I agree the #1 reason for lower attendance is covid. None of my friends went this year bc we all have young kids who can't get vaccinated yet. I do wonder if the numbers represent actual attendance or "tickets sold." I have 3 season tickets but attended none, similar to many of my friends.
As for increasing attendance, there's really only one way: win and they will come.
Cal is at a severe disadvantage because of location. Access is difficult, parking is atrociously priced (costs more to park than tickets cost) and almost non-existent, and tailgating is nearly impossible. This destroys out-of-town attendance, be it visitors (and some conference schools with some regularity bring thousands of fans on the road to some locals) or "home team" fans. Short of selling the campus and reinvesting part of the revenue by buying Pacific U in Stockton, or Cal-Davis, and relocating operations to a more attractive location, there is no apparent solution to that.
Cal is at a severe disadvantage due to a program with a mediocre win-loss record. Tedford proved that.
Once the wins pile up, attendance rises to the upper levels of capacity and will stay there until performance mediocrity returns. Many will pay to see wins. Few will pay to see losses.
Cal also fails to market the team very well. That exacerbates attendance problems.
Agreed on parking! For the USC game I went to park at Emerson Elementary (my Alma mater) and it was $50! Fifty! I love supporting the kids, but thot $50 was a bit out of line for all the other costs associated w attending a game (pre-game drinks at Kips, etc. 😬). Luckily, the USC game was not an anticipated “game day” so was able to park on the street…… FIFTY!!!!
As it turned out I only attended three games in person this season - Nevada, Wazzu, and SC. Two were painful losses. Looking around, it seems the crowds were smaller than the announced figures. Winning games obviously will help with attendance, and the demise of Covid someday. Also, since every game is now televised there is less incentive to attend. Obviously if the commissioner can re-negotiate the TV contracts to increase the pool of money this will help offset athletic department expenses.
Great analysis! I share your optimism for next year, particularly with the better home schedule in even years (and us not contributing to Stanford’s numbers via the Big Game on the Farm).
UCLA was certainly propped up by its LSU game (ESPN reports 68k in attendance). The Hawaii game the week before was as sparsely attended as a 2020 game.
Meanwhile, Utah expanded their stadium capacity by 13% (45k to 51k), which fits with their attendance increase. Being good surely helps too (expert-level insight).
Covid combined with possibly a perception (hopefully false) that the on-the-field product is stale and tapped/capped out. We should get a bump next year with the Wilcox news and a better home schedule, but that will be short-lived unless we can show we'll be competitive from the jump. We traditionally get off to a fast start and then underdeliver. This year was the reverse and that lackluster start really killed interest. We also now have to factor in wildfires. Not an issue last year, but air quality has affected at least a few games over the past 4-5 years, and unfortunately is likely to continue to be a regular fall tradition.
Regarding the wildfires, it would be interesting to see a breakdown it how many tickets are bought in advance (and this would still count towards attendance even if air quality keeps them from actually showing up) vs. people who buy tickets shortly before the game and would be discouraged by air quality.
Because I became a dad, tickets are always plentiful, and game times have become undetermined until only a week or two ahead of each game, I gave up on season tickets for good maybe seven or eight years ago. I now pretty much only buy tickets on the day or days leading up to any game. Obviously I'm a small and maybe very particular sample, but I assume the unpredictable gametimes and issues like COVID, wildfires will continue to disincentivize people from making a lot of long lead commitments. There's simple not enough of a reason to given the unpredictability.
Yeah, game time announcements being announced way too close to day of, as dictated by TV, have really hurt attendance, all across the conference....probably more than the pandemic, if we're being honest.
I don’t think Covid had much of an affect on attendance. In fact, people were excited to get back to normalcy after a year without being able to attend a game, especially early in the season. Pac12, like all conferences, sold their soul to the networks, and the affect on attendance is not at all surprising:
• Not setting game times until 12 or even 6 days before kickoff. People need to be able to plan. If the gametime isn’t set, people will prioritize other events, family activities, etc. It’s like asking a girl out but not telling her what time you’ll pick her up until the day of your date. If you’re not going to commit to her, why should she want to go out with you?
• Too many night kickoffs. Before moving back to the Bay Area 15 years ago, I used to drive down from the Folsom area with my young kids, rarely missing a game. There’s no way I could do that with so many 7:30 and 8pm kickoffs, as I wouldn’t get home until 1:00am at the earliest. It’s also tough on octogenarians who don’t want to be driving that late.
