Comments on: Defending the Indefensible

By: bweynand

bweynand — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:05:38 +0000

I'm with Chris on this one. One doesn't have to compare Kentucky for the trend to still hold, there were still sizeable drops for the first and third games, those percentages are quite frankly embarrassing.

If you want to talk about confounding variables.. the Penn game of 2008 happened at the same time that our football team played Maryland to clinch a division title, and the UNC-Asheville game was the Sunday of Thanksgiving break. I am a diehard of diehards, and I skipped both for those reasons. I don't buy for a second that attendance is down because we aren't as good; I've been here four years and never seen anything like the first three games of this year.

I am it disbelief that CAA is blaming students for not taking advantage for available tickets. Essentially, they are asking students to overcome and fix the given failures of their ticket system.

I think its obvious that for these games there does not need to be as many student tickets available. Lack of attendance isn't all on the CAA. But their policies make it a huge inconvenience for students who want to go to find tickets because of the inane inefficiency of distributing a commodity for free of effort. That does lower attendance some and it does create an unnecessary hassle.

John Russell is a great guy, he gets off the hook only because Clint Gwaltney boxed him into a tight spot. Gwaltney should be fired for being an idiot and a failure.

By: cwjones

cwjones — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:50:45 +0000

Exactly! I've only been to one game this year, and that was because Stephen scrounged up something like 6 tickets for my bible study and we still had to go lowest common phase. I hate making a 24 hour rush of emails, facebooking and phone calls to figure out who else has tickets, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

By: pyelena

pyelena — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:35:04 +0000

um yeah i would go if i had friends to go with in the same phase.

By: Duke Cheston

Duke Cheston — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:14:59 +0000

It may be slightly more difficult to get a ticket, but in Mr. Russell's defense, there are several confounding variables you're not taking into account. First, we're probably not going to win a championship this year. As demonstrated by the Syracuse game, we're just not as good and thus less fun to watch.

Further, all games are not created equal. Number-1-ranked UNC vs. Kentucky is not equal to number-4-ranked UNC vs. N.C. Central.

Additionally, many of last year's players had been around for a while and the fans had made a deeper connection with them. Hansbrough had been a star for four years; Wayne, Ty, and Danny had all been stars for three years. The emotional connection takes time to build., and it's just not there yet, so people feel less connected to the current team.

For all these reasons and others, give J-Russ a break. It'll probably pick up soon anyway. If it doesn't, maybe we should reconsider, but as of now, all this fuss is much ado about not very much.