Split loyalties and the cost

[Jimmy Lemke]

I had a discussion with some fans on facebook who don't see why having split loyalties with the Badgers and Panthers hurts our program. One went so far as to challenge me to come up with 10 reasons why it hurts us. He should have known not to challenge me lol. I thought I'd share my response on here and open it up to discussion with all Panthers.

1. Donations. Of our largest donors to the athletics program, a handful (including two of the top three) donate to both Milwaukee Athletics and Wisconsin Athletics. If Milwaukee owned all of those donors and the money donated to Bucky went directly to Pounce the Panther instead, that would be worth upwards of $3 million per year for the university. This is one of the most direct and easiest to see reasons where split loyalties hurt our program.

2. Attendance. When fans of the Panthers and Badgers have to choose between attending a game between the Panthers and watching the Badgers on television, what are they going to pick? Probably depends on the stakes of the game. The Panthers' home game against Oakland on February 10th had almost no impact on the season other than the fact that it was a tough game against a good team. The Panthers were already out of title contention. The Badgers, on the other hand, were playing on the road against their own conference newcomer, Nebraska, in a game that was very close and had major conference championship implications. That game effectively put Nebraska away. Some fans would pick the Panther game because of live basketball. Some fans would pick the Badger game because of the stakes and comfort of watching from home or a sports bar. If the group of fans were Panther fans and Panther fans alone, there's no choice at all because the Panthers are playing Oakland and damn it we gotta beat them.

3. Urgency. When fans of the Panthers and Badgers are looking forward to March, it's okay if the Panthers don't do well, because they still have the Badgers. So for the whole run-up to March Madness this year, the Panthers are irrelevant in their own fans' minds because those same fans are going to root for the Badgers and their chance at a national title. That apathy towards Milwaukee for the season could turn into apathy towards Milwaukee forever. Because hey, it doesn't matter if the Panthers do well, because the Badgers are gonna last longer anyway. Fans of both teams don't have the sense of urgency. In an arena, that can translate into a dead crowd - why do I need to get on my feet and go nuts right now? If the Panthers lose this game to Green Bay and are out of the hunt for a title, at least I've got my Badgers to root for and give my love.

4. Engagement. What gets people interested about a team is when the people around them are interested in said team. For Milwaukee to build momentum as a program, people have to be talking about it positively in as many scenarios as possible. If two people work together and are interested in the Panthers and Badgers college basketball teams, what are they talking about right now at the water cooler? The Panthers may not be in the Final Four, they may be coming off an APR ban, but there is PLENTY to be excited about for next year. You know what I talk about with people? The Panthers. They make an extra effort to learn about the Panthers because they want to be a part of the conversations I have with other people at work who follow the Panthers. One of my coworkers came to a couple games this season because we were talking Panthers, and he's all of a sudden super interested in the program, considering buying season tickets next season. If the discussion was about the Final Four, or I had talked about the Badgers all year because he already knew about the Badgers, there's no doubt in my mind he wouldn't be asking me where to buy season tickets. And it's not just water cooler talk either. If the amount of Panthers-only fans were numbered in the tens of thousands or more, do you think we'd be able to get talked about on television and radio? Fans calling into sports talk radio, turning out big ratings for the Rob Jeter Show, and clicking and commenting on JSOnline articles would be good for the program. Why? Because radio stations, television stations and media outlets need your eyeballs and ears. And if the eyeballs and ears are looking at and listening to Milwaukee Panthers discussion, they're going to want to dedicate more time to that Panthers discussion (and hosts will dedicate more time to learning our product) to boost their advertising revenue. But that doesn't happen if the Panthers fans are also Badger fans, because they tune in when the Badgers are on too, so there's no need to put Panther talk on more. And Panther talk is going to do what? That's right, get casual people interested in Panther talk, because they will want to participate in the discussion themselves. And then you have what? More Panther fans.

