home opener and its against your arch-rivals...AND u went 2-0 in the preseason...AND the one preseason game was televised to show everyone this year is lookin more promising than the last...AND there is a street fest tomorrow to remind the city that the season begins next week.
I can well remember when 20,153 would have been celebrated as a good crowd for a Labour Day game!
Most TiCat (regular season) games in the mid 80's - 2004 were in the 17-18k range... Doug Flutie was at Ivor Wynne in 1988 (I believe)with BC and there were less than 11,000!!!
Kudos to Boss Bob! It all changed when you adopted the team, Big Guy!
however, it also didn't look like there were ONLY 10,000 empty seats..... looked a LOT more empty than that... guess this was the 'paid' attendance and not the actual...
I don’t care if it’s just a preseason game, the last 3 preseason games at home drew 25k each. They’re not going to get big crowds this year like before. All the ‘new’ fans they thought they got are going to avoid this team like the plague after all the brutal football they’ve been through the last couple of seasons.
This is the first year they did not give a ton of pre-season tickets away. This is pretty good attendance seing as how there were not as many "comp" tickets as there have been the past 3 years.
actually just over 20,000 people for a preseason game is not that bad especially when were playing against winnipeg instead of toronto. I for one am from oshawa but you can be sure that me and a bunch of my friends who didnt make it to the preseason game will be there on July 7th when we play against toronto..and i bet tehre will be over 25,000 people...it will be a sell out if we win and beat out calgary in the first game nicely.
one more thing with my above comment...i have talked to a lot of people about going to the games..at first they were hesitant. They said they wanted to see waht would happen in the preseason first before they decided to go to a game. They love the hamilton tiger cats but i guess they didnt want to watch there favourite team get beat out like last year. I think they were afraid on how Jason Maas was going to do this year. I think a lot of people were surprised with the first two games..and the real test is the 30th when we play calgary and then come back home and play Toronto in the regular season. The last game was a close one 24-20 against winnipeg and the first preseason game was a lot stronger. I think if were going to have a strong turn out and shock a lot of fans out there and make them come to the games...we need to have a really good game with Calgary...lets go on the road and stomp on those stampeders..show the fans what were capable of and that were going to be very competitive this year. Its like teh movie Field of dreams...if you win, they will come!
If Doug Flutie was at Ivor Wynne in 88’ it was only as a spectator cause he wasn’t in the CFL yet. But ya, its great to see the great support for such a tradition -rich city like steeltown
I wouldn't be worried if the crowds start smaller than in previous years. Hype will only sell tickets to the casual fan for so long - eventually you have to provide value.
I was at a two large events on the week-end - one with friends, the other with family. I noticed that, between the two events, there were around fifteen people had at some point over the past 35 years had seasons tickets with me, and another 15 that have gone to games with me here and there. As far as I could tell, not one of those people have tickets this year.
Because I am well known to be a die-hard in both groups, I was asked a bunch of times about the game Friday and how I thought the year would go. The overall impression I got is what I would expect - more losing than winning has taken the fun out of attending for these mostly casual fans, but several watched Friday's game on TV and said they would go to a game or two later this year if the team keeps winning. If it doesn't, they probably won't.