Seawolves Fans

its a good question.

firstly- how can it be a good location when such a large portion of LIers won't attend SB, but would rather go to Buff/Bing/ua?

secondly, we are isolated.  LI is a bubble, full stop.  hard to get to.  traffic.  hard to get out.  high prices.  difficult people.  scarce open space.  not gown-friendly.  it's the reason you see LIers go up to bingo but not bingo kids down to LI.  rinse/repeat with another upstate region.  add that to #1, and we lose across the board.

while we are on the topic. LIers arent the easiest to get along with.  because it's insular.  ask an SB grad from a different region how that feels.  it's part of the reason those students last two semesters and split.

we say we are NY-accessible, but we all know it's really not.  2hrs on the train, or deal with 90min of driving and good luck finding/paying for parking, college kids!

realistically, the large population we draw off of is LI, queens, brooklyn, bronx.  none of which either have strong sports (relatively speaking), nor care about sports. 

add to that- that each one of those kids CAN and most WILL go home every weekend.

because of the train.  geography.

and the campus is in the middle of affluent suburbs.  it hinders off campus housing; college kids cannot afford an 800k house with 25k in taxes.  so they stay home, stay in the miserably overfilled dorms, or move to selden, PJ, mt. sinai, nowhere near campus.  the student population is thus fragmented.  don't give them any reason not to show up to something.  with all the distractions and technology today.  add in a car, designated driver, parking, traffic, and time.  time away from laptops and chargers. 

the campus also is just not designed well.  there's no congregation area.  there's nothing open on weekends.  no actual houses on campus.  no one is there.  and then it becomes cyclical, feeding off itself.  this may never change and it's a shame.

i think the only real solution here- and it's a long term one- is twofold.  they really need private industry to come in and build houses and a college town with a scene (and it needs to be done correctly).  secondly, they need to get away from this enrollment of local kids who just go home on thursday afternoons and return monday.  use the excelsior program, take in kids from the cap district, southern tier, CNY, ADK, WNY.  free money, more contribution to the community. 

all you need to do is spend a saturday night up in guilderland and you'll quickly see why they will eclipse us.  if they haven't already.

http://sbufan.createaforum.com/around-stony-brook/making-sb-better-idea-thread/

(and i didnt even get into what the campus looks like, it's lack of history, tradition, spirit, and the indifferent faculty)

There is also this possibility mired in the mix:

What if our entire notion of a university, especially as it pertains to student life and gathering and sports and atmosphere, will be modestly/significantly/completely changed in the next several years or possibly our lifetimes because of health protocols and risks? What can any university do on the sports and student life end of things before that other big thing gets figured out? Is our vision of the vibrant university, built from past experience, applicable in the future?

And certainly there will be many opinions about the virus situation and where we stand. Go to your favorite partisan news source today and you'll get all the answers you want to hear.

Truth is, we don't know, and it's possible "a university" will need to be re-imagined by taking a hard look at what it can and cannot do. With regard to the interests here, that could be a change or end to some sports, to the fan experience, even what it means to "go to" a university.

Ultimately the myriad complexities proved to be too difficult to overcome, leading to the difficult decision to postpone fall sports to the spring.
 
Chief among those complexities is travel. Almost half of our scheduled football opponents (Florida Atlantic, Towson, Richmond, Delaware and William & Mary) are in states that require a 14-day self-quarantine when traveling to New York. We would have had to scramble to find opponents, a situation made all the more complicated with potential regional opponents from the Patriot and Ivy Leagues taken off of the board due to their earlier decisions to postpone fall sports.

As part of our budget planning, we asked each head coach to identify cost savings that could contribute to our overall savings plan. That process resulted in trips canceled, scholarships saved, positions left unfilled and equipment purchases curtailed. Our head coaches deserve tremendous credit for their understanding and willingness to seek solutions in support of the department's fiscal needs.

In the America East, sport-specific task forces were created to examine scheduling scenarios that would ensure more regional contests and less travel. The CAA went so far as to create six potential schedules, including one that had each team playing a home-and-home series against four conference opponents. Imagine having two bites at the Golden Apple in one season!