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First of all, the "elderly fanbase" thing is a myth. Most of the larger schools that have terrific turn out get a lot of turnout from retirees and the like. Watch any of the games on ESPN this week and tell me that the cameras panning around the stadium don't show a bunch of older folks.

As far as the Dawg Pound:
1. Disproportionately high female, professional, and fine arts population at Butler. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, in general, or that there aren't exceptions. But, by and large, you won't draw well from those demographics.
2. No one cares about our opponents. Very few students at Butler ever considered going to CSU or UIC. Very few students have even heard of them outside of the context of Butler's conference. And those conference games make up the majority of our home games. So for the casual fan deciding whether or not to round people up to go to the game, they dismiss it when they hear that our opponent is Wisconsin-Green Bay. They couldn't tell you a thing about them (the team, the athletic program, or the school). The only school in conference that even casual fans are familiar with is Valpo, maybe UWM. Thats it. And then the rest of our schedule is rounded out by teams like UAB. Great basketball matchup, to be sure, but it doesn't sound exciting to a casual college student. Look at the few times we have played big name schools the last few years - its been a big deal. Ohio State was huge, Southern Illinois was huge, Drake (not a big name but a great season) was huge. Knock the Big 6 all you want, but people know who they are. They have friends that attend there, their parents went there, they grew up rooting for that program, etc.
3. Scheduling seems stacked against us; especially when you consider that all of those casual fans will do something else at the drop of a hat. They won't schedule their lives around BU bball.
4. So you might be asking yourself, how do other schools create die-hards from those casual fans? The die-hard students are few and far between. The biggest problem is that there is little Dawg Pound culture. Why? 1) Not many students arrive on campus big Butler basketball fans. That may be a generational thing, since most parents of students would have attended college in the 70s and 80s, when Butler wasn't very good. 2) Because of that, there is no fervor on campus about the team. I never saw myself being really into the team when I got here. It was just by boredom that a friend and I ended up going to the Tulane game in Nov. of '05 and got into it. 3) Can you name something unique that the Dawg Pound has done in the last 5 years? I've sat in it for almost every home game for 4 years now and I couldn't tell you what we do thats any different from any other school. Maybe I'm part of the problem and not the solution because I haven't stepped up. But it's really hard to get students to even clap their hands and yell "Defense." They don't know the War Song, they don't really know who Tony Hinkle was. Unfortunately, you can't force the creation of culture of fandom. And even more unfortunately, it will take many more years of our current success to generate that culture among students.