FIU Attendance...

A few notes about FIU...

1) A large part of the crappy attendance is the fact that students at Florida International University are, in fact, international, and have no ingrained love for American football. That is, it's not that they don't watch FIU because they grew up in a Miami Hurricane family. It's that their families don't watch American football at all. I mean, there are exceptions, obviously. For heaven's sake, not every family in Alabama watches the Tide, Tigers, or [insert other SEC team]. Some would much rather watch Real Madrid on cable than watch anything involving an oblong spheroid. But just as MOST folks in Alabama grew up with football on the TV on Saturdays, MOST FIU students don't share that tradition.

2) For the past several years, FIU has been the absolute doormat of FBS college football. Terrible doesn't begin to describe their ineptitude. It's hard to pull in fans with that kind of history. Mike Macintyre has a big rebuilding job in front of him. He's actually made some strides in recruiting and some other areas, but they're just soooooo bad in soooooo many areas across the board, the odds are stacked against him. If he can keep some of those young guys in the program and continue recruiting well, they could turn the corner (a la NMSU) within a couple years.

3) Who am I kidding? FIU's attendance sucks even when they're decent at the game of football. Back in 2010, when Mario Cristobal coached them to a co-championship in the MIGHTY SUN BELT, they averaged a *reported* 16,000 per game. If last night's game was reported at 14K, then we can reasonably assume they averaged about 2,000 in actual attendance in 2010. For perspective, they pull in an actual 1,500 for men's soccer.

4) I like their band. I mean, yes, they're small and have very little tradition behind them, but they know their crowd and recruiting grounds. (Unlike some other schools I could mention with young bands without tradition. Coughcoughkennesaw.) If I were a band director in south Florida, you can bet your bottom dollar I'd be going after those kids who were raised on Cuban salsa, rhumba, and Spanish fusion. We'd play a steady stream of Latin jazz like Malaguena, Malaga, La Fiesta, Firedance, Spirit of the Bull, and just blow the stands back each and every show. Most of all, it'd be fun, both for the band kids and for the crowd. Every show would be a fiesta. Based on what I've seen of the FIU band on the field, that's sort of what they're going for. I hope in time they can get their numbers up, but they're hampered a bit by that crappy football team.

5) I thought their field looked terrible on TV. Hearing that it looks that bad in person is just ... shocking. Football fields can be a lot of things in this day and age, but they should never be shiny.

6) There is a solid use for qualified, decently well-trained event staff. When there IS a need for them -- some jackwagon is in your reserved seats and gives you attitude when you ask him to move -- knowing you can flag down someone in an orange vest to give you backup is a nice benefit. But that's where it should end. They should check tickets as you walk into a reserved section, and then never bother anyone in that section again, except in the aforementioned case. If they think their job is to repeatedly police a section to keep out all the riff-raff, then they don't understand their job. Shame on them, and shame on the school/venue that employs them.

7) FIU was originally the Sunblazers, but was changed in 1987 to the "Golden Panthers" and then shortened to "Panthers" in 2010, as the school became more and more generic and forgettable. But in the glory years of the mid-80s, they were featured on an episode of Miami Vice (as the Sunblazers), forever sealing both the mascot and the logo in the minds of every FIU fan as the best thing ever to come out of their alma mater. In recent years, a push from both alumni and current students to ditch the Generic Panther logo and return to their roots has taken hold. The university paid homage to their original identity last night as part of a "Way Back Wednesday" promotion. That's why the Panthers were Sunblazers again for a night.

8) If they return to their Sunblazers identity, I would hope they'd modernize the logo. At the very least, they need to change their field to a different color that's more complimentary of that ugly 80s sun. It looked awful last night.

9) I hate that (people think) the refs blew that call, even though it was to our benefit, because now folks are saying we only won because the refs were in our corner. C'mon man. Watch the first quarter, which was the finest quarter of football the Gamecock football team has ever played, across all phases of the game, and tell me the refs had ANYTHING to do with that. Heck, FIU even benefitted from an personal foul against the Gamecocks which, even though it was the proper call, was not your typical "personal foul" kind of infraction. (Our guy was clearly swatting at the ball and came down on the QB. Yes, he hit him. Yes, he made contact with the head. No, it was not intentional. Proper call, though.)

10) I hate that the Gamecocks lost their way for about half the game after the 2nd quarter began. But in a way, I'm glad. I don't know how motivated I would've been to watch us soar to a 90-0 win. I appreciate the intrigue.