Nightmare Bowl Scenario

[Don Toro]

Are we still talking about the Nightmare Bowl Scenario?  :-?

[outrunner]

RMF, I don't disagree with what you are saying, but Florida is celebrating 100 years of football while we are celebrating 10. You cannot force tadition upon fans, it happens on its own. In time we will have our own deep rooted traditions and several tens of thousands of fans. Only time will tell.

[BullyPulpit]

USF has enough grad in Central Florida to sell out RayJay every week if the alumni felt the same way about USF as the UF, UW, Tenn, etc... alumni feel. There is no excuse for 40k at a conference game.

The flaw in your reasoning is that the alumni of UF, UW, UM, OSU, UT, PSU, etc. attended the schools while they HAD a football team. USF has relatively few area alums who attended while we had a team, and even fewer that were there while we have been playing D-I, and even fewer while we have been BCS. Look at our student section now. It is rabid and growing by the season. Those students will be the foundation of our fan base in the years to come, but they still have to graduate and become financially stable enough to afford the commitment of season tickets/donations.

I predict a bump of between 500 and 1000 of alumni season ticket holders every year over the next decade, and that is with our current performance. If we were to win a BE Championship and get to a BCS Bowl, that numbr would spike (not only with alumni, but also with "casual fans". If my conservative numbers are right, in the next 10 years we will have between 22,000 and 27,000 season ticket holders, not too shabby.

[Jamie]

Didn't the perception of the Big East as a sissy conference drive some of those bowl affiliations? That's not true as everyone can see.

By the way, TCU is a 100% lock to go to the Fort Worth Bowl because it's in their stadium. So that throws the whole scenario off right there.

[RMF5630]

I agree with you guys, USF is not 100 years old.  The problem, as I see it, is if time is the answer we are screwed.  Football is not going away at these schools, so for every year we add, so do they.  Therefore, USF needs to do something to close the gap beyond simply existing.

USF and the other new programs will have to create ways to boost attendance and develop fans that will travel. Otherwise, we are stuck in the world of the BCS or Birmingham Bowl.  Nothing in between.  As things stand right now, we will never play in a New Year's Day Bowl until we develop a following that will travel.  

The general consensus (that I can see) appears to be that we have to wait until we are older.  I say, that USF should work on developing this faster through choreographing the football experience that will make a USF game more attractive to the non or fringe fan.  

An on-campus stadium is one controllable asset that USF can do and fans can demand.  A cheaper way would be to teach the band how to act like a College Football band and not some artistic John Phillip Sosa on acid band!  I simply don't want to wait 50 years.