Game Day Attendance

[Vespidae]

First and I know people will not go with this but there is too much ( football) on TV. It's to the point you don't have to get tickets you can watch almost all of Tech's football games without leaving your home.

This.

Paul Finebaum addresses this earlier this year. Football is programming content. No one cares much what the live attendance is ... as long as broadcasters can sell the game.

I did a 20 year study on GT attendance and GT holds up better than most P5 programs. Not as big as an SEC school, but very stable.

The NCAA also did an analysis and determined that the main factors are rural vs. urban schools and the density of alumni within 5 and 10 miles radii. Both of these factors are ones Tech can’t fix.

 

[FredJacket]

This.

Paul Finebaum addresses this earlier this year. Football is programming content. No one cares much what the live attendance is ... as long as broadcasters can sell the game.

I did a 20 year study on GT attendance and GT holds up better than most P5 programs. Not as big as an SEC school, but very stable.

The NCAA also did an analysis and determined that the main factors are rural vs. urban schools and the density of alumni within 5 and 10 miles radii. Both of these factors are ones Tech can’t fix.

Great post. I was about to ask a version of the rural v urban thing.

I'm all for trying all kinds of smart things to get more folks to games. Some will actually work....marginally, I'm sure. Backing up OP's point... winning is by far the #1 on list of "causes" for the "effect" of increased attendance.

 

[Supersizethatorder-mutt]

Great post. I was about to ask a version of the rural v urban thing.

I'm all for trying all kinds of smart things to get more folks to games. Some will actually work....marginally, I'm sure. Backing up OP's point... winning is by far the #1 on list of "causes" for the "effect" of increased attendance.

I'm sure this is what you meant, but I would say CONSISTENT winning.

 

[Oakland]

I know this will be blasphemous to many here, but our stadium is way out dated for fan comfort. The seats are narrow and crammed and the aisle steps are too small and narrow. I love history as much as anyone else, but it's time for a new open roof 45,000 seat stadium. I'm sure someone could figure out how to incorporate some of the historic portions of Bobby Dodd stadium into a new building. For historic purposes, a new stadium could be called Grant Field.

 

[Animal02]

I know this will be blasphemous to many here, but our stadium is way out dated for fan comfort. The seats are narrow and crammed and the aisle steps are too small and narrow. I love history as much as anyone else, but it's time for a new open roof 45,000 seat stadium. I'm sure someone could figure out how to incorporate some of the historic portions of Bobby Dodd stadium into a new building. For historic purposes, a new stadium could be called Grant Field.

Try attending a game in the Big House....you will never again complain about narrow seats and aisles

 

[iceeater1969]

This.

Paul Finebaum addresses this earlier this year. Football is programming content. No one cares much what the live attendance is ... as long as broadcasters can sell the game.

I did a 20 year study on GT attendance and GT holds up better than most P5 programs. Not as big as an SEC school, but very stable.

The NCAA also did an analysis and determined that the main factors are rural vs. urban schools and the density of alumni within 5 and 10 miles radii. Both of these factors are ones Tech can’t fix.

I was thinking we were discussing a desire to be a higher rated football school and not just better than duke. Sure seems like we need to do something major since our interest only debt payment is the same as our ticket sales.




As i sit on west 40 side of bds it sure seems like have a lot of tickets being spot sold around us. At FSU game we bought a couple of near by seats (on 30) for guests for 25$. They just sat w us because the seats adjacent were not used. As games progresses fans from cheaper seats fill in the good swats that are not occupied.

Sure seems like we can get some business to contract for these prime

I know this will be blasphemous to many here, but our stadium is way out dated for fan comfort. The seats are narrow and crammed and the aisle steps are too small and narrow. I love history as much as anyone else, but it's time for a new open roof 45,000 seat stadium. I'm sure someone could figure out how to incorporate some of the historic portions of Bobby Dodd stadium into a new building. For historic purposes, a new stadium could be called Grant Field.

Baylor paid 260,000,000 for theirs. It can be expanded to 55 . All good sightlines and chair backs. We had seats in north endzone to get the breeze and be in shade. Very do able. (Got fed up and moved to nw fla so we could fullfill a bucket list and attend gt games at bds.).

 

[AUFC]

I wouldn’t try to compare us to Atlanta United. Very different scenarios. Atlanta United staff held a 3 year on-going bar crawl shaking hands, handing out house flags to build brand, and targeting Atlanta transplants who loved the city but didn’t have an Atlanta sports team to call their own. They all kept their Patriots and Yankees and Cubs (etc) multi-generation fandom when they moved here but they had never had a soccer team (aside from our national teams) to call their own. MLS being little-known and only 20 years old played a big role.

Try as hard as you want, you will never convince all the Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Clemson, South Carolina, Bama, etc alumni in our city to buy Georgia Tech season tickets.

 

[SteamWhistle]

Make the whole stadium the gold fold down seats and reduce capacity is the easiest way. Stadium would look more full with less and those there would be more comfortable.

 

[Oakland]

Make the whole stadium the gold fold down seats and reduce capacity is the easiest way. Stadium would look more full with less and those there would be more comfortable.

If you're talking about chair back seats, I'm not sure if certain portions of the stadium can be converted. The west stands appear to be designed for elevated bench seating. I'm not sure if chair back seats would fit there. The west stands design appears to be like a little larger than normal stairs. I don't know the measurements, but once you are in your chair back seat, I'm guessing you might be stuck there until the end of the game.

 

[MWBATL]

Texas am has twice our living alunmi but they have 7 times our donations and ticket sales.

I would be curious as to where you got your data. A quick internet search shows that Texas A&M's alumni network organization boasts 640,000 members, with 59,741 students in College Station (over 47,000 of whom are undergraduates). That dwarfs GT in every way. GT has just over 15,000 undergraduate students, so we are a little less than 1/3 the size of the Texas A&M undergrad student body. More to the point, GT has about 126,000 living alumni, or only about 20% of the numbers the Aggies have. I know from prior research that a significant percentage of Gt alumni live out-of-state, where I would guess the opposite is true in Texas which makes the ratios even worse. If we do indeed have only 1/7 of their ticket sales and donations, that would be around 14% plus, which would not be unreasonably correlated with the size of their alumni base in state vs ours.

While I think that GT marketing can do better at attracting younger, hipper, fans like Atlanta United has done, I think it is a huge uphill battle and we can only make incremental progress. The numbers are simply against us in a huge way unless GT expands their curriculum and campus to become a full university that issues both BA and BS degrees....which many here oppose in principle.

By the way, let's see how Atlanta United attendance does after three years in a row of mediocre results......