Well, I think we need to fill up our stadium with our own fans. Relying on visitors to fill seats is not a good plan. I am NOT disagreeing that it would be extremely helpful if our visitors brought (consistently) enough people to fill up their section.
But visitors and good opponents correlate, which bring in casual fans.
I mean we all know several transplants to this city. They're not tied to UofL, but we could get them to come out and support the city's team. Then as far as visitors, we're a city that opponents want to travel to if they have a large enough fan base. Clemson & Notre Dame fans plan trips around coming here.
But we have tried to schedule good out of conference opponents, but they drop us and don't want to do home and home games. So it's not our fault that it's not working.