Spot on.
And we have had factors erode our fan base:
Football is also a dying sport in America. Parents like @MRCat95 and I realize that our children are much smarter than us. And, thus, they do not need to play football (but, if they do, rest assured that they will be properly coached!).
I love stealing the other team’s signals when I coach. It is one of the most fun things to do on the opposite sideline.
who knows with the new stadium, the product is not great and our game day experience is poor. Our band is small and lame, the PA announcer is monotone, and there is zero effort put in pumping up the crowd. I sound like a downer, but I will have tickets in the new stadium, but NU has reverted to a glorified high school experience.
You are an exception, not the rule.
22,000 seems like a really high number. Although some grad students may appreciate Big Ten football, you can easily exclude med school, law school, whoever else is at the downtown campus, the 21 online programs, and the part time MBA students.
Yes. And that atmosphere was amazing. Still get chills watching the intro with Brent and Herbie on YouTube. Chicago will join us but we have to have a B+/A- season at worst.
They also have minimum qualifiers so they can get any player on the board. We can’t. And we should hold the line on standards otherwise what’s the point of “college sports”?
NU admissions needs to get over itself then. Stanford, Duke and ND can do this. Can program insiders opine on whether student athletes would simply not be able to pass NU classes if we lowered the standards?
Keep in mind an organization is reflected by it's leadership. JP tried to market to Chicago, but had mixed results. Gragg did not want to talk to people so he was clueless in any form of Marketing. NU did have have Mike P (focusing on the position not the man) who was in charge of branding, marketing etc. Take a look at NUSports.com, we have four "marketing" staff and they look all but 22 years old. I am surprised the new AD has not made any staff changes as we went from a top talent pool to this....
The excuse is always the numbers. The numbers I quote are from NU. NU is not small like Wake or Rice. Every year, undergrad graduates about 2k. NU grads should be buying year in year out at a minimum of 20k season tickets. They just aren’t. They have the money. Most everyone who sit near me in section 107 did not attend the school. My one buddy who attends with us and fully supports the program went to a small undergraduate school and then grad school at NU.
Chicagos Big Ten team also had no notable impact.
I would ask @kelloggcat what their majors are. There have always been certain tracks in Organizational Studies, SESP, Communications that are not as rigorous which seem to be common amongst FB players.
I’m complaining specifically that this game was chosen for homecoming
In the past, NU has bragged about its diversity. From the outside, most of this appears to be geographical diversity, whether domestic or international. I suspect your kids are very talented and would do well even if me and CMT were sitting in class with them. It just feels like a very homogeneous student body. I wonder if adding students with different life experiences actually would benefit the current “regular” admission students?
I was a "B+" HS student with high board scores that got in NU off the wait list.
How many satellite campuses does NU have though? Segal, Chicago and the one in the Middle East? U of M has one in Dearborn, MI and one in Flint, MI. That helps to really drive up the fan base both in terms of the student body, and just folks who live in those areas. U of M basically has the entire state behind it, along with a very strong, loyal alumni all over the US. My brother, a U of M Dearborn grad lives in Texas as did my sister til a couple years ago (another U of M Dearborn alum). My brother would put his little block M flag out for football season, while there were one or two others in his neighborhood. Same went for my sister. NU is an elite institution; thus, it will be harder to get a significant fan base going for such a small school. The double whammy is an administration that comes off anti football somewhat. The whole Fitz locker room drama was a disaster and handled very poorly. It seemed like the administration was looking for any excuse to get rid of Fitz. We needed new blood, but not having Fitz go out that way. Very poor look for the university as well.
NU’s point of differentiation on academic quality has narrowed in recent years along with that of other perportedly “elite” schools. As baby boomer professors have failed to retire across the nation, there is an oversupply of strong teaching at colleges everywhere that did not use to exist. It is also the case that the more highly ranked school as also tend to have cultivated cultures oppositional to free inquiry. That means that over time their graduates will be less sought after by employers. So the material difference between NU and a large state school is slim if there is one. And now in the era of NIL, NU is at a massive disadvantage in player compensation and gameday experience.
It’s diversity in a different way. Would not call it homogeneous at all, maybe more polarized. You’ve got the top 1-2% students (academically and family income-wise) who are national level achievers and whose parents can pay full price. Then NU is striving for a lot of first gen or underresourced students, many of whom can get full tuition or full ride. One of the tour guides at my son’s NU visit was a young woman from Appalachia who said she rarely studied in high school. One first gen student I met with virtually as part of an alumni program was from the south and said he wasn’t thinking much about colleges outside his immediate area and NU asked him if he wanted to apply. I don’t think there as many suburban Midwest high achievers with family income $150K-250K who are likely to get in, or be able to afford it. If my son were able to get in (he didn’t apply), I wasn’t too keen on paying $92K cash per year, at least for the majors he was considering.
