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)