NCAAbbs

RockyMtnRamFan,

CSU has a student enrollment of over 25,000. Yet, CSU doesn't even average 25,000 in attendance. And CSU can't even sell tickets for its arch rival Colorado? Normally, I root for the NonBCS team which in this case is CSU....but, heck, if CSU fans won't support their team, can you really blame Colorado for dropping CSU? By the way, Tulsa has lots of games scheduled with seven time national champ Oklahoma U and will be playing the Sooners regularly in football and basektball. TU, with 4,200 students, averages about 20,000 and that average is expected to go up with renovated Chapman Stadium.

It seems to me that MWC fans have an uncanny ability for wrong timing to criticize others and make posts on this board. I hope CU doesn't kick you off the schedule, but like I said, in this instance I don't blame them. If CSU is not selling tickets, not even tickets equal to the student enrollment, why should CU bankroll CSU's football program?

You are always welcome on this board.

TG

http://www.buffzone.com/news/2008/aug/26...-with-csu/

I think CUSA has a number of schools that don't average as many fans per game as their enrollment. Not certain about some of the schools in the Eastern Division, but I know Houston doesn't.

Attendance is solid in the east outside of UAB. I'm not necessarily sure that the students=attendance argument is valid. UCF, for instance, has almost 50,000 students now and we averaged like 43,000 fans. But I'd say that's not fair to say we should have had 50,000 in a mythical stadium that would hold that simply based on the student body size, because our student body is eclectic so to speak. We have commuter students, non-trads, etc, whereas other schools are more strictly residential.

1. The linked article notes that CSU hasn't sold out its ticket office's entire allotment of 30,000 tickets for a game vs. CU in Denver. If Tulsa played a game vs. OU in Oklahoma City, would Tulsa sell 30,000 tickets through its ticket office? Only if OU fans bought 20,000 or more of Tulsa's allotment. People who live in glass houses...

2. CU wants a better deal from CSU, they don't want to drop the series unless CSU is unreasonable. If CU gets a more equitable split of the revenue from games in Denver, and the right to play a few games in the series at Boulder, the series will continue.

You beat me to it.

Tulsa, with a student body of 4,200 students, brought 15,000 fans to Liberty Bowl. Oklahoma State is negotiating with Tulsa because next to Okla U, Tulsa has brought more fans to Stillwater than any other school, including schools like Texas, Texas Tech and TAMU. No doubt Tulsa has/will bring fans to Norman and Stillwater. Norman, for all practical purposes, is now a suburb of the OKC metro area. So playing in Norman (about 30 miles or so south of downtown OKC) is like playing in OKC.

CSU, with 25,000+ students, averages less than that for its home football games. For its most heated rival (Colorado) and being played in Denver which is so close and then too the vast majority of CSU students and alumni are from Denver, CSU cannot even sell 30,000 tickets? What does that say? I thought MWC was an elite conference that deserves BCS status. BCS is defined at turning out the fans and turning on the tv sets.

CSU is a MWC school in a state that is the second largest Rocky Mountain state after Utah, with 4.5 million people. It would seem difficult to advance the argument that your conference is BCS when that conference's school in its second largest populated state....has attendance issues.

FWIW, I note the Sun Bowl is sold out for Texas/UTEP game...quite a contrast versus the CU/CSU situation.

FWIW, Washington State U, which has about the same enrollment as CSU, is projected to have 55,000 fans for its game with Oklahoma State @Seattle. WSU has a lot of its students and alumni from Seattle. CSU has a lot of its students and alumni from Denver. WSU sells tickets. CSU does not.

Good luck to Rice this season. Hopefully, you guys can raise your 10,000 attendance figure.

You're being too easy on them. Colorado is the largest Rocky Mountain State by population.

Colorado - 4.8 million
Utah - 2.6 million
New Mexico - 1.9 million
Wyoming - 0.5 million
Metropolitan San Diego - 2.9 million
DFW Metroplex - 6.5 million

OU fans bought up 20,000 seats of Tulsa's allotment when the game was in Tulsa. I'm pretty sure they'd do the same if the game was in Oklahoma City, or Stillwater, or Fayetteville, or Dallas.

With logical reasoning like that, you wonder when TU's law school is going to drop to 4th (bottom) tier. Oh wait - it already has. I'm beginning to wonder if employers are getting their money's worth by giving TU grads almost the same starting salary as Okie Lite grads.

Tulsa brought 15K to Memphis for a Championship Bowl game - not a first game of the season coming off a bad year. And they took about 300 to their first bowl game in the BCS era, couldn't even sell out their own ticket allotment to the closest CUSA bowl to Tulsa a couple years ago, and by Tallgrass-math, took negative eight hundred to the Mobile bowl last year. Pretending Tulsa has any sort of traveling fanbase is laughable.

Tulsa should travel well to UNT, SMU, and Arkansas this year (at least by the standards of a school with 4,200 students). I know we have official alumni events at all three games and TU is sending lots of buses to SMU and Arkansas. We are traditionally the largest non-conference draw for Oklahoma State. We travel pretty well in the region for a private school in C-USA.

I wasn't aware that Mr. Grass was a law school grad or that he went to TU at all. I think he just likes TU -- we actually depend on fans like him who are not affiliated with TU at all other than by just liking the team. Get your facts straight and quit trying to be a hater.

Maybe so, but that is still a long way away from having any legitimate right to troll about another non-BCS school for only selling about 20,000 tickets to a season-opening game at a neutral site 65 miles from its campus.

I'm not the one trolling the other non-BCS school. I'm responding to the troll from your school that has some weird obsession with TU. And it's not a "maybe so" -- we do a pretty good job when we have a good product on the field.

