Im going to assume your a Brumbies fan and you live in the area, and it will have to come down to us both experiencing the transition differently.
I'd say I was a Brumbies fan, though my waning interest in RU over the years has almost nothing to do with anything the Brumbies did, RU has just become more and more congested, slow, and frankly boring in my opinion.
Somewhere in the early 00s a style of play was introduced that became the dominant style of play, a style that is more interested in playing for a penalty to kick a goal then going for a try, and it's slowly killed the spectacle in my opinion.
Sadly in my opinion RL is slowly going the same way...
By what you said, it was negative for you, and I'd call it positive for me.
Brumbies never had southern NSW as a fan base, catchment yes, but not fans. Waratahs made it their mission to bury the Brumbies if they ever crossed the border. Even queanbeyan was fought over.
It's true that they never had southern NSW as a fan base, not really anyway, and they still don't, changing their image didn't change that, all it did was erode the fan-base that they already had.
It's also true that the Waratahs tried to strangle the Brumbies business, and Queanbeyan was one of the battle grounds, one of the most bloody in fact, but it wasn't over fans, it was over juniors!
The Tahs felt that they had a right to all the juniors that came out of NSW and that they should all feed into their system, the ACTRU and ARU disagreed, the ACTRU felt that since at least the 70s they had been doing more for Southern NSW then the NSWRU, that like the NSWRL in RL, had become almost completely focused on Sydney and had a right to the juniors that were developed in that region cause of that, and the ARU needed three competitive teams to be part of SR and the only place apart from Brisbane and Sydney that was in a position to support one at that time was Canberra, but they knew that giving the ACT a license but only allowing them to draw juniors from Canberra would kill the club before it had even got on it's feet, so they backed the ACTRU and the Brumbies.
Once that happened the Tahs thought that they could muscle the Brumbies out and take all the juniors back plus Canberras juniors, obviously it didn't work, in fact it seems to have almost totally backfired on the Tahs and succeeded in only making the Brumbies stronger and further galvanising everybody involved with the Brumbies, from the admin to their fan-base, eventually the Tahs seem to have realised that, or that they were wasting millions on a losing battle, and gave up...
Waratahs had been active for over 100 years, and had rusted on fanbase. Even today, my mates are 50/50 lit down the middle as Brumbies and tahs fans.
Yeah and in different forms the Brumbies had been around since at least the 1930s and they had their own rusted on fan-base as well...
And Brumbies were very active in Vic rah rah circles, or at least when I was in the system. They we adored in the Vic high country, and this bled into the rest of the state. Help that they hated the tahs as well.
Never said that they weren't, all I said was that Victoria wasn't "their" area, they couldn't claim to have a huge rusted on support base their.
The analogy that I used before is basically perfect, in those days Victoria was to RU what WA is to RL today, anybody could go into Vic and do things but it wasn't anybodies region.
Just like I'm sure that everybody would agree that Souths do great things in Perth the Brumbies did great things in Victoria,and the people in those regions were thankfull for that, but as regions they aren't loyal to either team and would trade that work in a heart beat for their own team.
Now that they're just the Brumbies and don't have a geographical reference in their name, you now more likely to see a Brumbies jersey in Wagga or Albury, Goulburn, Bathurst and denny
Maybe (though I doubt that you are actually seeing a great increase in fans so much as you are seeing people from the ACT passing through that region or whatever, but lets just accept your hypothesis for the moment) but what have they traded to gain that?
They've lost a lot of support in Canberra and damaged their relationship with the community to gain what, maybe a few thousand more active fans in Southern NSW, and all after years and years of pushing the fact that they were the down trodden little brother from the ACT who was only allowed to play cause the ARU needed numbers, not cause they were wanted, and has to fight for scraps to survive while the Tahs on the other side of the boarder where the rich bully big brother that Mom and Dad tried to hand everything to on a platter (which for those that don't know wasn't just a narrative, most of it was true, but that's a story for another time), all to just totally about face one day and attempt to completely deconstruct the ACT patriotism in an attempt to attract more fans from NSW...
Who knows how many fans they lost in the ACT (TBF most of them weren't rusted on ones that showed up to every game anyway, but still), they setback their standing in the community years, and for that they gained maybe 5k active supporters in Southern NSW most of whom won't attend a game once a year on average...
It was dumb, really, really dumb, they went from having the ACT market on a f##king platter to pissing it down the drain chasing something that they were never going to get, if they had played their cards right a larger generation of kids born and raised in the ACT from parents born and raised in the ACT that is coming through right now all would have grown up to be dyed in the wool Brumbies fans cause the ACT was and is screaming out for something extremely rare that they were selling, ACT patriotism, that you couldn't get anywhere else, but they chucked it away in an attempt to appeal to everybody and succeeded only in appealing to nobody.
Anyway this has turned into a rambling rant so I'm gonna stop.
