From what I have heard in that time we had a Pres that actively undermined athletics. Had we gotten a good coach I agree they weren’t going to pay to keep him. That’s going to be irrelevant to anyone in a P conference now given the dollars and baseline facilities everyone has, that situation isn’t going to happen. You might have an admin drag it’s feet dumping money into facilities, but everyone has good enough facilities where it isn’t going to have that big of an impact.
I think it’s more about what they draw in a year in which they perform typically. They were 5-7 last year and drew very poorly. Not even close to 7-6 ISU. 2019 Cal was 8-5 and had two respectable games in afternoon network slots - vs Oregon at 2m and ASU at 1.4m. Now Oregon was 12-2 and ASU was 8-5. Given the slots, opponents, and their record that isn’t great.
I say decades because one could argue ISUs long crawl to relevance began with McCarney. It has been a rollercoaster, but from that point and the start of Pollard, things started an upward trend. From on field product to facilities. Its hard to imagine just how bad things were before McCarney took over.
Jim Walden's criticism may have been right for when he was here, but his criticism since has been unwarranted. We had some terrible administrative policies during those times but we have changed a lot since those days.
People don’t go to their games because they have been pretty bad for years and there are a million amazing things to do in the area, also attendance doesn’t matter.
Well in the past 15 years both KU and USC have a 12 win season, so I think you have to define it with a likely frequency factor. Cal had a 10 win season 16 years ago. It looks like a reasonable range is 5-8 wins for them typically. 2019 and 2021 suggest they are a fairly poor draw when in that range.
That's always a lame argument IMO. I lived in the Bay Area, and I attended Cal and Stanford games because I was a college football fan. The reason they don't draw well is because the majority of the people in the Bay Area just don't give a hoot about CFB, not because they love CFB but have other things to do. FWIW, I managed to do plenty of other stuff on non Cal-Stanford CFB Saturdays (which is only about 8 Saturdays a year).
This is kind of perverse, taking enjoyment out of watching a longstanding conference potentially collapse. I know you probably don't mean it that way, but. It's a crazy time.
I've read they have a huge debt on their stadium and for other improvements for their program, but the University as a whole doesn't fund the program much or at all. Unless they play football in a much smaller budget FCS league, find a way to make a lot of money as an independent or drop the sport, the Big 10 or Big 12 could be their best options for repaying the debt.
Agree ... I get no joy from seeing major traditional conferences having to crumble. Of course, realistically, if it's eat-or-be-eaten, it's better for ISU to be in semi-predator league vs. not, so my empathy has limits. If it's "going to happen anyway," better them than us. But again, that isn't "fun" by any means.
They don’t care about cfb when the teams aren’t relevant for sure. When the teams are good like when Stanford was going to the rose bowl people showed up. Not sold out crowd after sold out crowd but they still showed up. The problem is when the team isn’t good there are a billion other options.
We have great fans. Thankfully. I mean, look at this board just as a small example. It is one of the things that will hopefully carry us through all of this
