Attend any Colorado State athletic event, and you’re bound to hear it.
No, not the fight song, but the chant.
“I said, I’m proud, to be, a C-S-U Ram.”
It’s simple and direct. And it’s perhaps never been more appropriate to say than right now.
One-hundred twenty-five NCAA Division I schools competed in FBS football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and women’s volleyball during the 2014-15 academic year, and none had a better combined winning percentage than Colorado State.
With a record of 91-21, the four revenue-producing sports won a remarkable 81.3 percent of their games. Only Kentucky (94-24) and Florida State (92-25) produced more total wins than CSU (Stanford also had 91 total wins but in nine more games).
The success is contagious and not limited to just the programs that sell tickets. Last week the CSU men’s and women’s track and field teams both won their respective Mountain West outdoor titles — a first for the men in MW history and the first for the women since 2008.
New athletic director Joe Parker is less than two months into his job, but he’s already made the rounds in the department and gained an understanding for how the success of one program has helped carry over to another.
“We’ve had conversations about that in our head coaches meetings. Each one wants to see the other have success because that just raises the bar across the department, amongst themselves but also amongst the student-athletes,” Parker said. “Our students that participate in intercollegiate athletics have relationships across rosters and there’s a competitive sense among all them, in a healthy way. If one team has success, they want to see their own team have similar success.”
Not surprisingly, the Under Amour-clad Rams were quite proficient at protecting their house, winning more than 90 percent of their home games in 2014-15 with an aggregate record of 52-5. Going back the past two years, CSU’s four major sports have won more than 80 percent of its home games.
However, all those Ws haven’t always correlated to gate-busting attendance totals — with the exception of Tom Hilbert’s volleyball team, which ranked in the top 10 nationally in attendance for the fifth time under his watch.
Despite a perfect 6-0 mark at home, the football team drew an average of 26,575 fans, ranking 84th out of 129 FBS teams. That means Hughes Stadium was filled to just less than 82 percent on average, ranking 68th nationally.
Construction preparation started this week on the new on-campus stadium the football team will start to call home in 2017.
Moby Arena had an even harder time filling up this past winter. Even though the men’s team won a program-record 27 games, the team drew less than 5,000 fans per game, ranking 107th nationally and 10th in the 12-team Mountain West. Moby was filled on an average to just 55.5 percent capacity, 140th out of 351 Division I teams.
The men’s team drew much better for its nine conference games with an average gate total of 6,305. That would seem to point toward an issue with the team’s non-conference schedule, but Eustachy said right now his program hasn’t quite built the reputation yet to host some of the bigger-named teams fans would want to see.
“We can’t get these teams to come to our place. We can’t get them. I welcome any of our fans to call every school in the country and try to get a home-and-home started,” Eustachy said. “It’s a compliment in that it’s a tough place to come and win. The altitude doesn’t help, and the way we play.”
Eustachy, though, did say if the program continues in the direction it’s heading, that eventually things will change.
“We’ve changed the culture, which is big in three years. Now we have to continue to build the fan base,” he said. “If you build a good enough program, people will go to San Diego State, because if they lose, they can come back and (a team like) Kansas can explain, ‘well, we lost to San Diego State,’ and their fans will accept it.”
Although attendance figures on the whole may not have been equitable with each team’s win-loss record, there were times when tickets were hard to come by, Parker noted. The football team sold out Hughes for the first time in a decade — not once, but twice — and the men’s basketball team sold out against San Diego State and came close against Wyoming.
But there’s more the department can do, Parker added, and a lot of that effort needs to be focused on the students.
“We’ve had some of those conversations about how do we get the right alignment with our marketing promotions group to make sure that we’re all pulling in the same direction and doing all the things we can to draw people into the buildings,” Parker said. “In my mind it starts really with the students. Every stakeholder group is important, and you want to put the appropriate value on their participation, but in so many ways if you can get the students committed, it just changes the entire environment with whatever the building is, whether it’s Moby Arena or the stadium.”
Winning, of course, goes a long way. But as this last academic year proved, it’s not the only thing that matters.
“It’s having the students that are participating in those sports really embrace their role in building relationships with other students in the classroom,” Parker said. “And then it’s us trying to figure out ways to manufacture a positive experience for those that do attend and encourage them to share that experience with others so that they build on the attendance success.”
Changes have been made by the department in the past several months.
In January Ben Lorezen was hired as the senior associate athletics director for sales, marketing and communication after spending the previous two years as the general manager of Rams Sports Properties for Learfield Sports.
Last month the school announced a partnership with The Aspire Group to work with CSU’s ticket marketing, sales and service support. Then earlier this month, Nick Popplewell was hired as an assistant A.D. for marketing and branding.
Sean Star: 970-669-5050, sstar@reporter-herald.com or twitter.com/seanvstar
