7,500? 15K? Really?

So, we want the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to do good in football. We want it to be just as much a gridiron school as it is a hardwoods one. To be in the BCS just like it goes to the Final Four’s. Yada, Yada, Yada. Well then let’s start thinking about filling up the stands in Kenan for the spring game like we fill up Dean Dome for Late Night with Roy. Yes, as RL Bynum pointed out to me, it’s not a game, it’s almost not a scrimmage, and it lasts less than an hour. Two great points, but if Late Night with Roy lasted 10 minutes I am pretty sure that the venue would be filled anyways, and that is why we need to ask ourselves this: why do we put pressure on the football team when we don’t put pressure on the fan base?

I just posted about the Heels having many players headed to the next level and that ESPN has plenty of them projected to go in the first rounds of the draft and all that could manage to head to Chapel Hill for the spring game is 15,000 as RL Bynum said, or, even worst, 7,500 from what Barry Little twitted? (Edit: UNC_Athletics (the official tweet handle for Carolina sports) just tweeted that the attendance was, 15,500) C’mon, really? We want, or should I say, we expect that this team go towards the BCS bowl games but we can muster up a Div IAA type of attendance? Not fair, not by far, not by any standard. The weather was not perfect, but it was not raining and it was not freezing, so that can not be an excuse for anyone, at least in my mind it can’t be.

What no one is realizing, or maybe they are and don’t care, is that besides the players on the field there are many others attending this game. They are called recruits. You know, those guys that we all want to come to Chapel Hill and get mad if they do not, and then wonder why they went elsewhere. Of course I am not saying that the attendance of a over glorified practice is going to be the main reason a top tier HS player is going to think about when choosing a team. On the other hand if he is choosing between two teams it could be something that he may factor in. I might be naive but wouldn’t a coach that is competing for a player against UNC say to the player “look at the following we have here compared to them”. Anyway you slice it, for the players on the field or the ones that come to the game and check out what the UNC experience is, you can not say that seeing a pretty empty stadium is a good thing.

The counterpoint to this post would be that I just said that there are many Tar Heels ready to go to the next level, leading people to say that even without a great turn out for a spring game the players are coming in. To that I have two things to say: first, these are the first class coming out from the Davis era, which knew that the support wasn’t as big as the basketball team. Secondly, having a good attendance at the spring game is always going to be a plus, whether you have all the top players in the country or do not have one!

And please, let’s not use the excuse of I would come to the venue if it was a real game/scrimmage. In my humble opinion the way it should be: first show up, get the place packed or close to it, then begin to ask for some changes. I believe that in order for UNC to become as much of a football school as it is a basketball one it needs to start with the fan base, without it, it’s never going to get there. It’s just not going to happen! In the end it’s our team, we have to make sure that we give it as much support as we do when basketball is on. I know that as a blogger I am guilty of not giving as many posts to the gridiron as I do with the hardwoods, so I too need to be included in the guilty party, and with this post I am making a commitment to work on that. Join me in this by giving the football team that extra look, and who knows, maybe in a couple of years I will be doing this post from the game itself saying how many people there are at the stadium!

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