands down one of the worst run student sections in the nation for both sports.
At other Big Ten programs, the have organized student sections complete with cheer practice. They are all on the same page. They coordinate shit and they have established traditions and activities that happen. always, at key points in a game (think Jump Around at Wisconsin).
Our student section and administrators couldn’t coordinate a Chinese fire drill if their life depended on it.
Basketball too. Other schools have their entire student section in the same shirts and gear. We had one guy in a gorilla outfit. That was it.
It is hands down one of the worst run student sections in the nation for both sports.
Agree somewhat, though we used our balcony seats in the student package whenever we had them. AH is a special place, but it was designed with a number of poor seats, as everyone knows. But the student allotment needs to shrink, as I’ve been saying for years.
In football, we need to win, but both spouses have failed, not just one. Student support isn’t good, and excusing it as simply a matter of not winning enough is a cop out. It’s their school, it’s easy to go, it’s cheap to go, it’s fun to go. Those attributes alone make it worthy of student support.
Again, because we don't have a true student section in basketball. Those sections at other schools have the same core group of students in the same place for every home game. At Indiana you end up in just about every corner of the building over the course of a season. It is hard to organize anything when you are behind the basket one game, in a main corner the next, in the balcony on opposite sides the next two games, etc. Give those kids less tickets but have them have an actual section and I bet that changes a bit.
As far as football goes. We suck. We have always sucked. Getting your pants beat off every year for decades with very little hope of change appearing on the horizon tends to cut back on the time anyone would want to put into that. Jump Around at Wisconsin didn't pop up when they were sucking ass. It came about after they had started to actually win games. Going and watching your team lose isn't fun.
Alvarez was a once in a university’s lifetime hire. Mallory was as close as we will ever get.
It isn't fun to go. That's the problem. I was a student at the end of Cameron and beginning of Dinardo. Randle El was good his last year and the football was a little more exciting but we couldn't do anything with him when it came to getting to that bowl. Then after that minor uptick we fell off the planet again. That is the issue. If Randle El would have been followed up with a few 6-5 (think it was 11 games then) type of teams then you start building something.
That Ohio State game wasn't fun. We had one FG and a takeaway to cheer for the entire game. I heard the band was pretty meh. What was fun about Saturday that they couldn't have gotten out in the parking lot or at home with some friends?
Maybe?
Even then, other Big Ten schools have pulled even with IU like Maryland and a few others. We certainly don’t dominate there like when old man Yeagley was running the show. Still very good.
Kids at other schools move around, too. They aren’t in the same seats for every game.
Anyone can support a winner but it takes people with a special tie to a school to support a program that hasn’t performed well. When you don’t go and don’t care, you don’t demand that the standard be improved. For the most casual fans like you, none of this matters. Winning is your one and only prerequisite to offering your support. For those of us who’ve been supporters for decades, we actually care (and caring is the first step to improving).