5. Complacency. This goes hand in hand with urgency. If big donors have separated their loyalties between us and Bucky, they don't see the need to buy out a coach's contract or an AD's contract when things aren't working out, because they'll just focus on the other team that is winning for the time being. If people are happy with winning Horizon League titles, they are complacent. There's no need to push athletics to go to the MVC because their other team is in the Big Ten! I'll cheer for the big guy and the little guy, and enjoy whichever one is in front of me at the time. So what if the Panthers are out with an APR ban? WE'RE IN THE FINAL FOUR BABY...who are the Panthers again?

6. Recruiting. If you have Panther fans, where do they live? Are they all on campus? Of course not. They're in Cudahy and Oak Creek, in Waukesha and Ozaukee. You know where they are? They're in Port Washington. If everybody in Port Washington who roots for the Badgers as well as the Panthers only rooted for the Black and Gold, where is Josh Gasser going to school right now? There's definitely the possibility that Josh would have decided on where to go to school based on academics (he's a business major, Milwaukee top 100 but Wisconsin is #33) and Bo Ryan. But if he's surrounded by Milwaukee Panthers-only fans, what are they saying every time they see him? What were people in Germantown saying to Zak Showalter when he was trying to decide between a freaking scholarship at Milwaukee and walking on at Wisconsin? The split loyalties hurt, because when people care about both, at best they are not going to go to bat for one over the other. At worst, a person who is one of our own fans will look a recruit in the face and say we're not the better choice. It happens. We have a better reputation nationally than we do at home. Why is that?

[Jimmy Lemke]

7. Money. Fans of the Badgers and Panthers will spend their money on both teams. If I've budgeted $120 for two basketball jerseys this year, and I'm a fan of the Badgers and Panthers, it's a solid bet that I'm going to buy a Badger jersey and a Panther jersey (I'd go with McWhorter this year, sorry Tiby). If I'm a fan of the Panthers alone, I'm going to buy that McWhorter jersey AND I'm going to buy that Tiby jersey. It's simple math. What about that fan who decided to stay at home and watch the Badgers-Cornhuskers game? If he's not a season-ticket holder, we lost his game ticket. But that's not all - we lost the beer he bought (yeah people who are reading this, you can buy beer at our games), the parking pass he bought, the popcorn and hot dog he bought. We lost that extra fan in the seat. One guy isn't going to make much of a difference, but what if there are hundreds like him? What about 1,000? To tie that into #6, how is that going to look to the recruit who could have seen 5,000 show up for Oakland instead of 3,500?

8. Student life. There are roughly 29,000 students on campus in any given semester. Are we to believe that only a handful of them are college basketball fans? How many of them will be watching the Final Four on Saturday rooting for the Badgers in the Gasthaus? What if every single one of those kids were Panthers-only fans? Would we have had such a crappy student section this year? The games would be crazy fun because you'd have a student section that is emotionally invested in the only college team they care about, their alma mater. Road games would have multiple buses. Road games on TV would make the UWM Gasthaus party central 15 times a year, driving up sales for them as well. But because those kids aren't just Panthers fans but Badgers fans too, they've got double the opportunity for games to watch, and options to stay home and watch their other team.

9. Alumni engagement. Forget 29,000 students. What about the 145,000 alumni, of which 70,000 live in the greater Milwaukee area? Now not every one of those people are sports fans. Even less are basketball fans, and even still less college basketball fans. But are we to believe there are only 1,000 alumni who like college basketball enough to buy season tickets to a team? With split loyalties, many people who would be Panthers season ticket buyers instead will pick a few Panther games to go to and elect to instead watch Badger games on the other days. It costs us money, but it also costs us their undivided support. If those people are giving us their undivided support, that is nothing but good for us. It gives us people in prominent, influential positions, a lot of them with money. Maybe they care about basketball but don't want to donate their money to it. If they're interested in the Panthers, the university will be at the forefront of their heads. Maybe they'll donate money instead to the education department they graduated from. Maybe they're engineers and holy crap Innovation Park looks so sweet maybe I'll help them out there. You want stats? In 1997, USF had no football (and didn't invest in basketball). They had $8 million in donations to the university as a whole, 8% of which went to athletics. Fast forward to 2007, when South Florida was a national power in football briefly. USF had $75 million of donations that year. Still, only 8% of those donations went to athletics. Athletics success breeds academic support.

