Drive 20 minutes south you're in Findlay with another university, some restaurants, and a movie theater. Drive 15 minutes up 25, you're at Levis Commons, shopping, movie theater, restaurants, bars. 30 minutes up 75, you're in Toledo, another university, bars, restaurants, night life, museums, zoo.BleedOrange wrote:Falcon137 wrote:Well lets see. There isn't anything to do an hour and a half in every direction from Athens, they don't fight any other schools for exposure or ticket dollars. They are coming off a sweet 16 birth, they returned basically their entire team, new high profile coach, 1 dollar tickets, they fill 1/4 of the arena with students, it was dads weekend (one of their biggest weekends of the year). Oh and they've been pretty good almost every year since the late 90s. It's not a hard formula to figure out, win and people will show up.zete wrote:OU had over 12000 people for a game earlier this year vs. Portland. Granted they sold tickets for a dollar for promotional reasons. But 12000 fans! That is more than we usually get for football. If we had 12000 fans show for a basketball game we would need to turn away 8000 of them.
Everyone and their brother has tried to determine what the mind set difference is. There are probably a combination of several reasons.
This year they (OU) have some good players, as they did last year. (Sweet 16) We have not made NCAAs since 1968 = interest has eroded away over the years. When we do have decent teams they are overlooked by NCAA and then get the shaft by playing on the road in the NIT. It has proven to be a loosing battle.
It's amazing what winning will do. OU football had something like 900 season ticket holders in the early 2000s. This year they led the conference in attendance. It's pretty simple what changed....they started winning.
Within an hour of BG you have, Detroit, Toledo, Michigan, and Eastern Michigan, 4 division 1 programs. Then you have the Mud Hens, Tigers, Pistons, Lions, Red Wings, 5 pro sports teams fighting for entertainment dollars. That's a lot of sports entertainment options, fighting for dollars in a pretty small market. Couple that with a lot of your alumni not staying in the Toledo area, you are going to have a hard to time drawing crowds for a program that hasn't had success in 10+ years.
Will please give give my tired ass a damned break??? There isn't any more to do in BG than there is in Athens.
Drive 20 minutes north, south, east, west, out of Athens and you get Hocking Hills as your only excitement. Although if you go an hour west you get to the exciting town of Lancaster.
