BOWLING GREEN — Jeremy Davis is one of those rare undergrads who attends Bowling Green basketball games snow or shine.
Maybe you’ve seen him.
His voice loud and style louder, there he was in his familiar spot in the student section Tuesday night at the Stroh Center, wearing a Falcons hoodie, shorts, and orange socks, and waving a sign — complete with garbage hanging from the poster board — that informed visiting Akron, “YOU’RE TRASH.”
Never mind the arena is a 15-minute walk from the heart of campus.
Or that fans these days have a million other options, including watching the game at home on their backboard-sized 4K TV with their beer-fetching robot dog (probably).
Bless ‘em, the junior electronics and computer engineering technology major can’t imagine missing a chapter of this charmed Falcons season.
“Maybe if I had a major exam the next morning,” he said. “Maybe.”
Now, if only the zeal was contagious.
A few seats down from Davis, another student scanned the scarce crowd crawling in before the Falcons’ last-second 73-69 win.
“The boys deserve more than this,” sophomore Brandon Ferpes said.
Well said.
Seriously, where is everyone!?
There is a hell of a story continuing to unfold on Wooster Street this winter, and yet, with the exception of those two perfect-storm nights against then-No. 18 Buffalo and Toledo earlier this month, it has largely gone unwitnessed.
Excluding those who had to be there — the pep band, cheerleaders, dance team, and Freddie and Frieda Falcon — I counted 48 students in their end-zone section among an announced crowd of 1,954 on Tuesday.
Yes, it was a weeknight, and your business is not our business. I never want to be the guy who suggests how fans should spend their money or time.
I hate that guy.
But ... really?
Bowling Green can’t crack 2,000 fans when its first-place team plays Akron?
When that first-place team that was picked to finish last in the MAC is instead — after vanquishing the Zips for just the third time in their last 30 meetings — off to the best league start in school history?
After back-to-back roaring overflow nights at the Stroh, I wondered if fans wouldn’t be able to get enough, the turn-back-the-clock scenes evangelizing the students and community.
They did not.
In the two games since, the bandwagon has emptied faster than algebra class at the closing bell. Last Tuesday, Bowling Green announced a crowd of 1,445 for its win over Central Michigan, the most sparsely attended conference game that night.
That’s too bad.
If this were any other year, we’d leave this alone. Because, look, we get it.
This isn’t just a BG issue. Where games at Anderson Arena or Savage Hall were once the event — Toledo averaged 8,337 fans per game as recently as 1984 — times have changed.
Consider that fan apathy was among the reasons the Rockets fired Stan Joplin after the 2008 season. The average home attendance in Joplin’s final year: 4,605 fans.
“We need a new energy,” Toledo athletic director Mike O’Brien said at the time. “We will have a facility that is one of the best, if not the best in the MAC. We need people in those seats.”
Well, a decade later, the Rockets have done a decent amount of winning lately, and those seats are even emptier. UT averaged 4,239 fans per game last year.
It’s the way it is almost everywhere.
“It is what it is,” BG coach Michael Huger said afterward. “We’ve still got to go out and we’ve got to play. I would love for our students to come out and support. But they’re busy now, too.”
Still, this is no ordinary season and no ordinary team.
We’ve seen that the Stroh Center can be a special place when the team and students and community come together.
Put it this way: In the past two weeks, I went to sold-out games at Crisler Arena at Michigan and Savage Arena, both much larger venues than the Stroh. The atmosphere here for the Buffalo and Toledo games was incomparable, a million watts of enthusiasm shoehorned into the MAC’s coziest venue.
How much fun would it be for all of us who love hoops to keep that going?
If any team ever deserved more — if any Bowling Green team deserved for fans to let down their guard and show their appreciation — it is this one.
After an aimless decade, the Falcons are doing their part and more. Now, if the program is to truly be taken seriously and build on this momentum in future seasons, it’s time for the fans to do theirs.
First Published February 20, 2019, 4:38 a.m.