Treat Tallgrass like any other troll when he posts this cr@p, ignore him and he'd go away. As a CSU fan, yes it is embarrassing that we there still are some tickets left in our allotment for the Rocky Mountain Showdown, but this writer is a hack. CU's attendance is anything great and the only reason they want to move the game to Boulder is cause its the only way they can sell out all of their new suites. CSU has been down for four years and when I say down I mean pathetically under achieving, but CSU will be fine and get their attendance back up in no time with any success.

As a Tulsa fan, TU will be just fine. We're building our fanbase right now. A couple years ago we were lucky to get 10k to a home game. With such a small enrollment you can't afford to have so many losing seasons in a row. But now we're introducing the non alumni to our product and hopefully they'll stay through the good and bad times.

Good stuff, Next. People who haven't followed TU for long (and there seem to be more of those on the boards these days) don't remember the days when Catbird's tailgate party was the only option before a game. Attendance and atmosphere have come a really long way.

Bowels Owl is either ignorant of the situation or another Graham hater. The only reason OU gets fans in to Tulsa's stadium is because their fans are so aggressive that they will buy up mini pacts or season tickets to see OU in Tulsa. Tulsa could easily fill up its own stadium with all Tulsa fans if they could get tickets before the OU fans. The only way to do that is to sell out your entire stadium with season tickets & not allow any of them to scalp to OU fans. Norman is 2 1/2 hours from Tulsa & there is a waiting list to buy OU season tickets. Therefore, any time OU plays in Tulsa, the multitude of OU fans in Northeastern Oklahoma will pay a lot of money to see them in person.

Tulsa does not have fans (or a history) to compare to OU's, but we definitely have a fan base much better than owl fans are saying in this thread. There appears to be some jealousy & bitterness from the Rice fans. They need to get their own program going & not trash a fellow conference program.

The first Owl fan to post was DEFENDING Tulsa. Some of us think independently from the others, just as some of us can separate Tulsa from Graham. Wish more of the TU fans could take criticism (or support) from a Rice fan without falling back on their Graham crutch.
I don't think highly of Graham, but then I didn't think highly of him while he was here, for things he did long before he showed the rest of the Owls his true colors. I didn't drink his Kool-aid, as so many others have done. Glad you have him, but I really don't care who has him as long as it isn't us. He did us a favor by getting out when he did. MHO. But WTH does that have to do with who is or is not buying your tickets? I don't care, sell them to Razorbacks for all I care, just stop hiding behind Graham's skirts whenever someone says something mean to you. Boo hoo.

The only time Tulsa will play in front of 76,000 is a road game. You cannot say the same thing for CSU and they are coming off of one of their worst seasons in a decade. I'm not making excuses, but having a primetime game on Sunday will sell out especially in Denver.

May I have a link where CSU has played before 76,000 in Denver AGAINST AN OPPONENT NOT COLORADO U?

Until you provide that link, the author of that article may be biased but is correct to say that: CSU, with a 25,000 plus student body, has trouble selling 30,000 tickets in Denver WHERE THE VAST, VAST MAJORITY OF CSU STUDENTS AND ALUMNI LIVE.

Yes, the CU/CSU game will be a sellout but that is because CU fans are buying tickets from CSU's ticket allotment. And, yes, you are making excuses. MWC fans have an uncanny ability to toss a flame on this board and quickly an article appears in the public press with something much different take on the elite MWC.

Next04,

You are a bit of an unusual bird in that you are a TU and CSU graduate, a CUSA/MWC hybrid. My thinking is that you get to enjoy the sports of two conferences.

I want to pick up on a statement in your post. That statement is that the attendance of Colorado U is not great. Next04, that is a true statement. And it is true historically. One of the reasons CU has not joined PAC, even though CU has had a standing PAC invitation for something like 10/15 years is that the Big 12 schools like Nebraska, KSU, Kansas, OU, and even OSU....bring a ton of fans to Boulder which CU needs.

Having made that observation, it is also my observation that when CSU's "god" Sonny Lubick was doing so well.....CSU, like CU, didn't have all that great attendance one would think the Rams should have with a 25,000+ student body.

Blaming the current poor CSU attendance on the current poor football record, while a very relevant factor, does not explain why CSU has historically never drawn well when compared to its 25,000+ student body and Denver, where the vast majority of CSU students and alumni live, is only a hop and skip to Ft. Collins.

If MWC fans want to come on this board and toss a flame, that's fine with me. But if a MWC tosses a flame on this board, then they shouldn't cry tears when we respond and should have a better response than what I see above other than name calling.

TG

My money says Barack Obama plays before a bigger crowd than CSU this weekend.

I'm actually a Tulsa grad who was born and raised a CSU fan and now am a HUGE fan of both schools. And like you said, the best part is I get to enjoy the action from both conferences!

The problem that faces CSU and CU is that college football fans in CO stink. Everyone in CO is from somewhere else and while they immediately convert to Bronco fans they usually stay faithful to whatever school they went to or grew up by. Although the fan bases for both schools are growing they still lag behind where they should be.

Like you said, CU NEEDS CState, Nebraska, KU, KState, OU, Texas, etc, fans to sell out there games. And CSU has similar problems which hopefully Fairchild will fix.

It is fun to root for more than one team....if one team is down; maybe the other is on a roll. I root for TU, OSU, and, althougth it is hard at times, OU.

My theory is that where high school football is strong.....college football in that state is strong. On the other hand, there was an attitude among many students, especially the students from Californian, when I was at Washington State that being for football was being sort of a red neck...and that it was "cool" not to go to your college's football home game. But, really, it seems it is the western colleges that lack the real strong support that you see just about everywhere else.

Being a native Tulsan I do not want to dog TU, but I would suggest that a lot of Tallgrass poop about Tulsa be taken with a grain of SALT.

That is as nice as I know how to put it.

A lot of our fans totally agree.