(09-20-2016 06:05 PM)Barrett Wrote: I would say the PRIMARY difference between Stanford and Rice is the on-field product quality. There are other differences, surely, but that is the glaring one. If our product were just as good as Stanford's, Rice students would care more about Rice football. I can guarantee you that there are plenty of Rice students watching college football on Saturdays on their TVs in their colleges. They love college football. They just aren't interested in poor quality football.
Things can change. I left Rice and started grad school at Stanford in '07 -- Rice was coming off its first bowl appearance in decades, and Stanford was coming off a winless season. I was disappointed to be missing out on a football program that was clearly on the rise (this was pre-$0.05 St., which changed a lot of things).
On the Stanford campus, the football team and its crazy new coach were something of a joke. The gameday experience actually reminded me a lot of Rice's -- as a student, I could walk in right at kickoff and get a great seat in a mostly empty student section. There were more students there (and fans, in general) than at Rice, but you can probably chalk that up to it being a much larger school, and the fact that it's a lot nicer to spend a few September hours outside in Palo Alto than in Houston. Rice can't do much about either.
Stanford's turnaround started that season, with the huge upset at USC and another in the Big Game. The next year, you had to line up before gametime if you wanted student tickets. Even so, I was convinced that Rice's '08 team would have beaten Stanford (remember, this was
less than ten years ago). The year after, they had to move the student ticket allocation prior to gameday, and a lottery for the biggest games. The football team had gone from a joke to the hottest ticket on campus in three years.
So how did they do it? Sure, they have a lot of advantages that helped them get over the top (and stay there) faster; going from completely inept to a consistent BCS bowl participant in three years was incredible, especially for a team like Stanford without a recent tradition of success. But they would never have gotten there without Harbaugh and Luck, two guys who, by some accounts, could very well have ended up at Rice.
[I'll pause to allow for your what-if daydreams.]
I guess the point of all this is that it's possible, with the right hire and a little recruiting luck (literally or figuratively, as the case may be). Stanford did it, and the students responded (but it took a couple years of sustained success, something we haven't experienced yet). UH is trying, even without the stud QB (remember, we were better than them within the last ten years, too). Why can't we?