Tickets for Wed game against Auburn are 6 bucks. My bet is there will be a crowd. If you haven't experienced Tiger basketball before now is the time. Some of my best experiences with any Tiger sports has been in that Dome. The regionals in 86, the Shaq years, and the Kentucky game a few years ago...my son's first experience with a basketball game. That place can be the best place to see a game as long as the fan support is there.
Football is the only sport in LA that will get a great following with an average team. Hell, in the days of unspeakablke darkness we even had football games with only 70-80% of the stadium filled up in games that we were almost sure we would win. When it comes to other sports most fans in LA will be "bandwagon" fans for lack of a better word as they just aren't as interested in them. There will never be the passion for baseball and football that we have for football, never, football is a religion and a fuel, feeding the soul of rabid fans. For the other sports the program needs to be built and maintained. Skip built the baseball program from the ground up, built up interest before they really were great and then maintained a level of excellence for a long period of time that can withstand a few periods of less than excellent play, but not many. But even when we were winning NC's and dominating college baseball he still did all of the same promotions that he did when the program was nothing. If LSU baseball were to flounder for 3 or 4 seasons we would lose much of the excitement and loyalty to the program that we have now. Many people buy season tickets to LSU basaball now because if they don't they may miss out on the big series, the Regionals and Super Regionals, etc as they will be sold out. Let us go a few years without hosting these things and ticket sales would drop. In basketball, as soon as Pete left, the drop off got worse every year, then Brown came and he was a master at building interest in the basketball program, no matter what your feelings for him were you had to admire how he built excitement and interest in the program again. Then of course he ruined the same program he had worked so hard to build and left it a shambles. Brady has come in and coached very hard but hasn't done the PR work that others had and Skip and the rest of the admin haven't really helped much, which surprises me the most. With Skip's knowledge of how to build interest and excitement I'm am just dumbfounded as to why they do not promote the program much better; doing all of the things that he did in getting locals to want to come to the games. There are hundreds of things that were done in building the baseball program that have not been tried with the round ball program such as having high school and even younger teams play before or after games, use plenty of local kids to be ball boys, participate in shoot arounds, be honorary captains, have plenty of free throw shooting contests, 3 point contests, etc. If you don't build the excitement through tremendous promotional efforts at LSU then you will not get the fans in the numbers you want. Ever. It is not all about wins and losses or even style of play, it's much deeper than that.
Basketball I used to cover LSU basketball from 1978 thru 1981 for a northern La. tv station as a photog grip. Football too. At the time I loved the basketball program. More so than football. Probably because at the time b-ball was doing better than football. Those games were as electrifying as any sporting event I had ever been to. I was even at the Ali-Spinks fight in N.O. and been to many NFL and other college football games outside the state. Nothing and I mean nothing compared to LSU basketball back then. I haven't kept up much at all with LSU basketball anymore. Probably more my fault than anything. Don't know much about Brady at all and granted have been really focused on the football this last year. Duh. National Champs in football is of course going to take some 'attention' away from b-ball. I wish the basketball team did come back to the national prominence it once had. I really miss it. Howard Carter, Ethan Martin, Dwayne Scales, Rudy Macklin, Greg Cook, etc. Those were truly great times. Just my 2 cents.
