Marshall football attendance: Good or bad?

Sports editor Rick McCann gently chided me today. It seems that in a recent post, I used the word "anemic" to describe Marshall University football attendance. So I did some checking and some wondering if "anemic" were the appropriate word to use.

This year, Marshall football set a record with an average attendance of 30,020 per home game. Throw out the WVU game and the 40,383 who watched it, and Marshall still set a record with an average of 27,947.

Okay, attendance was up this year. But I still maintain that Marshall doesn't sell enough tickets to make the football program self-supporting, let alone put it in position to support other sports at Marshall.

I guess I could do some research on other schools -- Ohio State, WVU, Kentucky, Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis, Southern Mississippi, Central Florida, Alabama-Birmingham -- to determine what their attendance is and which of those programs make money. But I won't. It's not worth it at this point.

Feel free to differ.