No, they weren't. It's possible that they were the first game, I can't remember that. But we did that the whole season, and there were games where there was no opposing student section. It was just us screaming our heads off and our student section looking at us like we were crazy. We wanted to be loud, to affect the atmosphere, so that's what we did.
Your argument is that people should get into the game no matter the result on the field, but this is purely an impossible goal to achieve. As humans, we respond directly to stimulus. For example, I'm not about to cry for any old reason, but I might cry if someone close to me dies. What you're saying is that I should be crying all the time regardless of the stimuli being presented to me.
We just don't work that way and most fans don't work that way. A good friend of mine goes to LSU and even he says that the crowd can be very stagnant at times. It's just totally unrealistic to think that most fans are going to hoot and holler when 1/3 of the team performance is going great and the other 2/3 are playing terribly.
Besides, you know as well as I do that a lot of the stadium is full of older people and the student section is probably half full of fair weather fans who just want to be in the stands to be there, not because of the game.
I've already had this exact argument with someone. Do you cheer when something spectacular happens? Yes, of course you do, it's inevitable.
But that doesn't make you incapable of cheering at any other time. You don't HAVE to be that way. If you choose to be, I don't really care, I'm like that sometimes. But I'm not going to get all butt-hurt afterwards when somebody calls me out for not being loud.
When the Blackshirts go onto the field, haven't you ever made a conscious decision to be loud? Have you ever tried to be the first person in the stands to be loud, to try to disrupt the other team? Eventually everyone joins in, because football stadiums are giant cesspools of groupthink, but the first few people to start screaming their heads off usually make a conscious decision to start making noise.
The idea that, "Well, it goes against human nature," is correct. But sometimes, human nature sucks. Saying that it's not the crowd's fault for not being loud against Kansas because it was just Kansas and it was a boring game, and the offense didn't play as well as some people would have liked... That's like saying that it was OK for the team not to play up to their potential against SDSU because it was just SDSU, and it's human nature to overlook opponents or to play down to your competition. Just because something is human nature doesn't make it right. Sometimes you have to fight human nature.
