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caradoc
Hall of Famer
Posts : 5227
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« #17 : June 22, 2012, 06:52:01 PM »
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This always comes up every year. Several legit reasons for the struggles:
The Tampa population is new. Not a great many of the people who live there now lived there thirty years ago. So many of the newcomers already have a favorite team elsewhere and aren't going to change that.
When an expansion team enters the league it needs to draw people from the local population away from their prior allegiances. The Bucs were so bad they never built a broad fanbase
The first time they really began to build a fanbase was under Dungy and Gruden. But the repulsive media deliberately sabotaged that out of their pissy little hatred of Gruden and they themselves bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the blackouts. Scumbags. We finally had the makings of a solid, long term fanbase, but they turned off many people. People who bought into their crap, and people who wont be bothered to follow the team when they know al theyre going to hear is bile, lies, and anger.
Raheem was an idiot and the majority of people knew it, only a few homers here bought in. The media tried to salvage him because they had gon to such lengths to savage Gruden. Again though, a lot of people are turned off because of that kind of propagandizing. The losing seasons are harder to bear when you know
you have a moron in charge, the media cheerleads for him, but the product sucks (this is happening in a larger arena now too).
A lot of people were angry with the Gruden firing as they knew it was political. Add in they replaced a SB winning, proven coach with a wannabe weekend bartender and more people cut bait. They stopped saying "this time he won't beat me"
The economy is playing at most a minimal part. The prices are so low that they really aren't an excuse. The portion of the population that would find those costs prohibitive is not significantly larger than it was before. They will sell somewhat more tickets IMO because of the offseason, but they aren't going to sell out unless they prove they have a product worth investing in. It wasn't fun watching them at all for the last three years. I don't blame people for not wanting to go to the games if they weren't diehard fans, which many aren't. We simply have not managed to build that fanbase yet. We need to overcome the first two reasons I listed for that to happen. But the media seems determined to prevent that and the organization has been shooting itself in the foot.
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