• Waiting too late to set the schedule. Kudos to the Pac12 for announcing the 2022 schedule last month. In recent years we’ve had to wait until February or March. As a result many people are unable to schedule their vacations around Cal football games. (September and November are great months to visit Europe, but generally you have to book your trip many months in advance.)
• We’ve already lost a generation of potential fans owing to the above reasons. The biggest hit on attendance as a result of whoring to the networks is the inability of young families to attend games. My kids, now all in their 20s, love to go to games because it’s in their DNA. Kids who have grown up in the “networks first” era, have never had the game experience, have no desire to go, and won’t be bringing their kids to games.
Priority 1 for George Kliavkoff in the next TV deal should be to allow the conference to have greater control of scheduling, especially kickoff times. If the basketball schedule, with 3X as many games, can be set, including tipoff times for all but a couple of games, why can’t they do it for football? Given that it’s a zero sum game, I doubt all the last-minute jockeying to select games makes any difference to overall viewership for each network. I also think it would be easier/more efficient for the networks to move their resources as necessary if kickoff times were set earlier.
"Not setting game times until 12 or even 6 days before kickoff. People need to be able to plan. If the gametime isn’t set, people will prioritize other events, family activities, etc. It’s like asking a girl out but not telling her what time you’ll pick her up until the day of your date. If you’re not going to commit to her, why should she want to go out with you?" Could not have put it better myself. Thank you for expressing this frustrating aspect of the current college football experience so well. The failure to set game times before the start of the season and the late kick offs are real turn offs to many. I go to all home games no matter what but there are many, many more causal fans who are dissuaded by these factors.
Also, parents/kids have more weekend obligations nowadays than they did when I was growing up. If you have a kid in club soccer (much less multiple little ones) then fuggetaboutit.
Those are definitely challenges that hurt attendance, but those have been factors for years without such a pronounced impact as we saw for 2021 compared to 2019.
Nice article, but not sure why the focus is primarily on the last two years. IIRC attendance at college football games has been on a steady decline for years. The chart you included for Cal basically shows that we had roughly 60,000 during Tedford, 50,000 during Dykes, and now 40,000 something during Wilcox years. The mystery has yet to be solved, e.g., millennials don't go out, erratic scheduling, not consistently winning, ticket prices, better TV coverage and picture quality, etc. etc. So this is not unique to Cal.
The focus is on the last two years because this is not the first time we've broken down attendance and it would be pointless to belabor the same observations about the earlier seasons.
There's certainly been a steady decrease since 2006, but the drop over the past two years is massive relative to everything else in this timeframe. The only drop of a similar magnitude was in 2014, when we were breaking in a new coach who just went 1–11. To me, that's a notable deviation from the trends and thus worth focusing on.
I think initially a lot of people reluctantly accepted the idiocy of the last-minute scheduling, but over time they just said F it, it's not worth the nonsense. I haven't reached that point yet, but if I still lived 100 miles from campus, I would have. Plus, the generational aspect (my 4th bullet point) is just now starting to take effect. Also, odd year comparisons probably aren't as valuable re trends, especially with a 12:30 game being replaced last-minute by an 8pm kickoff two weeks later (although I was impressed with the turnout for u$c, given the circumstances). With a markedly stronger schedule in even years, we should have a better idea after the '22 season.
The kickoff times is a double edged sword. If the conference wants the money that ESPN or Fox wants to shell out, it has to play at in the 10:30 or 11pm ET window, and play on Friday nights too. The P12 is not popular enough to take the prime time national slots from the B1G and SEC. If the conference wants day time kickoffs, ESPN and Fox won't pay nearly as much to televise since the games will be buried on ESPNU or FS1/2.
The double-edged sword for the networks is that the middle finger they extend to the fans who show up to the games is reducing the size of the fan base, which ultimately will mean fewer people bothering to tune into the telecast, no matter the time. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that the last-minute scheduling makes any difference in each network's viewership over the course of a season. They're all looking at the same data...
From what I've read about TV ratings, the NFL is primo no. 1 by a vast margin. Followed by...college football! It's not even close with even other pro sports or college sports. TV is where the money still is. So ticket sales (at least in the pro's) pale in comparison. So while we traditional fans do want to attend and have robust attendance, for money's sake, TV contract's have got to take the priority. The commissioner had some very interesting things to say with regard to changes he'd like to make (like kick-off times) in the next contract, but the issues (I think smartly) are related to national exposure for revenue as well as player recruitment, not necessarily about attendance. To increase TV money, we need better games/matchups so that they can be aired in prime time. This could be the PAC-12 alliances with Big 10 and ACC, not necessarily just winning more. And an expanded playoff system with 8 or 12 teams playing more games. I think this is just the reality in which we live.
