Hop said:
LSU Baseball Fan said:
Loyal enough to lead the nation in attendance for nearly 25 years in a row now, and that stretch includes some bad teams. Something like 20K of our fans traveled to Nebraska to support our college baseball team. Do you realize how insane and special that is? No other fan base in this sport comes close to that.
We are very loyal to our team. 1/9/12 was enough sobering disappointment to last a lifetime. I rarely leave games early, even when it's clear we're gonna lose, but I don't fault these people for leaving early at all. The team should have played better and given them something to be excited about. Outside of the failures in the 7th and 8th, our fans had nothing to get even remotely excited about.
There's more to life than sports. Why would I stay up late at night to watch my team lose after another 30-45 minutes if I have important things to do the next day? 4-5 hours of my day at the ballpark is plenty enough. Same thing if watching at home on TV.
I'm gonna wake up tomorrow, and it's gonna suck like 1/9/12 did, but I'll move on with my life. It was still a great season.
Bad teams? You mean the "bad" teams that don't win the national championship? And let's get one thing straight, LSU fans don't have anything important going on the next day. That's why they are in Omaha fir two weeks. And the fans leaving early didn't have anything going on. They were walking to Blatt's to get wasted again. LSU fans are nothing but front runners.
That's a bit of a stretch, man. Yes, Louisiana's economy sucks, but even most of the LSU fans in Omaha have jobs and lives to return to outside of LSU sports. I know several people who make the trip to Omaha every year. They take off work and book hotels months in advance. I guarantee they're on a speedy flight home, then it's straight back into the office. Same for thousands of other Tiger fans. Not everyone can afford 10 days in Omaha, so many just come for the finals whether we're in them or not.
And yes, even LSU has had some bad teams under Smoke Laval, and Mainieri's first team in 2007 was the worst we'd had since before Skip Bertman. The fans still showed up in droves and packed the Box. Of course we prefer winning, but we will always show up and support our teams.
Men's basketball was a rare exception this past season, as I and many other LSU refused to attend games out of protest for the pitiful effort from the players and coaches. It was for the good of the program, and hopefully better times are on the horizon with Will Wade at the helm.