Let's Cut The Attendance Trash Talk

orangeandbrown · Post by **orangeandbrown** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 6:49 pm

It's the Journey... wrote:Why the drop? It just seems odd to me that an entire conference would drop down to 1AA for only one season then come back up again.

It was the attendance rule. If a certain number of teams in the conference didn't make it, the whole conference went down. We were only down one year because the rule was either changed or challenged successfully, I don't recall which. But, the fact is, we were in I-AA for a short period of time.

Flipper · Post by **Flipper** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 7:17 pm

I think the initial issue had two components, average attendance for all games (home and away) and seating capacity. so, the grandstands weren't erected to acommodate a sudden demand for seating IIRC. We also started scheduling more road games agianst bigger schools because a road game with 50-60,000 in attendance went a long way towards making our average.

OhioCatFan · Post by **OhioCatFan** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 8:43 am

orangeandbrown wrote:
It's the Journey... wrote:Why the drop? It just seems odd to me that an entire conference would drop down to 1AA for only one season then come back up again.
It was the attendance rule. If a certain number of teams in the conference didn't make it, the whole conference went down. We were only down one year because the rule was either changed or challenged successfully, I don't recall which. But, the fact is, we were in I-AA for a short period of time.

It was not only odd, it didn't happen. In the year in question the MAC sent a representative to a 1-A bowl -- BG to the California Bowl. Now if you were 1-AA you wouldn't have gone to a 1-A bowl. I think a few MAC schools were declassified this one year, but then were back in 1-A the following year. It was not the whole conference!

Flipper · Post by **Flipper** » Sat Nov 04, 2006 10:17 am

IIRC, We were ranked in the 1AA poll in 1982. Andre Young was a 1AA all American. We did not participate in the playoffs....perhaps because the conference had a agreement in place for a bowl game for the champion?

I seem to recall there being a lot of controversy over where BG would be calssified...our time in 1AA was viewed as a temporary thing...you must remeber...this was 1982, I was 21 and frankly, alot of that era is kind of blurry to me...for instance, I still don't know where my pants wound up on the night of 12/31/82 morning of 1/01/83 ....

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