Some friends in our ticket group did not attend due to COVID concerns, but there were so few fans that social distancing was organic. Even U$C had entire end zone sections without fans. Positive note: the student section was 80% full for many games, compared to 2019 when Section T fans had to help with card stunts. A 2nd year student said he was excited for his first season.
I was in the young alumni section for the beginning of the Nevada game and there were so many students that they took over that section as well. I hadn't seen anything like that in years. Given COVID, it got a little too overcrowded and uncomfortable for my taste, so I moved to another, less populated part of the stadium for the rest.
There is a cumulative effect of fan-unfriendly events in recent years (clear bag non-sense, body scans at some Pac-12 venues, price gouging on tickets and especially parking, and hotel prices, ever more Pac-12 looong looong after dark, and on it goes), which was significantly exacerbated this year by a widespread move to e-ticketing. I wound up in position of trying to get a surplus ticket to an attractive OSU home game (Utah), a Cal game (OSU at Cal was not "unattractive" at the time), and the LA Bowl, and I couldn't give them away (never mind resell them). Multiple people who historically would have been reasonable possibilities stated that its too much hassle, and they just weren't going to deal with it.
I do know it was a source of stress (ever try to get adequate connectivity anywhere near most stadiums on game day), in part due to terribly written apps, every week, and sometimes worse.
Some may scoff at this (including, as we have found out, athletic ticket office personnel who dismiss complaints and requests for relief), but for a significant number of the customer base that is none too large and shrinking, its real.
This was the latest in a recent run of things (some of which noted above) where the attitude has become clear that college football fans will put up with anything and everything, and some more susshine pumping is all that's needed to get tickets sold. Evidence is clear that is not the case.
I agree the #1 reason for lower attendance is covid. None of my friends went this year bc we all have young kids who can't get vaccinated yet. I do wonder if the numbers represent actual attendance or "tickets sold." I have 3 season tickets but attended none, similar to many of my friends.
As for increasing attendance, there's really only one way: win and they will come.
Attendance ALWAYS represents tickets sold. ALWAYS.
Actual tickets used is a separate number that is generally not reported.
And in recent years, tickets dispersed often grossly exceeds actual attendance, at least other than at Utah in the Pac-12.
Cal is at a severe disadvantage because of location. Access is difficult, parking is atrociously priced (costs more to park than tickets cost) and almost non-existent, and tailgating is nearly impossible. This destroys out-of-town attendance, be it visitors (and some conference schools with some regularity bring thousands of fans on the road to some locals) or "home team" fans. Short of selling the campus and reinvesting part of the revenue by buying Pacific U in Stockton, or Cal-Davis, and relocating operations to a more attractive location, there is no apparent solution to that.
Cal is at a severe disadvantage due to a program with a mediocre win-loss record. Tedford proved that.
Once the wins pile up, attendance rises to the upper levels of capacity and will stay there until performance mediocrity returns. Many will pay to see wins. Few will pay to see losses.
Cal also fails to market the team very well. That exacerbates attendance problems.
Agreed on parking! For the USC game I went to park at Emerson Elementary (my Alma mater) and it was $50! Fifty! I love supporting the kids, but thot $50 was a bit out of line for all the other costs associated w attending a game (pre-game drinks at Kips, etc. 😬). Luckily, the USC game was not an anticipated “game day” so was able to park on the street…… FIFTY!!!!
More attractive location? THERE IS NO LOCATION MORE ATTRACTIVE!
As it turned out I only attended three games in person this season - Nevada, Wazzu, and SC. Two were painful losses. Looking around, it seems the crowds were smaller than the announced figures. Winning games obviously will help with attendance, and the demise of Covid someday. Also, since every game is now televised there is less incentive to attend. Obviously if the commissioner can re-negotiate the TV contracts to increase the pool of money this will help offset athletic department expenses.
Great analysis! I share your optimism for next year, particularly with the better home schedule in even years (and us not contributing to Stanford’s numbers via the Big Game on the Farm).
UCLA was certainly propped up by its LSU game (ESPN reports 68k in attendance). The Hawaii game the week before was as sparsely attended as a 2020 game.
