Foote wrote an article in October of this past year about poor attendance at our football games, and he closes the article with this quote from Maggard: "That’s the nature of our beast. When you win, the naysayers are quiet and when you lose, they clink. But if I made my decisions based on that small percentage of people who think they’re helping the program when they do that when in reality they’re hurting the program, I wouldn’t be in this chair very long."
It’s important to note, as evidenced by this quote and by SM’s post, this is not an opinion of just Vic of or a group of outliers on RP. This is the prevailing mindset amongst our leaders and decision makers at the university and athletic offices. This is further evidenced by the fact that RR has essentially been blacklisted until they coalesce and rein in what they speak about.
IMO one of the things we are seeing here is a group who has traditionally been able to tightly control the messaging that is put out to the public grappling with a changing society where that is not so easily done. In previous generations, these conversations happened exclusively in private at the water cooler, on the back porch, at the tailgate, etc. Traditional media didn’t speak about these things, and, if they did, it would resemble the article I mentioned above. Predominantly filtered through administrators and university officials. Then some of the discussions moved to message boards. While a thorn in the side of the objective of controlling the narrative, message boards for a G5 athletic program are still a fairly niche section of the internet. Then people start communicating with each other in spaces on social media where huge sections of the population are. Now you have podcasts almost replacing radio programs or at least the way most people consume those shows. Guys like the hosts of RR are on Twitter and Facebook. You can find their show on YouTube and all the major podcast apps. People are, in a sense, cutting out the middle man of traditional sources and just speaking directly with each other.
I see the following miscalculations in the university’s approach:
1. They seem to be determined to push a square peg through a round hole. This is not 1987’s society. It’s not even 2002’s. We are in the year 2024, and our approach needs to reflect we understand that.
2. It is a lie or misremembrance to say the naysayers were quiet during the winning years. Plenty of people were on the record telling them the gameday experience was unacceptable even during the Napier years.
3. They seem to take the “negative” vocal fans as a disruptive minority. When your stadiums are 1/10 to 1/3 full on nearly every given day, your community, at large, is not reacting with your product offering in a positive way. They may not be vocalizing it, but they are communicating to you that your product is not worth their time and money.