Re: Maine Off Season 2011
you are thinking like a merrimack college fan of 2007.
Actually, more like a fan of Merrimack College of 1997 or perhaps even 1987, if we're picking years.
MOST Maine season ticket holders pay $500 PER seat, to have the right to buy their $300 season ticket.
That must explain it. I assume the Maine athletics department must have been guaranteeing wins at all home games on the backs of the tickets. I suppose in the Walsh era that was a really safe bet, but perhaps from now on they ought to stress that a season ticket only confers the right to watch a game, not the right to watch a victory.
MC has HOW MANY members of its blueline club?
I have no idea. Is that relevant to something? Does Whitehead get to keep, or lose, his job based on that comparison? That seems an even odder metric to use.
maine has [had] HUNDREDS in its different levels of boosters.
Maine had, up until about 2 years ago, HUNDREDS if not thousands of fans at most away games... I have, many times, sat with MC fans at the Volpe and I was one of about 12! (maybe exaggerating a little) you guys do not even go to Lowell in numbers, never mind up to Maine or UVM.
Again, all true.. and Maine has a student body more than five times as large as Merrimack's, and an even bigger alumni base given their longer history, so we're not talking about hockey here as much as we are about demographics.
Maine fans are not like MOST other fans, so please don't tell us that a .600 record is respectable, it is not... just like Alabama football fans would not accept a coach that kept delivering 8-4 seasons
Every fan of a program thinks they are different from other fans, and their program is different from other programs. Being spoiled by success is not a unique experience-- just an above average one.
All you're really displaying here is the same thing displayed by the BU fans dismayed with Parker-- that they are so spoiled by years of winning that they have lost all sense of proportion, and they want a return to the status quo they remember-- the days when there was a clear demarcation between the good teams (which includes theirs, of course) and everybody else, with different standards of performance for each, and no motion whatsoever between the two groups.
Every program goes through down cycles and up cycles. Some trend more towards one than the other, but sometimes they move from trending low to trending high. Since collegiate athletics is essentially a zero sum game-- for every winner there is a loser-- the only way that Maine can ALWAYS perform to fan expectations and BU can ALWAYS perform to fan expectations and for BC, Michigan, NoDak, UNH, and all the other elite teams to meet their expectations, is for all the other programs to continue to lose and fail. Sometimes, some of those programs are going to succeed once in awhile, and sometimes they might succeed just a bit more often than that, and attempt to move towards that "elite" group. In order for that to happen, some programs-- sometimes-- are going to be on the outside looking in, participating in the NCAAs instead of winning them, playing in the playoffs on the road instead of at home, waiting at home to see what the PWR says when all is said and done instead of controlling their own destiny. It's the nature of things. Change and uncertainty are part of the game, part of the sport. If all the fans of elite teams actually got everything they wished for, there'd be no reason to play the games, no reason to celebrate wins, because wins are only enjoyable in opposition to losses which are not. It is Merrimack's past losses, as much as the performance of the team on the ice now, that made this season's quarterfinal series so enjoyable, and why the Merrimack crowd was pumped while at least two of the other series seemed to be pretty humdrum affairs.
Is it really anything to brag about that Maine fans are saying that their team could do better than others, but they'd enjoy it less? What's the point of that? Is the league giving out some High Fan Expectations award I don't know about?
