It has nothing to do with how we market the soccer team vs football. Soccer won a national championship. That's different. What you're seeing is the addition of fruntrunner bandwagon fans and only a few hundred. Football isn't doing that. An Access Bowl berth is not remotely on the same level as winning the national title. And you're talking about adding 1000 seats lol as opposed to selling out a 38k seat stadium or the regular.
Marshall football was at its absolute pinnacle from 1992-1999 and we did well to get to 30k. It is what it is. There is no amount of marketing or ticket slashing that is going to remedy that.
You know what holds Marshall back from filling the stadium week in and week out? The enrollment. Marshall is the 405th largest university. In 2020 we had an enrollment of 13,204. We're not exactly churning out a ton of Marshall fans and sadly a good bit of that 13,204 are WVU fans that happen to go to Marshall. It sucks, but it's true. A school like UCF on the other hand ranks 10th with 68,475 and up and comer Liberty is 6th with 79,152. Any discussions on football stadium expansion for us was and is still dumb.
Unless the population of WV greatly increases, Huntington stops being crap hole, and the overall perception of Marshall changes in the state (I don't ever see that happening) we are what we are and unfortunately as those with ties to the crash pass away our core fan base is going to dwindle even more.
Knock down the the erector set endzone, put in a party concourse with premium suites above, and redo the seating in the rest of the stadium and call it a day. A 30k seat stadium is going to look and sound a lot fuller than it is than the 38k seat stadium we have now.
Well, what did the soccer stadium seat before? 2,000 people? Adding 1,000 seats is literally a 50% increase, no matter how you want to spin it, that's a lot.
Ask any college program if they've increased their seating capacity by 50%, they'd be shocked something like that exists.
The student body part is, once more, lame and a poor excuse. You use ucf's student body as an example, but also forget to mention when they first made the CUSA title game, they had to hand out free tickets to passerbys...and they are in Orlando, the largest city in FL I believe...and they can't routinely sell out.
Wow, it took ucf several years to entice just 40,000 people in a city and enrollment far beyond it, to attend a game on Saturdays? Is that really something to brag about?
Take a place like Nebraska who has more livestock than humans living in the state, and they fill up consecutively for decades.
MU is in a tri-state Metro area that has more than enough people to fill the Joan. The student body could show up and you'd still need to have 26,000 complaining fools to fill in the rest. Furthermore, knowing MU, if the student body expanded, ticket holders would complain about the drinking, the sinning, and the smell of the Devil's lettuce.
The key to this is retaining the young, professional graduates and keeping them nearby and engaged in MU in some way.
A major reason for all the state-wide pessimism on MU and Huntington, is because the optimism moves away...as WV as a whole, sucks.
Of course, that is very far beyond MU's reach and is a state-wide problem.
But, as I said, people like Brad Smith aren't stopping at MU to make big things happen.
