Nothing is controlled, forced, or supervised. Obviously there is some organization or CA wouldn't be there.
CA hurts nothing. A losing culture of basketball hurts everything. CA does make transferring tickets a little tougher, but the people that want to be at the games already have tickets anyways. CA is just a convenient excuse for people to *****.
I remember football games in the mid-late 90s when JTS was empty. There was no noise. Why? Because we were god awful. Now JTS gets much better attendance even on days we think attendance is crappy now. Why? Because we started winning more than 1 win per year. I remember basketball games at the same time until now. We won basketball games, and expected to win them. Iowa State basketball was a primary activity, not a secondary activity. Now, we haven't won a big game at home in eternity. Iowa State hoops isn't at the top of the list.
I'm telling you man, I was there every year of the transition. The last year without CA, the year with half CA and half GA, and the first year of full CA. The transition occurred during the Morgan years when we were an okay team, winning around 18 a year and making the post season 2 of those 3. The awful on the court product of the last 4 hadn't happened yet. You could just feel the attitude of the student section change. With all GA it was much more like the atmosphere at JTS. When it was split, there was the wilder side over in GA (which typically seemed to have better attendance as well) and then the CA side with matching shirts and crossed arms. Then they went to all CA and the air was just let out of the balloon.
I joined CA when they went to all CA because I wanted to sit down low, and honestly I had/have no problem with the couple bucks and the t-shirt thing that they did, but it just didn't feel the same. It really killed the attitude of the student section. You just can't go creating an organization that adds any kind of order or control to the chaos of the student section without changing the very nature of that section.
I don't know that killing CA would help with early season attendance issues like we are seeing now, but I do think it is the reason why the students that are there aren't as wild or into the game as they were before CA. I'm just getting ready for those anti-CA threads that will start once we get towards conference play.
No good has come from the addition of CA at all. Okay, maybe the matching shirts look nice on TV. But nothing else. I just don't get what CA offers that make so many people around here so adamant about defending it.