Meanwhile, Utah expanded their stadium capacity by 13% (45k to 51k), which fits with their attendance increase. Being good surely helps too (expert-level insight).
Thanks!
Covid combined with possibly a perception (hopefully false) that the on-the-field product is stale and tapped/capped out. We should get a bump next year with the Wilcox news and a better home schedule, but that will be short-lived unless we can show we'll be competitive from the jump. We traditionally get off to a fast start and then underdeliver. This year was the reverse and that lackluster start really killed interest. We also now have to factor in wildfires. Not an issue last year, but air quality has affected at least a few games over the past 4-5 years, and unfortunately is likely to continue to be a regular fall tradition.
Regarding the wildfires, it would be interesting to see a breakdown it how many tickets are bought in advance (and this would still count towards attendance even if air quality keeps them from actually showing up) vs. people who buy tickets shortly before the game and would be discouraged by air quality.
Because I became a dad, tickets are always plentiful, and game times have become undetermined until only a week or two ahead of each game, I gave up on season tickets for good maybe seven or eight years ago. I now pretty much only buy tickets on the day or days leading up to any game. Obviously I'm a small and maybe very particular sample, but I assume the unpredictable gametimes and issues like COVID, wildfires will continue to disincentivize people from making a lot of long lead commitments. There's simple not enough of a reason to given the unpredictability.
Yeah, game time announcements being announced way too close to day of, as dictated by TV, have really hurt attendance, all across the conference....probably more than the pandemic, if we're being honest.
I don’t think Covid had much of an affect on attendance. In fact, people were excited to get back to normalcy after a year without being able to attend a game, especially early in the season. Pac12, like all conferences, sold their soul to the networks, and the affect on attendance is not at all surprising:
• Not setting game times until 12 or even 6 days before kickoff. People need to be able to plan. If the gametime isn’t set, people will prioritize other events, family activities, etc. It’s like asking a girl out but not telling her what time you’ll pick her up until the day of your date. If you’re not going to commit to her, why should she want to go out with you?
• Too many night kickoffs. Before moving back to the Bay Area 15 years ago, I used to drive down from the Folsom area with my young kids, rarely missing a game. There’s no way I could do that with so many 7:30 and 8pm kickoffs, as I wouldn’t get home until 1:00am at the earliest. It’s also tough on octogenarians who don’t want to be driving that late.
• Waiting too late to set the schedule. Kudos to the Pac12 for announcing the 2022 schedule last month. In recent years we’ve had to wait until February or March. As a result many people are unable to schedule their vacations around Cal football games. (September and November are great months to visit Europe, but generally you have to book your trip many months in advance.)
• We’ve already lost a generation of potential fans owing to the above reasons. The biggest hit on attendance as a result of whoring to the networks is the inability of young families to attend games. My kids, now all in their 20s, love to go to games because it’s in their DNA. Kids who have grown up in the “networks first” era, have never had the game experience, have no desire to go, and won’t be bringing their kids to games.
Priority 1 for George Kliavkoff in the next TV deal should be to allow the conference to have greater control of scheduling, especially kickoff times. If the basketball schedule, with 3X as many games, can be set, including tipoff times for all but a couple of games, why can’t they do it for football? Given that it’s a zero sum game, I doubt all the last-minute jockeying to select games makes any difference to overall viewership for each network. I also think it would be easier/more efficient for the networks to move their resources as necessary if kickoff times were set earlier.
"Not setting game times until 12 or even 6 days before kickoff. People need to be able to plan. If the gametime isn’t set, people will prioritize other events, family activities, etc. It’s like asking a girl out but not telling her what time you’ll pick her up until the day of your date. If you’re not going to commit to her, why should she want to go out with you?" Could not have put it better myself. Thank you for expressing this frustrating aspect of the current college football experience so well. The failure to set game times before the start of the season and the late kick offs are real turn offs to many. I go to all home games no matter what but there are many, many more causal fans who are dissuaded by these factors.
Yes, THIS....families can't really make a plan to go to the game unless they all block off the whole day, and not all families can do that.
Also, parents/kids have more weekend obligations nowadays than they did when I was growing up. If you have a kid in club soccer (much less multiple little ones) then fuggetaboutit.
Those are definitely challenges that hurt attendance, but those have been factors for years without such a pronounced impact as we saw for 2021 compared to 2019.
