What Happened

[cajundiehard]

Hopefully you are right. I also hope most people wouldn't fall in line like sheep so easily, which may be the case because much has been learned and exposed since.

[CajunJeaux]

….I ask this as a real Cajun fan that doesn’t know the answer, but is/was a part of it……How some years back do we have a white out game with ULM and have a huge crowd? how do we have the sea of red at the NO Bowl? How can we now have an embarrassing crowd at home games following 2 -3 years of great teams? What the hell happened? Is it money/ school spirit/ ……..there has to be a huge search for the factors that caused this change….why and how did this come about….as I mentioned, I gave more money, went to the same t-gating, sat in the same seat…….so Tom, Dick, and Harry along with your family….What is wrong?

My take: college sports is officially no longer amateur.

Entitled coaches. Entitled players. Better have a top tier product on the field / court to back up the $$ required from all the people within the athletic complex if you want people to truly care.

[R1Letterman]

Maybe folks had to spend more time in the library and studying and missed sports in order to gain tier R1?

[R1Letterman]

My take: college sports is officially no longer amateur.

Entitled coaches. Entitled players. Better have a top tier product on the field / court to back up the $$ required from all the people within the athletic complex if you want people to truly care.

13-1 was pretty top tier, if espn had allowed it to be

[fanof71]

13-1 was pretty top tier, if espn had allowed it to be

Yep you dufus, 13-1 happened, ESPN had nothing to do with it, and is a top tier accomplishment, regardless of what you or ESPN think...take your meds and off to bed...

[Geaux]

Would love to see increased marketing efforts outside of Lafayette Parish.

[RaginScotsman]

I'll give you an example. I did not request tickets to the bowl game as I had prior engagements that day. Did I get a call to see if I wanted tickets or if I wanted to donate tickets? Nope?

If someone doesn't renew season tickets or rcaf, no one calls them to follow up.

I did get a call once when I didn’t renew my tickets. My answer was I was waiting a couple weeks and eventually renewed.

To Boomer’s question, you’re doing everything you need to be doing. I ask myself the same thing. You want some money? Here’s some. Want me to buy tickets? To donate? To wear the gear and ask friends to come? Okay, I do all that. That’s all we need to do.

At some point it’s out of our hands. People get paid good money to do the job of raising money, getting butts in the seats, managing all things athletics. Do your job. If you need some free advice, Ragin Pagin is a damn good resource. Bring your sifter, though

[CajunJeaux]

13-1 was pretty top tier, if espn had allowed it to be

And our 1 P5 game wasn’t competitive.

Acadiana & rest of LA aren’t impressed with beating Nichols by 3 points.

Sorry.

[60swerethebest]

I’m not sure what is happening. A poster commented on the privileged class now running amateur sports.
That condition in pro sports has caused me to basically ignore pro sports. I don’t even accept free tickets to Saints, Stros, or Pelicans. Zero interest. Wonder if some are feeling that here about amateur sports. I don’t follow sports outside of UL and by extension, the Belt.
Don’t know. It’s sad locally because we’ve had some fun runs in a number of sports. Wish I had an answer that made sense.

[RaginScotsman]

I still think it comes down to advertising and engagement.

You can sell anything in this town with buzz. The sad thing is we thought we had buzz with a good product due to 3 years of incredible football but it was almost like everyone was neutral until the championship game which had a good crowd. It’s because we didn’t sell the good product.

Hang stuff around town. Get the brand in your face to the point you can’t unsee it. I don’t want to see purple as much as I see red in this city. Put it everywhere. Schedules. Signs. Banners (don’t talk about a banner.)

Advertising college football seems easy. Look at what other schools do. You have a 300 plus school sample size counting FCS. What works? What doesn’t? You don’t even have to be innovative. Just be plugged in to your community.

It’s a sin what the administration did and didn’t do with the recent success. But, they can recover.

Hang a banner for the first home game. Advertise the hell out of it. That’s a start.

[cajun_lannister]

I still think it comes down to advertising and engagement.

You can sell anything in this town with buzz. The sad thing is we thought we had buzz with a good product due to 3 years of incredible football but it was almost like everyone was neutral until the championship game which had a good crowd. It’s because we didn’t sell the good product.

Hang stuff around town. Get the brand in your face to the point you can’t unsee it. I don’t want to see purple as much as I see red in this city. Put it everywhere. Schedules. Signs. Banners (don’t talk about a banner.)

Advertising college football seems easy. Look at what other schools do. You have a 300 plus school sample size counting FCS. What works? What doesn’t? You don’t even have to be innovative. Just be plugged in to your community.

It’s a sin what the administration did and didn’t do with the recent success. But, they can recover.

Hang a banner for the first home game. Advertise the hell out of it. That’s a start.

It's too late for that cfb ages in dogs years .2021 might as well be 2015 in most cfb fans minds.

They did nothing all offseason thinking hiring local and living off the back of 13 wins would be enough. Then all wondered why only 7k people showed up to the last weekend game.

[Cajun Soldier]

JMO Hud came in with the rah rah rah and having experiance from an SEC program brought us to our first modern day bowl game and got a huge emotional win, Napier was hired from a big-time program and hired a heck of a staff he was also supported by Slick Saban, CMD brings none of this, local product can't even be found in public. No head coaching experience or ties to a big-name program. How do you get excited when the coach isn't excited about his program in public.

[ZoomZoom]

JMO Hud came in with the rah rah rah and having experiance from an SEC program brought us to our first modern day bowl game and got a huge emotional win, Napier was hired from a big-time program and hired a heck of a staff he was also supported by Slick Saban, CMD brings none of this, local product can't even be found in public. No head coaching experience or ties to a big-name program. How do you get excited when the coach isn't excited about his program in public.

Marketing. A coach can be the face of a program w/o the need to “press the flesh” constantly. But we cannot even market dirt.

[RaginScotsman]

It's too late for that cfb ages in dogs years .2021 might as well be 2015 in most cfb fans minds.

They did nothing all offseason thinking hiring local and living off the back of 13 wins would be enough. Then all wondered why only 7k people showed up to the last weekend game.

Totally right.

My wife and I have been laughing at this for the past few years and it kind of applies to UL football.

You’ve got a restaurant that gets built up and delivers in Lafayette for a couple years, but somehow folds.

Then you’ve got garbage restaurants that get built up all the time and thrive. It’s because they are in your face all the time, they make it a place to be and that makes people continue to show up.

It’s easy to fool people with a bad product. Why is it so hard with a good product?

[JamesTheJeweler]

It’s all pretty simple. The CERN Large Hadron Collider was recently activated setting Earth and all of mankind through a portal into a parallel universe. We are currently living in some type of post Covid, Twilight Zone, simulation that has our fan base stuck in 2002. Hopefully they reengage CERN setting us all back into our normal universe.

The NPC'S have taken over