Everything GO4INLALALAND says about alumni support is true especially from that era.
It is clear that strong alumni support is necessary to have a successful program. Not only from a financial standpoint, but also from an excitement standpoint that makes high schoolers want to play at a college. We had a sellout game today and it was the 4 one this season. This is unprecedented since we have been playing at TCF. It does seem that enthusiasm is growing for gopher football. While this season may pose as a set back to fan enthusiasm, do we have the alumni interest in Gopher football to really take this program to the next level. Do we have the alumni and fans necessary to warrant the building the second level at TCF. That is what we need..that kind of passion for Gopher fb so that we get the money needed to build a top notch program. Do we have that? I want to believe we do, but do we have the fans to warrant the building the second level of TCF? IMO, not for a long, long time. Consequently, I believe we are going to be stuck in this pattern of struggling to finish in the top three of the Western Division. Thoughts?
We are from the same undergraduate era GO4INLALALAND. Football under Niels Haselmo was not important and campus the majority of students back then were commuters. Couple that with the fact that the campus was dirty, blighted and not well maintained, with old buildings and the tunnels and West bank bridge smelled foul. There was some crime(both my brother and I got burglarized losing a TV a, VCR or stereo) until Yudof came on board. Then you know why only about 30 to 35% even finished their undergraduate degrees back then because the U made it difficult to get classes at convenient times or made it much more difficult to work around a work schedule. The buses were always stuffed like cattle cars so full of people, parking was not easy to get, the U made it difficult to get classes available to graduate in less than 5 or 6 years, and nobody students wise, seemed interested in anything but maybe Hockey or to a lesser extent men's basektball. Like you said it was a means to an end(a place to get a degree) and many people felt C's get degrees and were not motivated to do U-Rop projects(like they have now) or excel at research. Faculty openly mocked the football team back then because many were undergraduates from Nebraska or Wisconsin, or a whole group of student advisers that hated sports at least that was my experience. The spirit of campus and the focus on the undergraduate experience has changed a lot, at the U, it is noticeably different and you can see how much better campus even looks these day's. TCF bank stadium leaves me envious to want to go back in time.
We each only lived in the dorms one year (Frontier or Pioneer) because that is all we could afford. All of us had to work jobs and got very little support financial aide wise from school or parents. God bless Jim Wacker he tried but we played no defense in those days and there was lucky if there were 800 to 1,000 student ticket holders than, I think one year there were 812 of us. They begged us to buy season tickets for $30 something bucks one year and were always giving away free food or tickets to try and drum up support.
I always thought the Students even in the Dome under Mason didn't realize how good they had it because of all of the horrible and poor football we had to watch. The only fun games I remember were the Purdue shootouts with Chris Darkins running a lot, and the upset of Syracuse when Tyrone Carter was a freshman.
Couple that with in those days the U did very little for campus life or for helping Alumni find internships or jobs and you can see why people from that era mostly don't connect to the U or Gopher football. I can even see why players from that era would not connect back to campus or the program so readily.
I will admit me and my younger and older brother, all Alums(CLA, Architecture, College of Agriculture) were not Gopher football fans growing up because we didn't have cable and we didn't watch any college football at all. The Gophers were not followed by family just the Vikes and pro sports like the Twins because they had the cheapest tickets. There is a whole generation growing up in the 1980's to middle 1990's lost alumni wise and fan-base wise that didn't grow up following the Gophers or do not connect back to the U, because campus life and football was so poor back then and no source of pride. Couple that with Bucky starting to go to Rose Bowls and we lost a lot of potential fans even in the Twin Cities.
The U didn't treat a whole generation of fans or alumni very well, so to expect them to connect back to Gopher football or campus will be hard. There were two generations of fans, that did not live like current students and didn't experience the success they had in the old days in the 1960's and 1950's so your talking about a lot of people that even if they still cheer for the Gophers didn't have a great campus experience to fall back on. I would be willing to bet the U is dead last in Alumni giving and support compared to all other Big 10 University's because of generations of lost fans and Alumni, and the 40 to 50 years of mediocre collegiate sports and scandals.
Hopefully they can continue to build some loyalty and a good undergraduate experiences for the kids, because the 1980's and 1990's the U was just a place to get a degree.