winwave wrote:Aberzombie1892 wrote:I support Tulane as much as the next person, but I don't things will ever be the way they once were, and I say that because it needs to be said. When you look at the FBS landscape, what private schools in a conference regularly command crowds of more than 50k for home games? Sure there may be special games that involve Notre Dame, BYU, or specific games against a handful of teams that have huge crowds that like to travel, but what FBS private schools in a conference (including high profile winners) have those crowds on a consistent basis (and it doesn't matter if we are talking P5 vs G5)? Maybe what, one or two?
Our stadium is appropriately sized until we can consistently sell it out, and, once that happens, we can expand. Even if/when we do expand, it's unlikely that we will ever need more than 50k capacity. I don't understand why some people believe that we will need a huge stadium when a survey of the other private FBS programs indicates that that is unlikely to be the case.
You're stuck in SC/RD land. Like I said this is a great sports town and it is an especially great football town. A winning Tulane program will draw a whole hell of a lot more than 22,660. No one has said we need a bigger than 50k on campus stadium. But we do need that to draw the recruits to elevate the program and we need it to host real games.
Maybe, but there are several factors at play concerning attendance that would impact our ability to grow our number, and, once you factor them in, it just seems like we will need to do more than just win in order to build our attendance.
1. Schedule - Our schedule year in and year out is flat out unattractive to a casual college football fan, and, even if we start winning, there are tons of examples of successful G5 teams that don't draw huge crowds (Boise State, Houston [relatively speaking], Northern Illinois, Temple, Cincinnati, etc.) that likely don't draw huge crowds in part because of their Schedule. Houston still brings a crowd, but the coach expressed frustration last year that they were not selling out games even though Houston was so successful. Given these and other examples, the only reasonable conclusion is that causal fans are not interested in the opponents enough to come to all of the home games. This phenomena also happens with some P5 programs, particularly in the ACC (which has the lowest average home attendance of P5 conferences).
2. NFL/LSU - We have to indirectly compete with the Saints and LSU for relevance with the general population, and we need to be realistic about that. Those teams are heavily supported by people that have no affiliation to either because their schedules are solid and their games generally impact the national landscape even when the teams aren't that good. We don't have those luxuries.
3. Local Alumni base - We have a small alumni base, and many of our more successful Alumni over the last few decades leave the area so that leaves fewer alumni in the area who are on the fence about games but would attend if we were winning. In regard to alumni that live outside the region, it's unlikely that many of them would even consider flying in for anything other than homecoming or a huge game (i.e. Oklahoma). Think of it this way - if you lived in Dallas or NYC, would you fly to Nola and pay for a hotel just to see us play UConn? Maybe a couple of our fans do, but not many, and you can bet top dollar that many people fly in for LSU and the Saints.
It's true that we sold out a bunch of games in our first season in Yulman, but the new stadium heavily influenced that. It's unclear whether we can consistently sell it out given our schedule, competition, and scattered alumni. Sure, we can sell out big games (big opponents), but we need to do sell out consistently, and, once we have done that, expansion of the stadium would make sense.