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Before Thanksgiving break, I asked a friend of mine if I could give his ticket to the Drexel game to another friend, because he was leaving campus a day early.

The recipient was a diehard Kansas Jayhawks basketball fan who transferred to Penn this year from Texas Christian University. She told me that she didn't even know this game or the Quinnipiac game was happening, because she had seen no promotion for them.

I tell this story because over the course of the semester, there have been many columns and features on this page about the attendance and general atmosphere -- or lack thereof -- at Penn sporting events so far this academic year. With the football season now over and the basketball season underway, it is worth asking whether there is a problem here.

I think that there is enough evidence to suggest that there is, and it's time to do something about it.

There are many people and groups of people to blame for the current situation.

Perhaps it is best to start with the most prominent and powerful of them all -- the Penn Athletic Department.

I have gradually become convinced that some people are satisfied regardless of how many people are paying attention to Penn sports. On the best of days, ESPN brings College GameDay to town for the Harvard football game and leaves with its highest-ever rated broadcast, which happened in 2002. On the worst of days, you get 2,472 fans for the men's basketball team's season opener, which happened this year.

It's been a while since I've really felt a buzz about Penn sports. Fan Appreciation Day at Franklin Field is nice, but I would much rather see the money spent on hot dogs and T-shirts go toward ads in local media. This city, so starved for successful sports teams, should be easily captivated by teams as good as Penn's are. But a quarter-page ad on the bottom corner of the The Daily Pennsylvanian's Sports Wire page or page three of The Philadelphia Inquirer's sports section isn't enough to drum up interest.

Buzz doesn't create itself. It is created by an external force of some kind, and then multiplies -- sometimes by its own doing, but often by the work of others.

Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point -- a wonderful book about how cultural fads become part of the mainstream -- could offer some advice about making the atmosphere around Penn sports better. Or maybe the Penn freshman class could do so on his behalf, as this year's class read the book this past summer for the Penn Reading Project.

In other words, it matters when the Inquirer sends top sports columnist Bill Lyon to write about a football game, or the Daily News puts a picture of a Penn basketball player on its back cover -- as what happened last Friday with Tim Begley.

It means that Penn is on the better side of the sliding scale, which measures whether people just say "that's nice" about a team or whether it really is important to them.

I do not wish to pin all the blame on the Athletic Department, though. Students deserve their fair share -- especially those who bought season tickets and got their Red and Blue Crew T-shirts but went home to study instead of going to the Quinnipiac game.

The Bobcats are not Wisconsin or Penn State, against whom the Quakers have christened the last two seasons. But the attendance for this year's curtain-raiser -- part of the prestigious Preseason NIT no less -- really was pathetic.

It is worth noting, though, that some of the harshest criticism directed at the students recently has come not from this page but from some alumni on fan message boards who yearn for a different era -- theirs, to be precise.

For better or worse, the current Penn team is not as good as the 1979 and 1994 versions, among others. Those who expect things to be as they were back then need to realize that this place has changed since their time here, and mostly for the better.

I even saw someone correlate the lack of interest in Penn sports with the school's lofty ranking in U.S. News and World Report. In my opinion, that patronizes a student body that often has other worthwhile things to do.

If there is any one thing I want, it is for Penn to be the best institution it can be, from its facilities management to its academics to its sports. Unfortunately, this sometimes means telling people things they don't want to hear. This is one such time.

Again, no one person or group of people is totally responsible for the current atmosphere surrounding Penn sports, nor is any one person or group of people singlehandedly going to fix it. It will take a renewed commitment from a wide range of people to get a big buzz going on 33rd Street and Locust Walk once again.

There is one easy thing that can be done, though. The University recently banned organizations from putting those little quarter-page ad cards that we get on Locust Walk under the doors of dorm rooms. This was a generally noble idea, and the floors of college houses are now a lot cleaner.

While the groups most heavily affected by this ban are Greek houses and college bands, I think it is in the University's best interest to make an exception to the ban for the Athletic Department. Athletics, unlike most other activities on campus, has a unique ability to create school spirit. The girl I mentioned earlier, and other friends of mine with similar feelings about sports events this year, would be much more inclined to go to games if they simply knew that they existed.

To borrow an adage, when Penn's teams succeed -- and when they fail -- a sound is made in the cacophony of things that happen on campus each day. Right now, that sound is a lot quieter than it ought to be, because no one is around to see it.

Jonathan Tannenwald is a junior Urban Studies major from Washington. His e-mail address is jtannenw@sas.upenn.edu.

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