I'm not getting on Iowa fans for not buying tickets. What about the thousands of people with tickets that are not showing up?
A number of us have mentioned this...and you keep bringing up $25 tickets to Northern Colorado.
The tickets have been bought...Hawk fans are just deciding to skip out on their team.
And as I've said before - that's not OK with me. Fine, let's go with the 9,500 tickets sold. Let's say 7,000 show up (which is about what do show up). That's half the arena. 7,000 fans in the seats for Northern Colorado, Louisiana Monroe, Eastern Illinois, and so on is understandable. I think around 10,000 (at most) were in the stands for Wake Forest. Again, not acceptable.
But, I'm holding out hope that for BT season, we'll see fans in the stands. I've tried to do my part in going to games - but as an out of work college student, there's only so many trips to IC you can make.
I don't think it's an issue of loyalty, it's an issue of fans being disappointed in how things have gone recently, and it's up to Lick to prove to them that there are reasons to attend games, not the other way around. ISU fans showed up for football games, bought a lot of tickets, and were generally disappointed in the season. Towards the end of the year, you saw more empty seats, and more standing room available at JTS. I'm just hoping (and yes, this is me being biased and "spinning"), that when better teams start coming to CHA, we'll see more people there supporting the team - and when the wins start coming, the fans will start showing up.
But there is no denying, right now, the Iowa basketball fan base hasn't had as much hope and things to cheer about as even the ISU football program has. ISU has had more success on the grid iron than Iowa has had on the hard wood - and fans see that. Right now, it's up to the Iowa coaches to prove to get the fans in the stands. They're there, they just really have no reason to go there. And "proving to a coach" isn't a big enough reason to spend a late week night watching a team lose. You need wins, you need cheap tickets (can't only rely on season ticket holders to show up), and you need hope.