(11-20-2017 11:27 AM)Racinejake Wrote: (11-20-2017 09:54 AM)eroc Wrote: This season has been so long that i literally had to look up whether we played Marshall earlier. i reckon their season did not go as planned either:
Quote:The outcry included some fans saying they were going to boycott the Herd's regular season finale against Southern Miss, a 2:30 p.m. Saturday game in Joan C. Edwards Stadium.
As he's done on several occasions throughout his Marshall career, Yurachek stepped into the face of adversity and met it head on.
"When y'all think about 'boycotting' the game Saturday, think about. ... us seniors, who gave our blood, sweat and tears to this football program for the last 4 years, rarely see our families, and spend countless hours working for this program and this community. Think about that," said Yurachek through his Twitter account - @Yurachek_MU85 - at 11:35 a.m. Sunday.
http://www.herald-dispatch.com/sports/ma...9e556.html
i realize this season has been a nightmare for all involved but hopefully the Bearcat Nation will turn out for the Seniors this Saturday. After all, they had to endure a couple of seasons of Tommy before suffering through this calamity. All kidding aside, this group of seniors will have graduated from Cincy with little to nothing to celebrate from a football standpoint. Their greatest claim may be the fact that they kept the victory bell streak alive. Hopefully a nice Senior Day sendoff, including a W, will give them something of a warmer memory to cap off their careers.
Crazy. Marshall is 7-4 with a chance to get to 8 wins this Saturday. That's coming off a 3-9 season last year.
A few have wondered about whether we "blew" the money on the Pressbox/Suite building at Nippert. I think you can look at Marshall to see a truly ill-advised (and poorly executed) expansion and what the issues might be following such a thing.
Marshall expanded their stadium by enclosing the "South" endzone, boosting capacity from 28k to 38k, back in 2000. The expansion stands, IMO, are too flat and don't fit the curve of the rest of the stadium (due to space concerns). They did the expansion as Marshall was winning the MAC and hoping to move up to CUSA (which they did in 2004 after we had moved to the BE...) and under the guise that "if you add more seats, people will fill them." What it really did was just add more seats, which made the 28k crowd feel smaller. Add to that the simple fact that the attendance hasn't "gone up," but rather has decreased across the board and you suddenly have a half-to-a-third filled stadium.
Our renovations were (a) not primarily about increasing capacity, but increasing premium seating, and (b) mostly interior (enclosed) seating, and © FIT and enhanced the stadium footprint. All of which is to say that it did not make Nippert more cavernous but actually helped enclose the stadium...whether the boxes are occupied or not.
Marshall probably should take those stands out at some point, but it will suck for them to do it. It'll be an admission of defeat and the stadium will never look like it once did. For Nippert, if (God forbid) we ever have to reduce capacity, it won't be the boxes that go, but probably the older Reed-Shank Pavilion...which would still leave Nippert intact.
My over-riding point is that UC did a good thing with their expansion on so many levels. The main beef of the Marshall fans is that attendance is flagging because of lackluster performance and therefore fans need to force a change. Part of that "flagging attendance" is real, but another part is simply that you have a crowd that feels smaller because of more empty space in the stands. Joan C. Edwards Stadium makes a crowd feel smaller, where Nippert makes a crowd feel bigger.