I agree. If we consistently struggle to fill the stadium, I like the idea of taking blocks of seats in the nosebleed sections and giving them to organizations like the ones you mentioned. And after every season, the athletic department could look at ticket sales from the season and adjust the number of seats given away as needed.
Random factoid, Spartan stadium still stands in Portsmouth and is used by a local high school team for play. The team later moved to Detroit and became the Lions.
Why did they move? Most likely, to get access to a larger fanbase. Which was my point in the original post.
IIRC, the local city government wouldn't yield to the Spartan's owner's demands for a new stadium with luxury boxes so he threatened to move to a city that would. Detroit, Flint, Sheboygan and Toledo were all considered and submitted bids but the owner was from Akron and there has always been a big rivalry between those two towns so they were eliminated although they had the most gennerous tax incentive package of the four. At least, that's how I recall it. I could be wrong.
I don’t think there were any changes that NASCAR made that affected driver safety that drove off any fans. What drove off fans was changes like an abundance of 1.5mile tracks, race locations, scheduling, competition cautions, the playoff system, stage racing, and messing with the engine package in the cars.
They took the sport away from their fan base, removed any individuality in the cars, teams, manufacturers, and put them on cookie cutter racetracks. Used to love Nascar. Can't remember the last time I watched a Nascar race from start to finish...
So is that necessarily a bad thing?
It's bad for the HS seniors, but talent-wise good for mid-tier CFB teams
Bad for players who might excel at the college level but never get the chance because they need a scholarship to even afford school.
What I miss was going down to the Peach Bowl (the race track) in Atlanta and watching the figure 8s. We'd always go the week before the 500. All - and I mean all - the NASCAR drivers drove in the figure 8s and had a great time doing so. We had a great time watching too.
Watched figure 8 races at the Fairgrounds in Nashville as a kid back in the 60's and loved it. Some drivers were timid, and others were hell bent.
Sure felt inconsistent. Maybe it was too much to ask them to crack down on football factories and their bagmen since these were paying everyone’s salary. But the hypocrisy seemed to get more obvious year by year. I remember watching a 30 for 30 episode about the corruption at SMU. The take away was that the NCAA regretted the death penalty and resolved “never again.” It seemed like years later penalties were mostly symbolic and if a school got hit really hard it was never a blue blood.