A few thoughts RE: fan support...
1) At the end of the day, it starts with winning. The fact that we can even mathematically COMPARE our fan support to a school like Iowa or Wisconsin is astounding and speaks to (A) just how many Illini fans there actually are out there numerically and (B) how loyal a good chunk of us are. Those two schools have experienced the type of success over LITERAL generations that breed love for their teams to the point that people revolve their social lives around their football programs. I am desperate for us to get there, but it will take a lot of bowl games in a row.
2) With that said, it WILL NOT take that much for our fans to come back in pretty significant numbers. Even just HIRING Lovie led to a sold out and electric Memorial Stadium vs. UNC in 2016. How was this support rewarded? A demoralizing beatdown and several years of barely any progress. Our fans are willing to get just as into Illini football as our rivals are with their programs, but you simply cannot expect more than about 30-40k to consistently sign up for psychological torture, lol.
3) The whole population argument is absurd. Even forgetting that the Chicago Area is not very far (I have made the trip more than a few times now in 2 hours and 30 minutes with a stop, and folks in the western/southwestern sides of the metro would have an even easier trip), people just do not plan a road trip like that and spend that kind of money to watch your team get smoked. If we were good, those people would make it work. Even with that said...
4) The Central Illinois population is much bigger than anyone seems to want to acknowledge, and we have more than enough fans in this area alone to fill a 60k-seat stadium if we had an okay product. The Champaign metro alone has over 220k people (compared to 175k in Iowa City or 160k in State College...). Bloomington adds 170k, Springfield is over 200k, Decatur is 100k, Danville is 75k and Peoria is almost 400k. Even before counting truly rural populations that are even closer to the stadium, you have several combined metro areas within in a VERY reasonable drive with a total population of 1.2 million people. Once you add on the one-weekend-a-year fans from Chicago, Rockford, the Quad Cities, the Metro East, etc. who will trickle in for games here and there, there is just no way a good Illini football program wouldn't fill a 70k-seat stadium almost immediately if fans actually had hope.
5) The one thing we CAN control YESTERDAY is the tailgating atmosphere, and as others have said ... that matters. A lot. People need to view going to Memorial Stadium as being about WAY more than Illini football itself. Talk to anyone who has tailgated at Indiana while they're bad, and they'll still say it's a great tailgating setup. Grange Grove was an astonishing improvement from what existed before, but it is just one step in the right direction. An epic tailgating setup with plenty of places to buy beer and food all around the stadium is good for, at minimum, 5k extra fans per game either buying tickets just in case (since they'll already be there) or deciding they'll just buy one last minute and go in since they're already tailgating. To put this last point in perspective, an Iowa City police officer once told me that if a game is sold out (at their 65k-seat stadium), estimates are usually that approximately 120k people are tailgating ... you build an epic enough atmosphere, and SOME of those people will wind up in the stadium.
In summary, the potential has always been there ... beautiful stadium, tons of space, huge student body, large population within driving distance and DEMONSTRATED passionate fandom in other sports like basketball. For all of this talk about football being a tougher nut to crack, I have literally never met an Illini basketball fan that had a different favorite football team (a problem Indiana faces with reversible jacket Notre Dame fans). We first have to continue to make the gameday experience at Memorial Stadium desirable enough that fans just want to be there because it's fun (I sat at a packed Wrigley Field last Saturday, and it was not because the Cubs are good!), and we have to continue to improve the product on the field. BB has the chops for the job, IMO, but it doesn't look like we will be taking the Zook route of an infusion of talent "above our station" ... we will have to scrap a few surprising bowl seasons over the next 2 or 3 and hope this staff's recruiting improves proportionately.
