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2006 NCAA Football Attendance


SiouxMD

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Two quick comments. First, you are correct about Team Makers being a bigger factor than the attendance numbers, but remember that the two are linked. Larger attendance usually means more season ticket sales and that generally means more money to the booster club. The increase in attendance becomes a double boon. Second, the decline in basketball attendance has not been as bad as it appears. Moving from doubleheaders to individual games has cut reported attendance but probably has increased, or held constant, the gate receipts.

Don't disagree with your statement, but membership upgrades within Team Makers and within the Fighting Sioux Club especially important, probably more so than membership increases. If the Fighting Sioux Club reached out nationally to alumni out-of-state, that's probably the largest untapped market for UND.

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Don't disagree with your statement, but membership upgrades within Team Makers and within the Fighting Sioux Club especially important, probably more so than membership increases. If the Fighting Sioux Club reached out nationally to alumni out-of-state, that's probably the largest untapped market for UND.

It's definitely helped us. Erv's trips to Arizona and other retirement states have brought in a lot of money for us. I agree with you about TM/FSC upgrades. Upward pressure for better seats is another way that football can help in the DI move. (A little less for UND, since hockey seats are more important there.)

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If you want attendance to go up during your first years of DI, I recommend you tell Coach Lennon to go 2-8 next year then recover after that. It seems to work.

What I'm really saying is that I think the 2002-2004 attendance rise had less to do with the transition than it did the excitement of Bohl and the recovery of the NDSU tradition. I think the 2005 and beyond numbers have been helped by DI, though.

I have to disagree with you here Hammer. Most NDSU fans like to blame Bob Babich for the "demise" of NDSU football in the late 90's and early 2000's, but that just isn't fair. Rocky Hager and Dale Lennon were the real culprits. Hager will never get blamed because he took two of Earl Slomonson's teams to the promised land but then Lennon showed the rest of the country how to beat the vaunted "Veer" offense. The only really really good NDSU football team in the last 16 years was Babich's 2000 team. His reward?......... A trip to the Super Bowl and the everlasting disdain of Bison fans across the country.

You can claim all you want that going from 2-8 in 2002 to 8-3 in 2003 was the reason for a 17% increase in football attendance for your inaugural year in DI, but if that is the case, what was the reason for SDSU's 35% increase in football attendance from 2003 to 2004? The answer: hype.

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Totally agree with pretty much everything you said, but just to make a minor correction it was Roger Thomas (not Dale Lennon) who exposed the veer offense. Lennon took over as head coach in 1999, but the Sioux had been beating the Bison regularly since 1993.

Coach Lennon was defensive coordinator for UND from 1990-1996. I believe he is the one who installed the 3-4 defense geared toward thwarting NDSU's veer offense.

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