Let me join the chorus and suggest (politely) that you're talking through your hat. Any comparison of attendance that matches DU against Michigan is fatally flawed and terribly unfair. So you think there is more to do in Denver than Detroit, au contraire my friend. A2 has a lot to do and on any given night the Hockey team has to compete every bit as hard as dU does for fans. yes the student body is a lot bigger, But there is definitely equivalent entertainment, and the students are into academics not athletics for the most part You certainly don't mean to suggest there's equivalence between the entertainment opportunities in Denver and Ann Arbor. Do you? If so, your argument is immediately exposed as without merit.No it's not! There IS no comparison between Denver and Ann Arbor in this regard. I assume you have never been to Ann Arbor sir. And how big is the Michigan student body? 35K, 40K? Many times larger than the DU student body. And has been pointed out, many DU students are gone on Spring break (DU is on quarters, not semesters, one of the really attractive things about the place). ok, good point. Further, whoever came up with the idea of conference playoffs in whatever sport should be roasting in hell. From DU's perspective, we've won the conference title, what's the point of the vaunted "Final 5" anyway, except to make money for the WCHA and give regular season losers another bite at the apple and justify tournament bids and higher seedings? I was at the WCHA playoff in 1970 I think at UW when Tech lost to a poor bottom team and ended up out of the finals, so yeah the playoffs are a risk for the top teams but they have been around for a while so arguing this is kind of moot And no offense to our friends from the UP, a matchup of #1 against #10 is not calculated to get people's adrenaline flowing, especially when they played a regular season matchup so recently.True
DU has a hockey base at most of, say, 6-7 thousand. And those folks have been mighty loyal over the years, considering how generally awful our teams and facilities were in the years between Murray Armstrong and George Gwozdecky. In the old days, DU hockey was THE winter sport in Denver. No NHL, no NBA, the Broncos sucked (and were in the AFL) anybody who was anybody showed up at our games (mayors, governors, candidates, business leaders etc.). Those days are long gone and DU has to fight like the dickens to get any recognition from the Denver media. That long dark period when DU dropped down to D-II certainly didn't help in that regard (even though hockey remained D-I).
DU has never generated the kind of student support that a Big Ten school does, and never will. But we can and should do better. Some of our DU posters (DG and Puck Swami particularly) have worked very hard to improve the overall intensity at DU home games (return of a pep band, encouraging students to learn and sing the fight song and last week's very successful White Out are some examples of the progress that's been made). So we're taking small steps in the right direction.I think all of us on this forum are doing what we can to foster fan interest in our respective schools
You may wish to categorize the forgoing as "excuses," but those are the realities DU faces everyday in a very sophisticated market with the world's best skiing just a short drive away (historically DU professors have been loath to schedule tests on Fridays during ski season because, well, nobody will be there).everyone faces handicaps, try the air service to Houghton.
This windy exegesis is predicated on the assumption that you're ignorant of these matters, rather than malicious. If I'm in error, then go bleep yourself.
