Take a look at attendance at Kinnick before Fry came in '79. Same thing at Camp Randall before Alvarez.
Very true, and good point. I guess what I was trying to get at is those programs have won enough games over the last two decades or so to sort of "retrain" multiple generations of fans to rearrange their Fall Saturdays around football, and a couple bad seasons here and there are not going to immediately water down that loyalty. Compare that to Illinois, where our fans understandably have a "show me before I buy back in" attitude, and if there is one disappointment (e.g., the MSU loss last year in front of our first 55k+ crowd in a long time), fans understandably adopt a "here we go again" perspective and jump ship. So, it will just take time/wins to get our attendance back up, but I think this coming season might be absolutely essential as far as articulating a trend.
FWIW and to toot our own horns a bit, I think basketball is the opposite. Iowa basketball fans can pack the arena for a huge game if their team is good, but there isn't a "habit" of attending among the fan base because the program over the last two decades has been too erratic. Meanwhile, even during the depths of the Groce years, there were often over 14k fans at SFC and we would get multiple sellouts per year just because we have built up a fan base with wins over the years. Give us one truly successful season (2021), and all of a sudden 2022 and 2023 are selling out every single conference game.
