John--Memories AGAIN !! Somewhere in my condo are papers you sent me --back in the day !! We had lots to talk about then, did we not ??

You know Damer and the Tribune Sports Dept was then and is now and always have been BIG-Ten lovers---FINE !! But NOT at the expense of the local schools.

It is ands has been pitiful---I especially notice it now that I live in Ohio---examples--
---Cleveland Plain Dealer NEVER forgets Cleveland State and Baldwin Wallace
---Akron Beacon Journal likewise never slights Akron Zips or Kent State--

And both cover Ohio State religiously--BUT neither slight the Locals --NEVER !!

Shame on the Chicago Tribune--led by the famous Arch Ward.

The sad part of all this is LUC must fight and scrap for a teeny bit of whatever publicity we have earned. I will say though it has gotten somewhat better--by a little. Around Chicago Big Ten and Notre Dame rule--Not so here in Akron/Cleveland---It is at least equal.

The Tribune's fealty to the Big 10 is one of the reasons Chicago isn't a much better college basketball town. Just up the road in Milwaukee, Marquette always had great attendance thanks to the Journal and Sentinel. In Philadelphia, the city's newspapers built the Big 5 into a great rivalry.

But in Chicago, the Tribune was almost proprietary about their promotion of the Big 10 teams to the exclusion (and sometimes derision) of Loyola and DePaul. At the beginning of the Big 10 conference season, they ran long previews of each Big 10 men's college basketball team-- on par with their Loyola and DePaul previews. Average local readers had nearly as much coverage of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan State as they did Loyola or DePaul. The Tribune's coverage of the NCAA Tournament dropped off noticably as soon as Loyola knocked Illinois out of it, and you saw some quotes from their coverage in my previous post that were representative of the attitude the Tribune took to Loyola. The word count for coverage of the Loyola-Illinois game (Elite 8) was about double that of the Loyola Duke game at the Final Four, and about equal to the National Championship game. Also remember, Tribune-owned WGN-TV played the 1963 NCAA National Championship game on tape delay in order to broadcast the state high school basketball final (played at Illinois' new Assembly Hall Hall in Champaign). In which order do you think they would have broadcast those two games if Illinois was in the final rather than Loyola?

Yes, I realize that Illinois has a lot of alumni in the Chicago area, but their campus is 125 miles from Chicago. Although Loyola was ranked #2 for most of the year, even their big road games (at Marquette, at St. John's, at Bowling Green, etc.) only got the most basic AP wire reports in the Tribune. And then the smarmy, almost disbelieving tone of the article when Loyola knocked off the precious Illini.... every complimentary observation about Loyola was at best grudging or backhanded, while still leaving the suggestion that there was some underhanded or unsportsmanlike play responsible for the 79-64 drubbing the Illini received.

The other papers in town-- The Daily News and the Sun-Times-- were much more even-handed with their coverage, but they had much smaller readership, geared toward more working-class audiences. And they didn't have televsion and radio as part of their empires.

And so, absent equal treatment by the local press, college basketball has been somewhat stunted in Chicago. If DePaul and Loyola had been receiving coverage on an equal footing with what was given to the Big 10 teams (like in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other urban midwestern cities), Chicago could have become a much better college basketball market. More local high school talent would have stayed in the city, and attendance would have been better through the years.

When #2 Loyola played at Marquette on Jan. 8, 1963, there were 10,125 there for the game, played at the old Mecca-- pretty close, if not at capacity. And it was on a Tuesday night. When the same two teams played each other on a Tuesday night at the Chicago Stadium five weeks later (Feb. 12), the game drew only 8,113 in a building than held 21,000.

Loyola's biggest attendance in 1963 was the Jan. 26 game against Santa Clara at the Stadium, which drew 20,687. But of course, that was a Saturday double header with #1 Cincinnati (featuring Marshall High School legend George Wilson) playing #3 Illinois in the other game. Yes, that's right, the top three ranked teams in the country playing in a double-header...

Apart from the regular-season finale with #8 Wichita State, which drew 18,778 (with Bradley vs. Notre Dame on the other end of the double-header), Loyola's attendance at other Chicago Stadium games that year was lackluster considering their #5 or better ranking all year:

Dec. 22 vs. #10 Seattle 11,840
Dec. 31 vs. Dayton 10,346
Feb. 2 vs. Iowa 6,876

And of course, all the home games at Alumni Gym had fewer than 3000. Two Monday night games in early December drew 1558 and 1293.

Those attendance figures are really telling and relevant in todays environment. It's important to schedule good dates and times. The realization that we are a neighborhood school would also help with attendance. Loyola's appeal to the surrounding area needs to be pumped up. People need to feel a connection that gives them a reason to attend. Loyola's biggest problem is we will play when school is out. However we have large catholic grade schools in the area and a good size student population of renters in Rodgers Park. We have not been able to exploit this factor to our advantage.

Props to both 63 and 86---
The pertinent facts that they mention normally would and should be handled by the AD and his (her) staff--SID ? BUT we have no AD !!! More's the pity !!!!!!

A point of emphasis: 5th ranked Illinois ended the game with a meaningless 15-4 run after being down 75-49.

Loyola was not popular in Chicago then despite the fact that almost all of its students came from Chicago. When Illinois and ND fans showed up at the Stadium, they rooted for Loyola's opponents. Now Loyola still has a large number of alumni in the area, but the students tend to come from outside. That is to say, there's probably not a kid on your block who goes to "Ly-ola" anymore. I think that makes the marketing problem more difficult.

Maybe start by thinking small. Make LU Rogers Park-Edgewater's team before making it Chicago's team. There are a lot of people in these local neighborhoods who have strong pride in the community and Loyola is a big presence in the community. It probably has to start with merchants who tend to be the biggest community boosters. What can Loyola do for them? How can there be productive cross-marketing, not just a passive sign in the Joe for a few quick bucks?

Of course it all depends on winning and getting some students in the gym to make the games an enjoyable college sports event.

For those that think a lot about the marketing of the program and places where it went wrong over the years, I highly recommend an excellent ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, "Requiem for the Big East." I was flipping channels past ESPN and started watching it, and was glued for the rest of the 1 1/2-2 hours. When you consider the parallels between the old MCC and the Big East (founded the same year, same kinds of schools, same kinds of markets, etc.) it really makes you angry at the lost opportunity of the MCC. The biggest difference was the quality of the leadership of the two conferences. A little bit of luck here and there, a little bit of convincing and cajoling, a few better decisions, and Loyola's program could have been on the same plane today with Marquette, Villanova, Xavier, and Georgetown.

right on JCT. a great episode that will make you think what could have been.

I appreciate that. Probably the biggest benefit of my attempt is that I got lengthy interviews with a few people (Bill Jauss, Red Rush, etc.) who have since passed on. Maybe I can touch it up here and there and put it out as an e-book. Maybe by the end of summer, depending on how things go.