All it takes for "fans" to be more of a factor at home games according to y'all is for the team to be winning. Do you fail to realize that every year under Wolfs tenure the team has increased its win total from years past (3,6,7,8). And the past 3 years the team has been 1 game away from the playoffs. But in those crucial playoff games where the team needed a 'home field crowd' they got nothing. It is in fact a running joke around the community to guess the attendance for the game (last week the pre-game prediction was 5,000) which is such a shame due to the talent level of the team this year as well as the overall record (should be undefeated).
How can you put this on the players, when the players bring 500+ of the "butts in the seats" due to friends and family coming to support them. If the players could pay to have a sellout every home game and have a home atmosphere like they experience on the road, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that they would do that in a heart beat.
The best home atmosphere those boys have had all year was at the end of the Western game when the true fans stayed after the bandwagoners left and the game was given up to a Hail Mary at the end. The players seemed out of sync because they were not used to playing in a home atmosphere like that on offense. Watch the post game interviews from that game, there were a lot of communication errors because the defense was not used to playing in a loud environment such as that.
Every week all everybody needs to do is bring 1 or 2 people, not get black out drunk at the tailgate, make it to the game and all these problems will solved in no time. Well that and our boys making playoffs this year.
This is a nice post and I was one of those at the WIU game. I don't think any other team fans "truly understand" the concept of the '12th man' more than Penguin fans. However, we were 1-game away several times under Heacock ...with a team that played a style of ball (particularly on defense) that we are much more accustomed to and enjoy. SO if we wanted to continue to be "just one more game away" then why did we switch coaches? I might add we are only 1-away because the size of the field is increased. In a 16-team field ...how close were we? Even worse is that most people do not realize just how different ball is played in the play-off. It requires a great deal of experience that Wolford and his staff does not have. Tressel learned to this through constant trips top the post-season; but that first title in 1991, was won on pure brawn. By 1994, we were able to outsmart a couple of finesse teams.
My point is ...Wofford has a long ways to go even when he does make the post-season.
At that WIU game (or was it USD?) we simply had to line up and play. The officiating became quite bothersome and some of us had enough and became even louder. I was upset because the fans did not seem to know what they were doing. That QB was signal calling with his hands and voice ...why was not every fan in the stands clapping and then yelling. There was a fan that came down from about row 40, up to the row-1 bar ...and he was clapping in the isle to show everyone what to do. In "the old days" we would have noisemakers and those plastic clapping hands to make even more disruptions. Then these same fans complain about a boring game ...get there and get involved; in that order!
