Forum › Forum › Lehigh Sports › Lehigh Football › Small Facelift-Goodman Stadium › Reply To: Small Facelift-Goodman Stadium
I love the banter on this topic.
Richmond mentioned above, they have a great little stadium, and amazing basketball arena (talk about sitting in the action), but the great part for them is they are smack dab on the campus, for all students to walk to in 5 minutes. We lost that one years ago.
To me, if you want to build crowds, put a really good team on the field, and play some exciting opponents. Nobody is getting fired up to see a .500 Lehigh team play Georgetown (or really any other PL team, outside of Lafayette). It is what it is. Guys would rather sit in their fraternity house or dorm or off campus house and watch Notre Dame/Michigan. Hard to blame them.
I still like the idea of scheduling a D1 behemoth who demolishes us yearly. Maybe we get lucky some year and knock off a Syracuse, Penn St, Temple or Pittsburgh. We won’t play them at home, but a win like that draws interest. In wrestling and basketball, we get to play some powerhouse schools, and that is exciting. Exciting when we get killed, lose close, or pull the upset. Makes Lehigh relevant.
And that leads me to last point, that nobody on here seems to like … if you want to draw fans, and excitement, put the teams in a better conference. Build up the program and move up in class. Very hard for football, but I would rather see Lehigh v. Villanova, Delaware, Richmond than Georgetown, insert other name here. But, if you want to keep us in the character of like minded universities (and everybody does), education over sports, student athlete over athlete, then you will never draw crowds. I can’t think of one team in an academic conference who does.
