Northwestern Links

ESPN.com Big Ten Blogger Adam Rittenberg today blogs about Northwestern's attendance problems despite its ability to field a competitive team. Last season, Northwestern finished 83rd nationally in average attendance at just 24,190 per game, even though the team won 8 games this year. NU's struggle to draw fans motivated me to write a blog post ten days ago about why you should go to a NU game this season. So far it seems, NU has made a valiant effort to improve its marketing, hiring former Chicago Rush exec Mike Polisky and launching the school's first large scale sales and marketing campaigns. Northwestern's poor attendance has been a point of mockery for other Big Ten fans to laugh at, so I hope the campaign goes well. Season ticket sales are up, in part to NU's game at Wrigley Field, but I think they have to wait and see what the actual attendance is like, regardless of how many tickets they sell. Hopefully people didn't just buy season tickets for the NU-UofI game and are planning to discard the rest

Big Ten Conference Divisions for 2011, should be announced sometime in September, and for now it looks like the Northwestern-Illinois rivalry will be protected , according to the Tribune's Teddy Greenstein. As far as the conference divisions are concerned, I hope that Michigan and Ohio State are separated in order to have them meet in the Big Ten Championship, like Alabama and Florida do in the SEC. I also hope that they split up Penn State and Nebraska, so there is a good competitive balance. Whatever happens, playing in a stronger Big Ten conference can only benefit Northwestern.

Also, Northwestern has new uniforms. Click here to see the new and old uniforms.