Army Frog Fan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 11, 2025 2:34 pm
Temple is in Philly. Tulsa is a team that pokes around the top 25 every 7-10 years. I don’t really give a crap how many Colgate fans come to USMA. We should be able to sell out the stadium with the Corps and people on post.
And yet we never do.
The ship has sailed and we are in the AAC but we are going to be playing in front of alot of aluminum bleacher seats come November. Will be a great fan experience for one and all and will look great on TV. Nothing says "come play football at Army" then looking in the stands and seeing them half empty.
Temple is regional team...I would think those fans will travel just as well as Colgate and/or Lafayette...with the added benefit that Temple is an FBS school, so a win "counts" towards bowl eligibility. You may be right about Tulsa. We'll see how time in the AAC goes in terms of developing any rivalries with other teams (seems to be something developing with UTSA already perhaps). I would think for the rest of the AAC, that traveling to West Point would be more interesting and attractive than to many of the other AAC destinations...so we may very well see opponent fans travel better to see their team play Army than they might to other AAC away contests.
You'd think a season like last year at 12-2 might generate Army ticket sales, regardless of the opponent. We'll see...but I'd like to think that winning matters and creates more fan interest, loyalty and that would translate to ticket sales. Ultimately, the money is in the TV contracts and conference affiliation...not in ticket sales to the home games.
prideandream wrote: ↑Wed Mar 12, 2025 12:17 am
We could play them in the PX parking lot with no fans for all I care. Need FBS wins and hopefully this year some of these teams will get their crap together and give us a quality win or two. We need to play Tulane, Memphis, UTSA, and South Florida every chance we get and hope they are good and win. Only way out of this is for these teams to get better and us to win at this point. Start racking up a couple conference championships and win 10+ each year.
Probably doesn't matter. In 5 years or so when the P4 players finally get a union and deal for a CBA the whole college football world will implode. Or Explode. Or Blowup. And if the women sue under Title IX next year once football and basketball players get paid it will likely hasten the downfall of the game.
Just my two cents
Agree 100% - particularly with the second paragraph. College football as we know it is now in hospice care with a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order attached. In the bigger picture, what happens in the next 4-5 years is pretty irrelevant to the long term future of the sport. When all the dust finally settles, there will be two types of "college football" - one with students taking classes in pursuit of a degree and one with full-time employees drawing weekly paychecks at State U Inc. The people in charge of the latter group can call their product whatever they like, but college football it ain't.
IMHO - a football plyer at an SA has more in common with an engineering student playing football in the Patriot League than with a hired hand punching a time clock at a P5 factory, but just my own $0.02
Agree on all, by early 2030's there will be some type of super league of 48 or 64 teams or whatever. We will not be in it. And we will basically be at the D-1AA level of year's past.
Army Frog Fan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 11, 2025 2:34 pm
Temple is in Philly. Tulsa is a team that pokes around the top 25 every 7-10 years. I don’t really give a crap how many Colgate fans come to USMA. We should be able to sell out the stadium with the Corps and people on post.
We need way more than cadets and people on post to sell out games. We need to get sports fans from the NYC area to come up to West Point once each fall to see a game. And to get those fans, we need to make the experience special. We have everything to make it special with the parade, skydivers, march-on, etc. What we need to do is make it easier to access the experience and to class up the in-game experience. Better food, beer, etc. to make it fun for the casual fan. And come up with some ideas to make getting on and off post better. That’s how you sell out our home games.