Think about Penn State. Their main campus is located right dab-smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. For those of you who don't know Pennsylvanian geography very well, There is Pittsburgh out in the Southwest, Philadelphia in the Southeast, and (almost) absolutely nothing elsewhere. To get there, it's about a 2 hour drive from both Metro areas, yet they draw almost 100,000 people every game. Why is that? In the last 50 seasons, Penn State has had 43 winning seasons. If we had that kind of long term success, I bet we would be a BCS team with a stadium of 50,000 easily.
One of the aspects of Penn State or Virgina Tech is they started their porgrams with a bigger stadium capacity which impressed recruits. Penn State built Beaver Stadium in 1960 to 47,000 seats, Virginia Tech built Lane Stadium to 35,000. Peden was orginally supposed to be a 29,000 seat horseshoe when design but the decision was to keep capacity at 17,500 until the 80's. Had Ohio finished that 29,000 seat design in the 60's and gone independent in football the program could have hosted BCS schools and have UC's spot in the Big East. Ping let the program go down the drain before he realized it needed support. Its too expensive to expand Peden in today's economy and the 24,000 seats is what its probably always going to be. The rationale behind even getting to 24,000 was driven by a requirement to have a 30,000 seat stadium that is no longer in place. Miami and BG have reduced their capacities from 30,000 to 24,000. Incedentally, 25,000 seats is the new norm in capacity for MAC level programs with new FBS programs like Western Kentucky and Texas State building capacity to the 25,000 standard. Ohio instead decided to go extra big with the Convo instead of the football stadium so now we have a Big Ten level basketall arena with a MAC level stadium. To be fair, the fanbase in basketball was big regularly exceeding crowds of 6,000 at Grover but 14,000 was a facility for a top 10 power at the time. And now we are scheduling a diet of low major competition in the Convo? The university has and is making some stupid moves when it comes to athletics.