no one has brought this up yet, and i've bit my tongue for 2 weeks, but PU had a better crowd for a noon kick off vs Fresno State who brought virtually no one, than IU did for a 3:30 kick vs highly ranked OSU.
and let's do the math here,
say IU had 40,000 for OSU, which is probably more than being generous. (probably more like 37,000 tops actual attendance).
say 11,000 IU students attended, 10,000 OSU fans, (probably actually more OSU fans than that), and say 5,000 youth tics.
that leaves maybe 15-16 thousand tops IU adults in attendance, and probably less than that.
IU has flat priced a huge part of their base out of the market, and what other markets get is totally meaningless in this market.
and spare me the winning thing.
IU has struggled in the W-L column my whole life, and i saw my first game in 10th St Stadium and attended almost every game in the early mid 60s after the new MS was built.
IU was doing much better in attendance in the early 60s coming off probation and pre Gonso/Iso/Butcher, and always full for OSU and literally sold out every yr for PU, when the population of the area was a third of what it is now.
we sell less tickets today than when the area population was a third of what it is now, and IU Btown had 10,000 less students.
dwell on that for a minute. less or similar attendance now than when the area had a third of the population it does today, and 10,000 less IU Btown students.
and the program then was no better than now, so spare me the BS that this is just about winning..
in any other business, everybody on the administration side would be fired for such results.
here, nobody cares, because the TV money is guaranteed even though no one here had anything to do with generating a cent of that.
there is no excuse for the administration not doing more to increase attendance, which has just killed recruiting for decades ten times more than facilities or coaches ever have.
the IU Corporation would have much preferred to have sold literally every seat to an OSU fan at premium prices, than do anything to bring in IU fans, even though it's swimming in money to the point of going Brewster's Millions on spending on opulance.
that in a nutshell says how we got where we are, and stayed there decade after decade.