Kind of missed this when it came out last month. LaMarcus Hicks has joined the Cats coaching staff as CB coach. He’s coached at Utah State, Eastern Michigan and Bowling Green, plus several other schools.
An Iowa State player, he was on the Detroit Lions roster for parts of two seasons but it doesn’t appear he ever played in any regular season games for the Lions.
See LaMarcus Hicks Joins Staff as Cornerbacks Coach - Northwestern University Athletics
Here he is being interviewed regarding spring ball
https://youtu.be/KwTrHJedPss?t=175
This is an interesting year as there are a lot of new faces. Hopefully we can make noise in the last year of Ryan Field before departing for 2 years.
Our home schedule is pretty sad other than PSU. Our only other “good” “home” game is Io_a at Wrigley. I think that will be an away crowd even if Io_a isn’t very good as many Northwestern fans are turned off by Wrigely and a lot of their fans are suburban high school kids who couldn’t get into Illinois and have moved to Chicago after graduation in Iowa City.
They still have to get the stadium project approved by the city of Evanston, and this week’s election might have made the city council even less Northwestern-friendly, if that’s possible.
My guess is they’ll eventually get it approved due to the increased tax revenues it will bring in, and maybe they’ll throw in some more in-lieu-of payments to the city coffers, but possibly with some limitations (at least at first) on non-football events and night usage. The issue of alcohol sales at the stadium might be another sticking point. Nebraska has started selling beer at basketball games, but I think they’re several years removed from doing that at football games, in large part because the vendor areas aren’t set up to support beer sales.
I’ve recently done a number of “premium” seating surveys sent out to season ticket holders.
All are depressing as their entry point is triple the cost for our existing seats. Their first suggestion would’ve been quintuple.
Having missed only 1 home game in the last 26 seasons we pointed out that a lot of the seats surrounding us are NOT occupied at all or not occupied by the same people game-to-game. We sit on the 47 yard line west row 32 so definitely good seats, which would suggest long-term season ticket holders. This means the season ticket holders either sell or choose not to attend but a few games per season. Many people who sit near us are well post-retirement so I understand not making the bad weather games, but still this is pathetic. I think it will be a big mistake to add PSLs to seats that already don’t have a big demand.
In an ideal world people who are Cat fans and who ATTEND every game should get the best seats.
Each year season ticket holders can donate their unused tickets back to the athletic department prior to the game. If I thought there was big demand from Cat fans I would encourage this, but I fear(and observed) it would just be given/sold to random people. The majority of these people would either not care about the game or cheer for the opposition.
To get back to the point I would love for the stadium renovation to be delayed forever, but I truly believe it will going forward moving us out for the 2024.
The issue of pricing fans, especially younger ones, out of the market for season tickets is one I’ve heard raised at other schools, even at Nebraska where there’s a sellout streak dating back to the 60’s, though the machinations to keep the sellout streak alive are a subject of local discussion.
We had season tickets when we lived in Evanston in the 70’s and again in the 90’s. We dropped them the first time when we moved to Nebraska and the second time when they started scheduling most of the games at 11AM, because it just became unworkable to leave Lincoln after 5PM on a Friday, drive 10 hours, and make it to an 11 AM game with an adequate amount of sleep.