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Would relocation of Rams open opportunity for SLU?


bk18

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Hey now. No slurs against my Eastern European homies.

(Besides, I used to date a Croatian girl. We called her Deep Croat.)

Back in my day, a guy could go to a sigma kappa event at the Croatian Home Hall in Granite City and be guaranteed to come home with at least one female.

Is that place still open?

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4 Things I'd Rather see than SLU football:

-SLU in the Big East

-SLU men's hockey back in D1 at the Chaifetz.

-SLU Men's Lacrosse (both this and hockey should have happened by now.)
-This thread finally die.

GO BILLS. BEAT DAYTON.

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4 Things I'd Rather see than SLU football:

-SLU in the Big East

-SLU men's hockey back in D1 at the Chaifetz.

-SLU Men's Lacrosse (both this and hockey should have happened by now.)

-This thread finally die.

GO BILLS. BEAT DAYTON.

before football, hockey lacrosse, i'd rather bring the level of all our existing programs (in particular the men's basketball program) to the upper echelon of the A10 consistently. i.e. not just an occasional visit to the ncaa tourney/playoffs. we have to expect conference championships in all sports all the time. until we have complete sports success of what we already got in the way of sports, to even talk about big east is silly, it just isnt going to happen.

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What is the marketing value in the media exposure, etcetera of a top 60 football program?

4% of college bound high school grads have heard of St. Louis U

38% of those believe it is the same as UMSL

A football program would do way more in a week than 4 billboards on a farm in Illinois along I-55 could do in 50 years. If we could make a better team than BC we would have the best Jesuit football program in the country and Mizzou would basically be irrelevant.

Meramec Caverns scoffs at this notion :)

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Maybe SLU should challenge Webster for chess dominance. Those highway billboards impress me a lot more than the ones for SEC football.

That state school AD to the west of us has reported a 4 million dollar surplus. You can suck in both football and basketball, finance a ton of non-revenue sports and still make a boatload of money. Is this a great country or what?

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the biggest benefit that the Rams departure might give Saint Louis University is not a football team, (that is never going to happen considering the cost of startup and thereforward) is it will free up a lot of sports entertainment dollars that were ear marked for the Rams since they came to town. Right before the Rams came to St Louis the Billikens were in the midst of some incredible attendance years. Saint Louis University had some top 50 attendance years prior to the Rams coming to St Louis. After the Rams came, there was a gradual decline in attendance that I believe was a big part due to the more casual sports fan picking to spead their limited sports entertainment dollars on the Rams instead of the Billikens.

Now those fans are without a place to send those dollars. Hopefully our athletic department will try to reach out to those fans in 2016 to attempt to convert them to the rebuilding of the Billikens. New coach + new fans = new era in Billiken Basketball.

I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point about freeing up sports entertainment dollars, but your time frame is a little off here Roy. SLU jumped into the top 25 in attendance in 1994 (http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/m_basketball_RB/Reports/attendanceYBYtop25.pdf). I'm assuming that is the 1993-94 season. SLU ranked 24 in 1994, 7th in 1995, 7th in 1996, 18th in 1997, 6th in 1998, 12th in 1999, 20th in 2000, 23rd in 2001, and fell out of the top 25 in 2002. The Rams came to St. Louis in 1995, so SLU was still packing in fans during the Rams first 6 years. Perhaps SLU had built themselves up enough that it took time for the generally poor showing early Rams teams to begin stealing entertainment $$ and then when the Rams were finally good after 1999 SLU's attendance began to fall off. My take is that the correlation between the Rams taking entertainment dollars and SLU attendance really is not as great as you assume.

Bigger factors in SLU's attendance decline are SLU being bad/mediocre and failing to capitalize on their mid/late 1990s success, popularity of college basketball declining overall, switching to the A-10 which had less well-known opponents than C-USA and it's predecessors, and most importantly moving from Scottrade to Chaifetz where the capacity was more than halved. I'll posit that if SLU still played at Scottrade, they may well have been in the top 25 in attendance in 2013 or 2014. Although I'm not saying SLU would be better off playing there.

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