Congrats everyone. Much like how we wait for the groundhog to emerge in February and see his shadow, the annual tradition of waiting for Bud Poliquin's preseason column trying to shame you into buying Syracuse Football season tickets is HERE! It's not as razzle-dazzle-y as 2008's version, but it does provide the same Yogi Berra wisdom as last year's version.
Brilliant, he’s never been. But Yogi Berra has been blessed with his share of uncomplicated wisdom, and he unveiled some of it a long time ago when he was asked about attendance. About waning attendance.
"If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark," Yogi opined, "nobody’s gonna stop ’em."
Berra’s game, of course, was baseball. His sage words, though, would spill into other sports, tumble across the decades and, as luck would have it, land in our town where a whole lot of folks are making the man look like Voltaire.
One can only imagine what Yogi Berra — who once declared that nobody dined at a certain restaurant because the joint was always too crowded — might say about the Carrier Dome on the occasion of a Syracuse University football game.
No, wait. He’d likely gaze upon all those vacant pews, ponder all those affordable tickets gone un-purchased and consider all those opportunities lost to support the Orange and tell us with a shrug that if folks didn’t want to come out and root, root, root for the home team nobody was going to stop them.
And the old boy would be right.
There is one shocking revelation in Bud's column this time around. Doug Marrone is pulling back the curtain and revealing that there is, GASP, trickery in those announced attendance numbers.
Now, it’s true that SU’s announced average crowd of 40,064 in 2010 had been exceeded only once in the previous six campaigns, which could be interpreted as a rustling of community interest. But it’s also true that Marrone, who guided his alma mater to an 8-5 record last year after eight consecutive non-winning seasons, believes those numbers were, shall we say, enhanced.
If you work in SU Athletics or live in the same neighborhood as DOC Gross, I want you to find his copy of the Post-Standard and BURN IT. God help us if Gross finds out Marrone isn't towing the party line. All Dome attendance numbers are true. Every game is a sellout. Dome Dogs are people. DOME DOGS ARE PEOPLE!!!
Honestly, I don't know why Bud bothers with these things. You'd think after writing this column every year for the last 512 seasons, he'd just give up by now and submit to the almighty truth...if you win football games for a prolonged period of time, they will come. Simple as that.
Besides, I say we worry about the die-hard Syracuse fans who ARE there every game instead of trying, at this point, to convince anyone else to show up. They'll figure it out eventually, especially once we're 3-1 (or 4-0) heading into October.