You'd have just as hard a time explaining why anyone actually went as to why they didn't. But the location certainly didn't help them.
People thought they could get Miami to be like other cities where people would hop on public transit and go to a game whenever. Miami isn't like that.
Nah, man, there are very understandable reasons, not the least of which is that baseball is 81 games, with a lot of weeknight games and some inconsistency of scheduling (times, dates, number of games, length of games, etc.).
Bottom line, you can mark off the calendar for 7 UM home football games and plan accordingly.
As for the whole "people from Port St. Lucie to West Palm Beach won't come", sure, that's inherent in any stadium relocation in any town. It happens. Some people stop attending, some new people start attending.
I'm not criticizing your thoughts on the subject at all, everyone is entitled to their opinions. But numerous times, I have seen the rationale that pits "existing ticketholders" against an idea that acknowledges that we are destroying the most natural creation of UM fans, namely the students and alums. It is very popular to demonize the UM students as apathetic and spoiled, people who do not go out to games, etc. But the same things were said in the 1980s and 1990s, I knew plenty of fellow students who REFUSED to go to games.
However, the student body creates alums, and alums create donors. And, yes, we can acknowledge that a lot of people give a lot of money to UM Athletics who are NOT alums, but we can also admit that those non-alums are also not hit up to donate to the Law School or the Business School or the Richter Library renovations like an alum is.
So let's leave it at this. Just as "better UM Athletics" has been shown to drive increased UM applications and better academic rankings, so too does "increased UM involvement as a student" drive increased participation as an alum and/or donor. And from my experience working with the UM Alumni Association, we can see a difference in both "interest" and "involvement" among younger UM alums since our football team was forced out of the Orange Bowl and/or fell off in terms of W-L records (and, yes, there is some overlap in those two issues).
Regardless of the binary (and brainless) argument-of-extremes over "Hard Rock vs. Tropical (and I'm talking about arguments that claim certain people will "never" attend again if the stadium moves 10 or 12 miles), we need to find a way to get more UM students to the UM games. And we need to eliminate the "kids today" silly arguments, because I was hearing the same crap 35 years ago.
Go to college. Have a good time. Get a job and make money. Donate to your alma mater.
It's the circle of life, it's been going on for decades, regardless of how technology and social media and everything else around us changes.
And all of those who support UM Athletics are important, we just shouldn't sacrifice our future fanbase because some of the existing ticketholders are happy with the status quo.
Dan's got a lot of interesting challenges ahead as AD, and "stadium" is one of the largest.
