RSS
Home
San Diego State football on life support
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
An article Sunday in a daily San Diego newspaper speaks to what many people have known for a long time - football is on life support at San Diego State University.
The article states that the time has come for the school's hierarchy to make the decision to punt football from the athletic program. And just why should that be done?
The most obvious reason has been the product on the field in recent years. San Diego State limped through this season with only two victories - wins over Idaho and UNLV. The Aztecs were blown out in a number of their losses, and the end result was the removal as Chuck Long as head coach and the hiring of former Ball State head coach Brady Hoke as the new man on campus.
Even if Hoke, however, were to turn the Aztecs around in the near future, would anyone notice it?
Attendance at Qualcomm Stadium has been horrible to say the least in recent years. While much of that has to do with the product on the field, the marketing of SDSU football has been losing yardage for years.
While finances will ultimately decide this issue, here's a few tips from one local college football fan, me:
* Put a winning product on the field. We should all give Hoke a chance because this problem will not be solved overnight;
* Find a donor/s along with the land, and build a 40,000 seat stadium for football only instead of playing in the Q, where a big crowd for the Aztecs is 20,000 people, leaving more than 40,000 seats empty for each home game. While this will take some time to build, the planning and work for it should have started yesterday;
* Move the games to Saturday afternoon instead of the evening games when many people are out and about on the town. The majority of schools play on the gridiron Saturday afternoons and it is worth giving it a shot;
* Even if you have to go on the road for two out of three or three out of the four games in a series, find some big time opponents to come play at SDSU each year. San Diego is hardly an outback destination for teams to travel to, and bringing in an Ohio State, Penn State, Texas, Oklahoma, etc. would give season ticket holders something to look forward to, along with bringing in some new fans. Sorry, but Cal Poly just doesn't quite cut it. By the way, the 2009 home season offers up such exciting home non-conference games as Southern Utah and New Mexico State. To put it more bluntly - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz;
* Market the heck out of this team with giveaways, etc. The lack of marketing of this program over the years has been lackluster to say the least.
There are many more ways to make football work here, but we could probably devote another entire column to it.
Bottom line is college football at SDSU is about to flunk big time unless school officials get their heads out of the sand and move quickly. Even with all the sand in San Diego, there has to be a few brains on campus. Up until now, we haven't seen them.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