Nice article, but not sure why the focus is primarily on the last two years. IIRC attendance at college football games has been on a steady decline for years. The chart you included for Cal basically shows that we had roughly 60,000 during Tedford, 50,000 during Dykes, and now 40,000 something during Wilcox years. The mystery has yet to be solved, e.g., millennials don't go out, erratic scheduling, not consistently winning, ticket prices, better TV coverage and picture quality, etc. etc. So this is not unique to Cal.
The youngest millennials are 23. Students and fresh grads are all Gen-Zers
The focus is on the last two years because this is not the first time we've broken down attendance and it would be pointless to belabor the same observations about the earlier seasons.
There's certainly been a steady decrease since 2006, but the drop over the past two years is massive relative to everything else in this timeframe. The only drop of a similar magnitude was in 2014, when we were breaking in a new coach who just went 1–11. To me, that's a notable deviation from the trends and thus worth focusing on.
I think initially a lot of people reluctantly accepted the idiocy of the last-minute scheduling, but over time they just said F it, it's not worth the nonsense. I haven't reached that point yet, but if I still lived 100 miles from campus, I would have. Plus, the generational aspect (my 4th bullet point) is just now starting to take effect. Also, odd year comparisons probably aren't as valuable re trends, especially with a 12:30 game being replaced last-minute by an 8pm kickoff two weeks later (although I was impressed with the turnout for u$c, given the circumstances). With a markedly stronger schedule in even years, we should have a better idea after the '22 season.
The kickoff times is a double edged sword. If the conference wants the money that ESPN or Fox wants to shell out, it has to play at in the 10:30 or 11pm ET window, and play on Friday nights too. The P12 is not popular enough to take the prime time national slots from the B1G and SEC. If the conference wants day time kickoffs, ESPN and Fox won't pay nearly as much to televise since the games will be buried on ESPNU or FS1/2.
The double-edged sword for the networks is that the middle finger they extend to the fans who show up to the games is reducing the size of the fan base, which ultimately will mean fewer people bothering to tune into the telecast, no matter the time. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that the last-minute scheduling makes any difference in each network's viewership over the course of a season. They're all looking at the same data...
From what I've read about TV ratings, the NFL is primo no. 1 by a vast margin. Followed by...college football! It's not even close with even other pro sports or college sports. TV is where the money still is. So ticket sales (at least in the pro's) pale in comparison. So while we traditional fans do want to attend and have robust attendance, for money's sake, TV contract's have got to take the priority. The commissioner had some very interesting things to say with regard to changes he'd like to make (like kick-off times) in the next contract, but the issues (I think smartly) are related to national exposure for revenue as well as player recruitment, not necessarily about attendance. To increase TV money, we need better games/matchups so that they can be aired in prime time. This could be the PAC-12 alliances with Big 10 and ACC, not necessarily just winning more. And an expanded playoff system with 8 or 12 teams playing more games. I think this is just the reality in which we live.
Some friends in our ticket group did not attend due to COVID concerns, but there were so few fans that social distancing was organic. Even U$C had entire end zone sections without fans. Positive note: the student section was 80% full for many games, compared to 2019 when Section T fans had to help with card stunts. A 2nd year student said he was excited for his first season.
I was in the young alumni section for the beginning of the Nevada game and there were so many students that they took over that section as well. I hadn't seen anything like that in years. Given COVID, it got a little too overcrowded and uncomfortable for my taste, so I moved to another, less populated part of the stadium for the rest.
There is a cumulative effect of fan-unfriendly events in recent years (clear bag non-sense, body scans at some Pac-12 venues, price gouging on tickets and especially parking, and hotel prices, ever more Pac-12 looong looong after dark, and on it goes), which was significantly exacerbated this year by a widespread move to e-ticketing. I wound up in position of trying to get a surplus ticket to an attractive OSU home game (Utah), a Cal game (OSU at Cal was not "unattractive" at the time), and the LA Bowl, and I couldn't give them away (never mind resell them). Multiple people who historically would have been reasonable possibilities stated that its too much hassle, and they just weren't going to deal with it.
I do know it was a source of stress (ever try to get adequate connectivity anywhere near most stadiums on game day), in part due to terribly written apps, every week, and sometimes worse.
Some may scoff at this (including, as we have found out, athletic ticket office personnel who dismiss complaints and requests for relief), but for a significant number of the customer base that is none too large and shrinking, its real.
This was the latest in a recent run of things (some of which noted above) where the attitude has become clear that college football fans will put up with anything and everything, and some more susshine pumping is all that's needed to get tickets sold. Evidence is clear that is not the case.