Recipe for mediocrity in coach hiring... Our fan base filling the stadium. Pride and ego plus for us as fans and for an incoming coach. Accountability problem in the sense of no consequences for a losing coach other than mass fan grumbling as we file in and out of stadium on Saturdays.
Callahan even alluded to that off the cuff. "They'll fill up the place for us no matter."
Yeah we finally got rid of the guy who said the Big Ten was going to have to adjust to him then coached 47 games for us and won 16 of them. But every home game he looked up at a full stadium. Some (most?) programs out there suffer gate money losses as a losing season unfolds. There are many other sources of revenue, of course. But those lack of ticket sales HURT many football programs and their athletic departments; it's a portion of their arithmetic every year. We get our 50 to 75 (or more) dollars per person times 85,000 (or more) every home Saturday. That's around five million dollars per home game.
We can be funny and say, "Oh.. I see, so we need to stop coming to games so the coach sees he'd better win.. duh" in Goofy's voice. But I'm just saying it may be a factor in the back of some minds that they've got that gate money no matter what.. so it cuts off one set of consequences that others out there do suffer.
