Gordon Monson Is Kind Of An Idiot

In this morning's Trib, Gordon Monson is singing the praises of Utah football.  It IS better than BYU football these days.  That part he got right.  But, it seems to this reader, that he's so afraid of alienating the fans of tsds that he can't really commit to what he's saying.  He keeps giving compliments to the Cougars.

Hint to Monson.  The fans of tsds that would DROP their subscription to your paper because you offended them already subscribe to, "The Deseret Denouncer" and don't care what you write.

To quote him, "The Utes, who prove what they can do on the field, have supplanted the Cougars, who STILL DRAW MORE FANS TO GAMES, as the states pre-eminent college football presence."  Italics/emphasis mine.

Well, DUH!  They have what, 17K more seats in their stadium?  Ours holds about 46K.  If I remember correctly, theirs holds about 63K?  We COULD draw more now.  But we have no place to put them.  We built our stadium with Olympic money.  You think the Legislature would have approved of any plan that gave Utah a BIGGER stadium than tsds?  If you do, you're smoking crack.

There has been talk of expanding our stadium to 50 or 60K.  I'm not sure I'm for it.  The trend in sports now is smaller stadiums with more expensive seats, because every game is televised.  So if you really, really WANT to be there?  You gotta pay a premium for it.  I don't like that, but it's how they make money.  Ask anyone who had Yankee's season tickets until last year.

Of course they draw more fans with a bigger stadium.  And a loyal fan base.  Of drones that root for them even when they didn't actually GO to school there.

Which is the ONLY similarity they have to Notre Dame.

Think about it.  You can't swing a dead cat in this country without hitting a Dallas Cowboys/Pittsburgh Steelers/Green Bay Packers fan and how many of them actually have a tie to any of those teams?  I'd bet less than 10% of their fans, nation wide, have any tie to those cities.  But those teams win.  And everyone wants to root for a winner.

Cougars are the same way.  If you're a Mormon, you're a Cougar fan.  Unless you went to college at Utah.  The Cougars were, "The shit" in the 80's.  Now?  Not so much.

So yeah, they DRAW more fans.  Do they HAVE more fans?  At this point, they might, still.  But it won't last.  They will be more, and more irrelevant to college football as things shake out with super conferences.  The ACC is growing, the Big East is dying, and the Big XII is dead.  And tsds is left to float on it's own.

A few years from now, you will be hard pressed to sell 63K seats in Provo.  And to GET 1 seat in Rice Eccles.