(05-07-2021 06:25 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  I’m just a Midwesterner but I feel like like the UCs and the Cal Sts are both hamstrung in athletics:

The UCs are elitist and don’t have great relationships with their communities. They don’t recruit locally and their alumni don’t stay in a 100 mi radius in the same percentages as you’re likely to see elsewhere in D1. San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside, Davis, and Irvine don’t see the UCs in their cities as THEIR schools.

On the Cal St side you have a large commuter population which doesn’t bode well for fostering that campus community feel that more residential campuses do. I imagine that the Cal Sts get a lot more of their students from within a 100 mi radius and a lot of alums stay in that same area and you’d think that would lend itself to a more populist, every man’s university feel but if their alums didn’t spend a whole lot of their free time on campus when they were enrolled, they aren’t going to have a compulsion to go back and attend sporting events and relive the residential experience if they never had it in the first place.

It’s sad. With the huge enrollment and shear number of CA public schools you’d expect to see them nationally relevant in all sorts of sports.

They are often hamstrung based on how they are legally allowed to operate and be funded. Specifically, most Cal State alumni don't donate, especially the Big West and D-2 alumni.
From 2015:
https://www.dailynews.com/2015/09/26/cal...hallenges/

Fresno State became the "Red Wave" with locals loving both football and basketball in the 70's-80's to expand Bulldog Stadium, create the Bulldog Diamond for scholarships, and pre-buy premium seats for the SaveMart Center. Now those folks are older or dead and their heirs care less about Fresno State sports, thus the delay in renovating Bulldog Stadium.