10. Apathy. When there are split loyalties, and the Badgers are much more important to even a great number of our own fans, the problems our university faces are unimportant or outright irrelevant to people in the area. Five years ago, when the UW System was deciding where to allocate the School of Freshwater Sciences and the School of Public Health, Madison was the other front runner for those colleges. If you asked people on the street, most of them would think UW would have a greater chance of doing those schools justice - forget the fact that Milwaukee has any number of Public Health problems and Madison's chief public health problem is the underage drinking at UW-MADISON! Forget the fact that Madison has a couple of overgrown ponds and we are five blocks away from the largest freshwater system in the world. Madison is perceived as better! This is the truth: UWM is the greatest economic driver in southeast Wisconsin. It is the life blood of the Greater Milwaukee Area, the backbone of our city's growth, the lynchpin to our god damn future. UW-Madison pales in comparison to UW-Milwaukee when it comes to what collegiate institution is more important to the city of Milwaukee and the region. They don't hold a freaking candle to us. And it doesn't matter to most of these people. So they donate to UW instead of the school that affects them. We should have a Panther Caucus in the state legislature that would fight tooth and nail for every project this school needs. If the 145,000 alumni and 29,000 students were Panthers-only fans, legislators would be fighting much harder for Innovation Park and the Northwest Quadrant in front of the building commission. Athletics is not why we are here, but Athletics is what pulls us all together. And we're all over the place because Athletics does not pull us together. Athletics has trouble pulling us all together because most of us care about Bucky so damn much that Pounce's problems are far from their minds. If Bucky was irrelevant in the minds of our people, and all they cared about in college athletics was us, we would grow - as a university, as a city. We're ready to go. We need to exorcise that demon skunk's from our program.

[BBF]

You're spitting into a wind that is never going to stop blowing, Jimmy.
Asking or expecting people to stop being fans of a "flagship" program is pointless. And why should they? We're not alone. Wright and IUPUI and Cleveland State and UAB and UTSA and on and on with urban public Universities in states with flagship land grant schools -- they all have the same problem. (Wright and IUPUI are really good comparisons because they also have to contend for interest with private schools with great programs in their own cities.) We simply have to excite people more about our own program. That seems especially difficult in a year when we are sitting at home in March and the "flagship" is in the FF, but we have seen what happens to attendance when we are winning. The opportunity is there for us, especially with the Arena secured. We are never going to "steal" UW's or for that matter MU's fans. I'm fine with sharing as many as possible. It's a hell of a lot easier and less expensive for most people in the Milwaukee area to come to a great college game at the Panther Arena than to go to the Kohl. That's our opportunity.

[Jimmy Lemke]

I don't need to steal fans, I just want to own our own. I know that Louisville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and any number of public urban research institutions do just fine standing on their own two feet.

[BBF]

Very different histories for those programs and ours. Not least, they have football. But they also had exceptional basketball programs before the television/NCAA tournament age had really even dawned, which gave them a two or three generation head start on us. Cincy and Louisville were big time programs while we were still a teacher's college with D3 level sports. And they own their cities, whereas we have the bad fortune to be in a city that has a private college that was a national power just when NCAA basketball was exploding as a sport and has kept an outsized share of local attention (and a slavish devotion by the world's laziest newspaper) ever since. That's why I always shake my head at your focus on Madison. It's MU that sucks the oxygen out of the local college basketball scene for us. Casual fans in Milwaukee go to MU games. Why? Because they always have. Extremely few Milwaukee area fans are trucking out to Madison for basketball games on wintry nights. Our competition is right across State Street.

The issues you raise with Madison are very legitimate when it comes to academic and building resources. Sports? That's a different ballgame entirely.

[Mike-waukee]

I don't know BBF. I think Jimmys onto something!! Everybody talks all Badgers all the time. I see them as a bigger threat than Marquette. Marquette seems to work in its own world, but Wisconsin is always there!! Look at the name!! University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee!! Thats their name BEFORE our name!! Tells everyone we're second class right in the name!!