The UConn football program is not the Auburn football program. That may seem obvious, but apparently it needed to be said.
Auburn is a big-time football school. And at most big-time football schools, football is a way of life. It’s so embedded in the culture that the game days are a borderline religious experience. I have a friend who grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, and he used to tell me how school breaks were scheduled around the annual Texas-Oklahoma game. Football is that big of a deal in some places.
Connecticut is not one of those places, and while anybody should be able to realize that, UConn athletic director David Benedict doesn’t seem to. Or, at minimum, he does not understand the perspective of UConn sports fans. Here’s what he said at AAC football media day about the university’s declining attendance at home football games, according to the Journal Inquirer’s Neill Ostrout:
“They’re two different issues. Obviously, typically when you win, the people come. I don’t think that would be any different in Connecticut than in most places,” Benedict said this week during the American’s Media Day in Rhode Island.
“But it’s really about creating an accountability with our fan base to have them take some ownership, just like coach (Edsall) is trying to get his team to take some ownership and be accountable for what they’re doing.”
According to Benedict, the fan base needs to take some ownership for not continuing to support the team through nearly a decade of unwatchable football. I’d argue this is absurd to say of any struggling sports team — what, exactly, do fans owe a team if they are getting nothing in return? Tyler summed it up best for us last night:
Owner sits in his empty restaurant: “Diners really need to take accountability for the inedible food I’m offering them.” https://t.co/c5R2pIwzN7
— A Dime Back (@ADimeBack) July 27, 2018
But there are places where tens of thousands of fans will continue to support the team anyway — places where football is on par with eating and breathing on the fans’ priority lists. Are there fans in Connecticut who are like that? Sure. But they are few and far between. And they’re already going to the games. They’re not the ones who stopped showing up when the team got bad.
That’s everyone else, and shaming them isn’t going to get them to suddenly show up. That’s especially true in Connecticut, with a fanbase that is still broken by both bad football and an athletic department that has spent the better part of two decades making little-to-no effort to connect with them.
Benedict knows this because, to his credit, he has gone to great lengths since taking over as athletic director to try and repair the relationship between the university and the fans. Initiatives like the UConn Coaches Road Show have been met with warranted praise. I was there when Dan Hurley, Randy Edsall, Geno Auriemma, Jim Penders, and more visited New York and it was an encouraging, enlightening, and all-around-fun experience. Benedict spoke there about how the fans spend so much time coming to see the coaches in Storrs that it’s only right that the coaches return the favor by going to them. It was exactly what was needed.
But I’m not sure Benedict entirely understands the situation he inherited. So, here’s my perspective, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
I grew up in Connecticut and my family had men’s basketball season tickets for over 30 years. Some of my earliest memories are of watching basketball games with my dad. My dad, a UConn grad, class of 19[redacted], bought his tickets every year for games at the Civic Center and Gampel, and donated to the university every year. And every year our seats in the 200 level in both arenas were moved further and further back while becoming more and more expensive. By 2006, the university stopped filling our request for Big East Tournament tickets, despite our years of loyalty, leaving us at the mercy of StubHub (this was at a time when they never went on sale to the general public). We were forgotten and eventually, thanks partly to the state of the 2009-ish economy, my dad stopped buying tickets. He couldn’t afford it and we felt like we weren’t wanted.
Would we have put up with the department’s apathy if the economic circumstances were better? Yeah, probably. But we’re the die-hards. I imagine for every one of us, there was also a family that could have done without this. That didn’t need UConn basketball the way that we do. And those are the types of fans that UConn needs to start bringing football games again.
I’m not sure those fans, who have also endured 10x more bad football than we’ve seen bad men’s basketball (with far less reward, too), want to hear the UConn AD telling them to take some accountability for the bad optics of an empty Rent.
You need them. They do not need you. This isn’t Auburn, where a weekly football IV drip is the only thing that gets you through the fall. This is Connecticut, where we will wait until two days before the game to see you panic and slash ticket prices — a slap in the face to season ticket holders — and then think about maybe going to the game.
Benedict has a tough job, and in a lot of ways he cannot win, no matter what he says. For as long as UConn has an FBS football program, it will be part of the AD’s job to try and sell it, and there is no indication that this decade of futility is coming to an end. But shaming fans that your predecessors have alienated is not the way to go. Trust me, I’ve seen it.
