(07-05-2019 09:30 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-05-2019 06:35 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-04-2019 10:53 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-04-2019 08:59 AM)waltgreenberg Wrote:  

(07-04-2019 05:00 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Attendance has been awful for half a century, with just a few bright spots. But start winning, and it will start coming back. People won't come to see freshmen - they will come to winners.

That's simply not true. Attendance was fine in the 1970s. It dropped off precipitously thereafter.

The 60s-70s were the foundation for the problems we are trying to overcome. I don't know how packed HRS was in the early 70's - I was an out of town alumnus by then.
By then, we were into the second decade of losing seasons. UH was coming up, the Oilers and other pro sports were coming to town, and traffic was just starting to be a problem. We lost base every year after 1962 or so, IMO. I was a freshman in 1963, our last winning season until 2006. We stopped being Houston's team and its hottest ticket. And that slide continued for decades. It won't be made up quickly or easily. Arguing over when it started is as useful as arguing over which year was the last perfect year before global warming started.
To get back into the hearts of Houstonians, we need more than promises - we need results. The kind of results that are reported in the sports pages every weekend.
So, I wish Bloom was concentrating more on the here and now. Maybe in 5 years, I will be glad he took it slow. But for me, and IMO for Rice, nothing beats wins here and now. And nothing we do or can do will have more impact on attendance than wins here and now.
JMHO.

I don’t think it’s that he’s not concentrating on the here and now. I think it’s more that there’s just not much to work with here and now. I’m still skeptical that we can make “pound the rock” work, but we could run anything from the single wing to the run and shoot this year, and I’m not sure it would make any difference.

JMHO, but it seems pretty insulting to the current players that Bailiff recruited to label them as inferior. I don't know why the guy who recruited the talent to win the CC in 2013 all of a sudden started going for chopped liver.

But even if they ARE chopped liver, it does not set well with me to just write off 2018 and 2019, putting all our eggs in the 2020 basket. You have that saying about his'ns and your'ns. Well, not only does it seem like Bloom cannot win with his'ns, it seem we, the Parliament, are gratuitously giving him a pass for it.

We have a killer schedule. 1-11 is the projection, with 0-12 the second choice. But I want our coach to fight for more. Instead it seems like he is saying, "You boys go play those games, while I recruit some real players" and the Parliament is saying "good plan".

I expected more the first year. I think the second year should be an improvement over the first. Even Bailiff improved his second year, playing with "his'ns'.

Conference realignment is happening, again, and the window for us is closing, if it hasn't already closed. In the face of that, I am very impatient with being OK with blowing off 2019 with 0-12, making excuses, and saying "Wait until next year".

But that's just me.

Just because fans on a message board are predicting a better team in 2020 doesn’t mean the staff or players will quit on this season. I think it’s perfectly fine for us to recognize that the current roster lacks talent and we need to recruit better to improve our record. Bailiff won the CC because all the good teams in the conference left and we played a CUSA 3.0 schedule with a CUSA 2.0 roster. If you go back and look at who he recruited after that you’ll see he missed on his first 5+ choices at every position. We recruited like one of the worst 5 schools in D1 multiple years in a row and our performance on the field reflected that.