re: What will its take for basketball to become more popular than baseball?

Championships, whether it be SEC reg season, SEC tourney or Natty. We get the players, just need the results. I feel like we have the coach, we have the history, we have some players in the pros and more to come, just need to win big.

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This was an issue under Jones as well.

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He was just so boring. I had a hard time getting excited for his teams even when they were good. Wade brings fire and energy.

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I would prefer to be successful in basketball over baseball by quite a wide margin. But, if you're giving me my choice of a Sweet 16 or a baseball national championship, I'm picking baseball 12 times out of 10.

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I know you're replying to that specific option, but honestly that's not the choice we're facing nowadays.

We haven't won a CWS in over a decade. I think we're objectively more competitive in the SEC in basketball than baseball, which I find a bit embarrassing. With as much attention as the fans give baseball, we should be the dominant team in the conference. We should be an annual CWS team.

If we're going to have relatively equal success in both, give me basketball every time.

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Basketball was much bigger than baseball then the baseball team won 5 NCs in 10 years.

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And as I said, the NCAA was destroying the basketball program, and Curley was doing the same to football.

We used to be a top 2-3 team in basketball in conference and a consistent bowl team when that mattered. Suddenly we sucked at everything... except baseball.

It will take sustained and significant success and somewhat of a change in culture in so far as who watches and goes to games as the basketball core fan base is pretty old and they sit on their hands for the most part when in attendance. Students just don't go. They are not interested. And in general there is an apathy toward LSU basketball here. College baseball is more talked about even - a sport that is barely a blip on the national radar.

I went to the SEC tournament last weekend and there were maybe 50 LSU fans there, Arkansas had 2000 for their game against us and Bama had close to 3000 there.

Same thing back in 2014 when the SEC Tourney was in New Orleans...maybe 100 LSU fans there and countless fans from other schools, some who had a worse teams than ours that year but brought more fans kept coming up to me asking why LSU did not have any fans there - "we thought y'all would have a lot more fans here.

And for years when I go watch a game at a local restaurant or bar to watch a game you almost always have to tell them to put the game on one of the t.v.s and half the time you'll get a "what game" back....and these are Baton Rouge spots that are generally considered sports bars, a couple right on the fringe of LSU's very campus!!

That tells you the apathy and what a long way to go that you have to get this fan base on board.

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What must Willy Wade do to win over more of the LSU fan base?

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Win consistently. Period.

College Basketball has infinitely more appeal to a much broader base than baseball. LSU hasn’t consistently performed well in basketball

Multiple National championships like baseball

Would probably take a national title

When you go to other areas of the country and mention college baseball, people look at you there as if somebody came down here from up north and mentioned college hockey.

Seriously. People don't really pay attention to college baseball. Because there's MLB, and minor leagues, and high school athletes going straight to the draft. Don't get me wrong, I love college baseball. I grew up experiencing LSU baseball at its worst, Skip Bertman coming aboard and rewriting the script, the dynasty period, and ever since then. I don't claim to be a baseball superfan, but my qualifications make me more than just a bandwagoner. I've been "aboard" the bus since day one.

I say all that to say outside of the specialty college baseball group, nobody else really cares about college baseball. It's more of an "oh really, that's great" type reaction when you mention LSU's six national championships to an out of towner.

Basketball is COMPLETELY different from that.

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Winning at a consistent level

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That's it.

Nationally, college basketball is IMMENSELY more popular than college baseball. What we have here at LSU and, to some degree in the SEC, is a complete anomaly. There was a time when students camped out to get into the PMAC and it was tougher to get tickets to an LSU basketball game than a football game. If you were there in the 80's/early 90's you would have never imagined the "Deaf Dome" would become so consistently empty over the next 30 years. But that is what 3 decades of inconsistency will do.

Baseball won big in the 90's and would be popular today regardless. But the BIGGEST reason baseball gained such immense popularity is because the timing of its rise could not have been more perfect. Skip was winning national championships in the 90's at a time basketball and football were both crashing. With the football program in shambles and basketball on the decline LSU fans were desperate for something to be proud of. That was baseball and it didn't really matter if the rest of the country couldn't care less about it. The decline of basketball and football allowed baseball to get a foothold far greater than could have been accomplished if basketball and/or football were winning big

From the early 90's on baseball became not just an event, but a gathering for many, many people generationally...just like football has been for a long time.

Now, while I hope the baseball program doesn't decline, there is an opportunity for the basketball program to gain more traction. For the first time in forever the program looks to be a consistent contender (though not at a national level just yet) while there are small signs of apathy setting in for baseball.