Also don't forget another thing they have that we don't, fan support. The whole state gets behind the team.
As pointed out, their on campus facilities are light years ahead of ours. We can't compete with their budget.
Finally, when it comes to recruiting, they have a large number of NBA players to tap back into to help seal the deal with any recruit. We don't have any.
If we had 4 championships in the last 16 years the garden would be sold out every night
It's not all of it, but that's a huge part of it Jack. There's no doubting that we don't have the large, passionate following that other schools do. Small and direct comparison, if the BET were moved to Chicago, and we were a Top 15 team, I don't think SJU would have 8K fans and take over the arena the way Creighton did this year.
That said, there are very few teams (college or professional) that are immune to attendance being down when the team is down. And that is the biggest reason our attendance has been as poor as it has been. We haven't just been down for a few years, we've been mostly awful for the last 15 years with plenty of drama surrounding the program. I'm a die hard, and even I wonder sometimes why I spend the time and money I do on this team (and the answer always is I love this team and college hoops, and sports is a great diversion in life, it's really not that serious).
And if I'm thinking that - as I'm sure many, many others in the same boat have - what is the above average or casual fan thinking? I'll tell you what they think, because I have friends who are big sports fans, don't have a D1 college allegiance and, when we are good, living in NYC, are interested in attending a lot of our games: they think we are a borderline laughing stock, where the results by March rarely meet the hype they heard about in October, with glimpses of relevance inbetween. Difficult to argue with that.
But I still don't buy the "SJU has weak fan support". Yes, fan support has been mostly atrocious for the last 15 years. But again, look at the team performance on and off the court! You're asking people to follow that? Even in our few years of success, we've refuted that notion roundly. In 99-00, we played Syracuse in the Garden on a Saturday night and UConn two days later on Monday. We were Top 25 and so were both of them. We won both, Cuse coming down to the wire, and we ran UConn out of the building. The Garden was shaking both nights. More recently, we know what it was like for the Duke, UConn, and Pitt games in 10-11. That same year you couldn't move on Senior Night against USF...in Carnesecca.
Imagine if we ever put together 3 straight years of those kind of performances? Then we'd be capitalizing on what we have that a lot of other more traditional college fan bases do not - New York City. Guys like my friends are coming to 5 games a year, people are bringing their clients to big games, and SJU fans besides the guys willing to sit through all the losing come back. Attendance at our games is a borderline sleeping giant, we just need to win and win consistently.
